Great Pursuits: Robotics

From the Glass Palace to the House of the Dynamo.

Robotics is one of the highest and best of the great pursuits for a simple reason: It brings the inner working of algorithms and computations into the unpredictable nature of the physical world. Therefore, it is wholly superior to video games as a pastime for youth. This subject has been considered at some length in The Sport of Tomorrow, but will be discussed in greater detail here.

We live at an era when the fulcrum of the world economy is shifting back from the tertiary economy which was predominant through so much of the last half century to a far more industrial secondary one. This will indeed be a profound dislocation for those who believed that message of endless credentialization repeated almost ad infinitum throughout most educational institutions in the past half century. Tertiary and secondary economies are often described in terms of the difference between factories and managerial work, but perhaps they are best described in terms of archetypes.

The tertiary economy can be best described as the Glass Palace, a place not unlike a Byzantine court in which the business of the day is the attainment of status rather than value. For the unmotivated, the conniving and the simply inept, there is no better environment. For the man of ambition it is living hell. Contrary to what you probably learned in your economic textbook, it is far older than the secondary economy, and is Apollonian rather than Faustian in its worldview. Were not the patricians of the Roman Empire participants in a service economy? The only suitable careers for the elite were law, politics or the military. The art of mechanics was relegated largely to foreigners or a servile underclass.

The House of the Dynamo is such a place as Menlo Park, or the early Ford factories. The roots thereof cannot be found in antiquity, but rather in the labor-saving mechanisms first employed within the medieval monasteries of Northern Europe. It came to its full glory in our Faustian age through the Industrial Revolution, and is entirely focused on the pursuit of innovation. Perhaps it reached its zenith in the form of Los Alamos, New Mexico, a community created for the purpose of harnessing the power of the atom. The decline and eventual extinction of Bell Labs marked the fall of the House of the Dynamo in America. However, there has been slow realization that it was profoundly unwise to allow the systematic removal of our technological expertise to the lands of the Orient. The Glass Palace is falling, and the House of the Dynamo is rising once again.

It is common for the intelligent youth of today to devote enormous effort and time to the pursuit of video games. I hold that these virtual pursuits do not only include playing such games, but also coding and developing them. We shall never know what the countless legions of such gamers and developers would have accomplished had they lived in a more heroic age. Their lives were devoured by the court theater of the Glass Palace.

We must then ask ourselves, what is the best pursuit for the young man of ambition? I propose that robotics is quite ideal. It is the best way to investigate a skillset other than one’s own. It instructs the tradesman in software, and the programmer in the mechanical arts. I shall now outline my own experiences designing robots, and with competitions in this domain. There are three domains one must master to become well-versed in robotics; the mechanical, the electrical and the algorithmic.