Ninth grader Max Shultz is a big-picture kind of guy. His words.
"I do a bit of the public relations and some of the building. But mostly I'm just really good at coming up with ideas," he says, slouching confidently in between fellow freshmen Gordon Stein and Julia Stavale. They are seated at a table in the suburban dining room of Joel Stein, Gordon's dad, which now doubles as temporary headquarters for Homemade Titanium Expo Robotics, LLC, the robot-manufacturing company the three of them founded.
Add comedic relief to the list of Max's contributions. He has a sharp, dry timing that is refined beyond his years, and drops witty asides constantly.
Me: I just saw an article online about a new robot with incredibly sensitive hands that can pick up a piece of toast without crushing it. They think one day it'll be able to perform medical procedures.
Max: Or make toast.
Unfortunately I miss most of Max's best early material because Julia - "the cute one" - is making a racket. A proper only-girl-in-the-group, look-at-me kind of racket. There is a tug of war over a Rubik's cube, prolonged bickering involving turning her cell phone off and so much random commotion in general that Julia seems determined to ruin any and all chances of anyone else talking about anything. I'm embarrassed to say that years of substitute teaching got the better of me and I shushed her.
"Julia has issues," Max explains.
The three Royal Oak High Schoolers decided to go into business together after Seeker, a land mine-detecting robot they designed and built for $148 and change, won top awards (second overall and first in the "People's Choice") in this May's Robofest competition at Lawrence Technological University. In addition to each of them nabbing $8,000 in Lawrence Tech scholarship money, their prize came with an additional $940 grant from the US Army's Tank-Automotive Research and Development Center (TARDEC), conditional on their submission of a proposal demonstrating exactly how they would use that money to make Seeker sleeker. If their company takes off, the world stands to gain. An average of 70 people every day are killed or maimed in countries like Korea or Vietnam by land mines left over from previous conflicts.
As Max schools me on the fundamental "STEM" skills of robotics ("Science, technology, engineering, mathematics - they drilled it into our heads") it would be easy to forget for a minute how relatively young these kids are to be tinkering with a frontier science, let alone scoring patents and setting up LLCs. But belying their relative sophistication is another set of fundamentals at play, a mix of awkward pubescence and garden-variety geekdom. Braces, light acne, mathlete jokes and traces of speech impediments abound. And I believe I already mentioned the Rubik's cube.
It's hard to tell what is a product of their advanced IQs and what is simply them acting their age; self-identity erupts at every turn in the conversation. For instance, besides having already identified herself as the cute one, Julia matter-of-factly claims her gender and good looks make her an ideal spokesperson for the group. While the others try to describe her technical contributions, Joel pipes in from the corner where he has been silently supervising our interview quietly but attentively in the corner, "You did a lot of soldering!"
With Max and Julia shining in logistics, it's Gordon's role that gets a little bit harder to define simply because it's so broad. Seeker is his baby, if only because he's the only one of the three who actually knows anything about the rarified side of robotics, namely the computer programming itself. In between the team's weekly meetings, it's Gordon who will slave over code and schematics. In this room, Gordon is a brain among brains. Let's not call him a boy genius - he would hate that. He has been, however, supplementing high school with classes at Lawrence Tech since he was 13, and when he finished ninth grade had already accumulated 20 college credit hours. But standing out is not something Gordon enjoys. He shudders as he describes his first class at Lawrence Tech, a course on video game design, and the reaction from students when they learned how old he was. "It.... really led to awkwardness."
When asked what, if any, influence a competition like Robofest will have on their futures, it's Gordon alone who has committed himself to a career of batting around ones and zeroes. "I have a very high-tech goal for my life," he says. "I'm a computer programmer by habit. That's what I'm going to end up doing [for a career] because I end up doing it anyway."
Joel's pride in his son's achievements is nearly matched by his enthusiasm for the Robofest event itself, a seeming godsend to the parent of a child with Gordon's ambitions. Though career paths in robotics are hardly de riguer, he makes sure Gordon is enrolled in the right camps and classes, finds the right mentors and has the tools and opportunities he needs. He relates, with a tinge of bitterness, the way Gordon was failed by the system when nobody at Royal Oak High School would sponsor his Robofest team. "They simply said 'No,'" he says.
So Joel stepped in by necessity, getting a crash course in robotics along the way. Besides describing it as a very friendly competition in which the kids almost collaborate more than they compete, he says Robofest is the most far-reaching event of its kind in the states and has achieved a global reach, with teams coming from as far as Korea to participate.
He's also aware of the economic lifesaver creating a new robotics workforce in Southeast Michigan could provide in the wake of the recession and sees Robofest as part of an overall process to improve his state through the commingling of the automotive and military sectors. If it gives him pause that the organization that might end up giving much of the support structure and mentorship to his son's career is the U.S. Army, he doesn't show it. In fact, he was thrilled about the additional TARDEC grant tacked on to the Seeker prize. "Nobody knew that TARDEC was going to be there because it wasn't announced until the day of the competition," Joel says, then adds with pride, "Speaking to the TARDEC people, they told me that [Seeker] fits in exactly with the future of military robotics. Small, lightweight, low-cost."
Michigan's Next Big Industry?
There is something vaguely Spielbergian about Dr. CJ Chung. The 50-year-old South Korean native's boyishness is enhanced by the oversized suit coat swallowing his rail-thin body, a moptop of black hair and a persistent smile. He works out of what appears to be a converted utility room that is barely big enough to house the floor-to-ceiling stacks of computers, charts, books, and ubiquitous LEGO NXT robotics kits. Personal space is an afterthought here, his desk just another storage surface. Some people live for science.
Dr. Chung teaches computer science and artificial intelligence here at Lawrence Tech, but it's not until the mention of Robofest, which he founded in 2000, that his thick accent takes on a sparkle. He proudly shows me videos from some of the other children's robotics events he's created, like Robo Fashion & Dance Show and Thanksgiving Robot Parade, which, as their names suggest, mostly involve decorating robots in elaborate costumes and getting them to move in straight lines. He says these competitions are less about the technical side of robotics and more about the illuminative process. "Einstein taught that imagination is more important than creativity," he explains.
Dr. Chung has high praises for the creators of Seeker. Aside from the merits of the robot itself, he says he particularly liked their approach to the competition, which, beyond mere robotics, encourages the development of entrepreneurial skills. "They read the rules very carefully," he says. "They thought of a robotics project which is in need - to save lives - then they implemented every step, from the planning to design, to the testing and even marketing, and, eventually, filing a patent. They completed the whole cycle for entrepreneurship. I was amazed at their thoroughness."
Though Dr. Chung's core subjects deal heavily in the theoretical, his emphasis on a business component to Robofest is one indication that he is comfortable thinking in applied-science terms. He lays out a scenario for me in which Southeast Michigan becomes a center for robotics development in the next decade through a collaboration between the military, automotive and education sectors.
The short version is this: the goal of the military is to have 1/3 of their ground systems unmanned by the year 2015. In order to do that, the technology must exist to build intelligent cars, i.e. cars with no drivers. Through joint programs between the Department of Defense and Department of Transportation, which have existed for years, efforts are being made to both develop those intelligent cars and to refit the entire transportation system so that everything from roads to traffic lights can transmit information. A world of cars talking to cars talking to roads. When the technology finally exists, Dr. Chung says, there will be a need for a new kind of engineer to build those new cars and highway systems. This is where Lawrence Tech comes in, churning out the workforce to make it possible.
Pure intentions, difficult questions
As Dr. Chung spins this fantastic yet feasible vision, he's mindful of a different kind of minefield than the one Seeker was programmed to disarm: a murky ethical area involving the use of autonomous machines in warfare, an issue many have begun to question but few have been able to resolve. Though his dreams for a robot-powered future are certainly civilian in nature, it's a U.S. Army-branded carrot spurring on the donkey of development. The life-saving and reconnaissance benefits of robots already at use in present battlefields are often the first thing touted by proponents, but what's often left out are the ways that these same machines can and have been fitted to kill.
One of the most high-profile and articulate voices to flag this topic for concern is P.W. Singer, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of their 21st Century Defense Initiative. In a piece for the Wilson Quarterly titled "Robots at War: The New Battlefield," Singer paints a picture of the accelerated rate at which we are using robots in armed conflict.
"Already in the prototype stage are varieties of unmanned weapons and exotic technologies, from automated machine guns and robotic stretcher bearers to tiny but lethal robots the size of insects, which look like they are straight out of the wildest science fiction. Pentagon planners are having to figure out ... how they should plan for battlefields in the near future that will be, as one officer put it, "largely robotic.""
Less a judgment than a call for discussion, the thrust of Singer's piece is that historically there have always been unintended and negative consequences to a technology-first, ethics-second approach.
"On the civilian side, experts such as Microsoft's Bill Gates describe robotics as being close to where computers were in the early 1980s—still rare, but poised for a breakout. On the military side, unmanned systems are rapidly coming into use in almost every realm of war, moving more and more soldiers out of danger, and allowing their enemies to be targeted with increasing precision. And they are changing the experience of war itself. This is leading some of the first generation of soldiers working with robots to worry that war waged by remote control will come to seem too easy, too tempting. "
And there are other gray areas. Beyond the imagined brave new horrors of a future in which warfare technology is allowed to progress uncensored, what about a very real scenario already existing in which the people charged with educating our children work hand-in-hand with those whose job it is to fight our battles? Is there a basic conflict of interest when the military starts dating the higher education sector?
The military-educational complex
Bernard Theisen is Project Editor for Outreach for TARDEC's Joint Center for Robotics (JCR), a congressional commission formed three years ago to help make Southeast Michigan the center for ground robotics for the entire military as part of the Base Realignment Enclosure Act. JCR's mission began with moving the whole operation from Huntsville, AL to its new center in Warren, MI and now extends to developing robotics curriculum and university programs throughout the country.
According to an article in Crain's Detroit Business TARDEC appropriated $3.9 million for research programs at seven Michigan colleges, including the newly established Ground Robotics Research Center at the University of Michigan. A rep for U-M's engineering department says the Research Center will likely get at least $4.1 million from TARDEC in 2009. U-M also offered their first Masters program in robotics this year, the direct result, Theisen says, of collaboration with TARDEC.
Theisen considers TARDEC's involvement in Robofest to be part of a comprehensive package in which kids are introduced at an early age to Army-sponsored robotics competitions. "You get the kids interested in that through Robofest and then hopefully they keep moving up to the [Michigan] FIRST Competition in high school, the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition in the University, and then they'll go work in a career in robotics," he says.
According to Theisen TARDEC's short-term master plan involves pumping robo life into other industries such as auto and agriculture through the development of dual-use technology. But he's quick to frame this in a bigger picture, "We're trying to help develop the commercial side as well as the military side because we want to reduce the cost of the military robot."
"Right here in Michigan you have an overabundance of manufacturing capability," Theisen says. "Many of the industrial robotics manufacturers - the Kukas, the ABBs - are all based in Michigan because of the automotive industry. We're trying to tap into some of these organizations that have advanced manufacturing techniques and low costs to make replacement parts for some of the current 8,000 fielded robotics systems."
Everybody benefits, Theisen says. "Right now the government is the only company purchasing ground robotics to handle dull, dirty or dangerous tasks. But we also want to see the mining industry purchase robots to help miners avoid those same kinds of tasks and for people who climb towers or clean nuclear power plants, and various jobs that put people in harm's way, to be replaced by robots."
He lists a number of military robots currently in use on foreign battlefields which have only life-saving functions, such at bots tasked with the identification and disposal of the deadly IEDs made famous in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When asked if he sees any problems with too much military and universy partnership, he doesn't have to think about it. "No. A lot of the major breakthroughs that the military has done - from armor to cameras to water purification - are through funding the top schools in the country," he says.
I'm caught off guard when he refers to "CJ" at Lawrence Tech. It takes me a second to register that he's referring to Dr. Chung. The two are apparently on a first-name basis. I'm reminded of what Dr. Chung told me when I asked if the collaboration between Lawrence Tech and TARDEC would become more direct in the near future. "It's already happening," he said. "Lawrence Tech professors are teaching classes at TARDEC."
On the dangers of robotizing our armies, Dr. Chung is agnostic. "To tell you the truth, we haven't officially discussed these ethical issues," he says. Dr. Chung sees robotics itself as a tool like any other, subject to the moral choices of its wielder. "Robotics are neutral," he says. "They can be used for good or evil. The solution is for the people using that technology to have a good ethical background, a good conscience. Something missing in our education system is the promotion of an ethical mindset."
This last bit seems more in keeping with a teacher who has professed an interest in sparking dreams and who has said of his students, "We want them to be the leaders of the future, to start something very new."
Dr. Chung sounds disappointed when he admits that Lawrence Tech does not currently offer any classes or coursework involving ethics in robotics, let alone ethics in technology.
In a recent interview, Singer said, "The robotics field is a very new field. And the fear is that it doesn't have a built-in code of ethics the way that medicine does."
As the responsibility of crafting an ethical framework within which to use new power is deferred to future generations, or simply sideways to "others," the question must be asked, isn't that really a decision in itself being made right now. Do we encourage burgeoning scientists to become military scientists before they've even had a chance to work out their own ethics? Does Robofest amount to a form of military recruitment in the guise of civilian education? If the answer to the latter is yes, doesn't it answer the former?
I put this question to prof. Keith Bozin, a physics and chemistry teacher at Lawrence Tech actively involved with Robofest.
"No," answers Bozin, before adding that he is ex-Navy. "By the time you get to TARDEC, you're not 16. You're 22. You've grown up a lot hopefully. But at TARDEC, it's not about the aggression there, it's about the accomplishment of a mission. Most of those robots at TARDEC are search and rescue, bomb finding/disposal."
Bozin says that war has its advantages, particularly when it comes to technological progress. "War provides necessity and necessity provides invention," he says. "Plus, war drives funding. So we get great advancements out of war."
Whatever the intent behind Robofest, what stands out to Bozin is the very un-warlike spirit in which it is played out among the students. "I remember one year, there were these two teams who met competing at a qualifier. They spent that night after the qualifier teaching each other how to make each other's robots better. They were saying, 'Here's how you can beat me tomorrow,'" Bozin says, laughing.
Bozin mentions Gordon Stein. He describes the way that Gordon has the proper support from his parents and a dad that helps while staying out of the way. After all, it was Joel who stepped up when nobody would sponsor his son, Joel who convinced the team to create something with a humanitarian function, shaping their creative energy into a life-saving mold.
In many ways, Joel seems to represent an antidote to the void - the void of support Gordon encountered when his school wouldn't help, the void of resources that cripples scientific research in economic droughts - a void into which TARDEC has stepped and exploited. For all of the ways that technology has pulled us into ways of being we could have never imagined, there are some things that never change. Like the way systems fail us. Like the need for all of us to have a parent like Joel Stein, sitting attentively but quietly in our corner.
Daniel Johnson likes to write, among other things. His last article for Metromode was Young Guns In Metro PoliticsPhotos:
Gordon Stein and Max Schultz
Lawrence Tech University students start up their robots
Dr. Chung
Remote control
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