Google is laying off robots too! 

It is the season of layoffs! Tech giants like Twitter, Meta, Amazon and Google are on a firing spree. But guess what? Human employees aren’t the only ones to get affected by these mass layoffs. Wait what? Yes, that’s right, even the robots are getting impacted. In fact, recently, Google has dismissed more than a hundred robots that were responsible for tasks such as differentiating trash, opening and closing doors, replacing missing chairs and cleaning tables in office cafeterias. Interestingly, the fired robots also often used language models such as the one that operates ChatGPT so that it could take snack requests and fulfil other regular demands from their human counterparts.  

They were being trained and developed by a company named Everyday Robots, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc that has been working closely with them for years now.   

For those unaware, Everyday Robots was part of the parent company’s ‘moonshot project’ X and will henceforth cease to exist. Okay, but where will the other human employees and technology go? Well, Google intends to hire them as part of their internal team and include in other ongoing or upcoming robotics projects.  

Google has justified this step saying that these automatic robots served general purposes and were part of their experimental division. In fact, they were dependent on cameras and machine learning to carry out tasks in every human space to make their lives easier. In other words, amidst economic downturn, they were spending more than making more money. That was in fact another reason why the company had to fire 12000 employees in January after the robotics arm was shut down due to budget cuts. This proves that contrary to popular belief that robotics is a sector with exceptional growth potential, such massive layoffs only prove the contrary.  

Experts believe it is the Covid-19 pandemic that has led to such drastic measures but are hopeful that things will change for the better. This means that robotics although suffering now will once again bounce back. Meanwhile, tech giants like Google need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of investing in such automation projects. After all, each robot costed tens of thousands of dollars for the company.  

However, amidst this robot layoff, controversy has once again been on the rise. Sources cite that Everyday Robots members say that they had no clarity since the start of the project and didn’t even know whether their goal was to develop advanced robots or train them as consumer products such as Siri and Alexa.  

What’s interesting is that, apart from firing robots, Google has also been asking their employees at New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Sunnyvale and Kirkland (all cities in USA) to share office spaces, visit office on alternate days and in some cases completely vacate them. As per several reports, the money saved here will be invested in Google Cloud’s expansion.