I imagine it would take decades to see payback on investment in robotics that are to be used outside of production. Self driving cars seem to be about the only thing that will pay off in the medium term.
Well any one that has read the second machine age ISBN-10: 0393239357 will look at this sale as extremely strange. Selling the goose that laid the golden egg. Its difficult to quantify the exponential growth of processing power, storage, and value derived from combinations of technology. The job market has seen a decrease in the amount of low skill jobs and an increase in high skill jobs. These robots may seem cumbersome but obviously that will change in time, it comes down to the "price per hour" for the wage. These robots have a cost associated with them running, there will come a time sooner than can be expected that price will come down and match then become cheaper than human labour. This already happened in China with a factory owner investing huge sums of capital to fit many thousands of robots to automate his factory. This is not a sale about profit since robotics always has been and currently is about progressing the science, and making a better robot into the future. This sale is some kind of ethical sale brought about by the realization that these robots will lay off HUGE masses of the human population. Bloomberg has this stock / company under, factory automation. Look how close they are, 6 to 8 years on the outside, most likely able to ship some thing interesting to market in 4 to 6. And Google with infinite capital and a true passion for science intellect and progression of humanity's future sells up this company? Things are changing in the future, progress is not going to stand still, in the next 24 months more processing power will be manufactured by man than has every been made all together to date. Man is ingenious and technology is componential, able to be used in combination to make new things, the Oculus dk1 was a smart phone.. Google selling Boston is like selling the biggest gold mine in all recorded history, just because its another 200 feet through rock to get into the mother load. It will be picked up AKA nepotism type situation any way. Sale is some kind of misdirection activity, Boston or its technology's will most likely be ramped up and increase in budget.
