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janvier 30, 2005
Build Robots for a Better America
Whatever happened to Robots? The Robots of the Future that never came?
Great, hulking metallic humanoids that walked stiffly on Erector-set legs or rolled about silently on rubberized wheels. They've been a joke, a retro-future parody, ever since Lost in Space.
Yes, there are robots of a kind in the world around us—-whirling Frisbees on the floor that do vacuum cleaning, toy dogs with articulated hindquarters and tails that light up--but these are mere toys, novelties. There are electromechanical apparatus called "factory robots" but they're nothing more than plain old levers and pulleys and processing chambers, but with microprocessors behind them.
I will tell you what happened to robots. They got derailed by the IT industry, which is focused almost entirely on software. All the energy and gadget-making brilliance that should have been developing friendly automatons was diverted into things like internet search engines and relational databases. Instead of building things with their hands, the mass of our inventors have been coding software. Software does not roll up to you and shake your hand and make your breakfast. It just sits there in an essentially static environment, recursively considering itself and producing nothing of value. No surprise then that a software-heavy IT industry mostly leads to inventions that are self-referential and unproductive (software utilities, OS patches) or of only marginal social use (e.g., blogging).
Really, what has the IT industry brought us in the last 30 years that is on a par with photography or the steam engine? Or Edison's lamp or Ford's factory processes? I'll answer the question. Nothing. Crap software, crap society, crap jobs, crap redirection of young people's lives into stagnant tidepools of endeavor.
I further submit that software development favors people who don't like to work with their hands and have no structural visualization. This can't be a good thing for society. I suspect this factor is what's really behind the influx of subcontinental asiatics into the American IT industry. (Can't prove it; too many hypotheses and speculations; but what does your intuition say?)
This wouldn't happen if we built robots instead. Robot design requires the involvement of the full individual--hands and heart as well as head. Software coding is there, yes, but it is at the service of some end purpose rather than merely supporting other software that serves no ultimate need.
Posted by Margot at janvier 30, 2005 09:56 AM
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