Where Are All The Robots?

The purpose of this post is two-pronged.  First, here I am with a blog titled, "Robot Rhetoric" and yet, outside of my profile mentioning that I am a wannabe roboticist, you won't find one mention of robots or robotics anywhere in the entire blog.  I plan to remedy that (I can hear the yawns already).

But really, robotics is one of my life long passions.  Which is why I chose the name for this blog.  However, I have not been very passionate about this particular interest lately.  Like a lot of things it had been pushed to the back of a cluttered drawer and gathered dust.  After starting this blog, I found that I had nothing to write about robots.  I had not been keeping up with any of the innovations or advances in probably the last 15 years.  The dust had grown thick.  That has begun to change.  I have now scoured the internet and found sites that have articles, videos, news and all the fun stuff I had been missing.  I have a lot of catching up to do and I plan to share it here with all the fans of this blog (both of you -- thanks Mom and Dad).

The second prong has to do with the lack of robots in general society.  I mean, by now, at least according to those "The Future is Bright"-type films and TV shows (in glorious black-and-white) that I saw as a kid, we should have robots to do everything for us -- cook, clean, do the shopping, make repairs, babysit the kids.  But, like the flying cars and interplanetary travel, it just never materialized.  Sure, you can get a small robot to vacuum your floors (iRobot Roomba) or a larger one to mow the lawn (Lawnbotts, or Robomow).  You can buy your kid a RoboRaptor from Lego or a robot puppy dog (Aibo) from Sony (oops, if you want an Aibo, you'll have to buy it used.  Sony pulled the plug on it.  See what I mean?  Out of touch).  But that's about it as far as consumer robots go.  What about the robot chauffeur?  Or Rosie, the robot maid from the Jetson's?  Where are all the robots?  What happened to the robot revolution?

Well, it's happening.  Slowly.  Very slowly here in The States.  Japan, Korea, and Germany all have a national robotics agenda.  America does not.  This could put us way behind in the field of technology, a category in which we have always been a leader.  What does not having a national agenda really mean?  It means a lack of capital investment in robotics research and development, at the government, academic, and industrial level. There are a few signs that this will change.  Let's hope it does.

Why hasn't the robot revolution happened already, as all the sci-fi (and SyFy) prophets predicted?  Well, people always tend to think that things will happen faster than they do; that technology will jump ahead like a lightning bolt.  And that does tend to happen, but, like lightning, it's only in short bursts followed by longer periods of apparent inactivity.  Think of it as the occasional lightning bolt without the rolling thunder.  Instead of repeatedly asking "Are we there yet?" like a child on a long road trip, we should try considering how far we've  already come from where we began.  The robots will come.  Eventually.

Meanwhile, there are tons of resources for the hobbyist interested in building and experimenting with robots.  I will be entering this realm in depth as soon as I can scrape together the time to research and figure out what I want to buy first and the money to be able to buy it.

So, where are all the robots?  Well, they are around.  Mostly in other countries.  But soon they will be coming to my house.  And possibly yours.  In the meantime, I will continue to explore, and hopefully post about, the underground robot revolution.

Power to the Promethians!