I spent half the day today playing with Lego robots. How fun is that! Every since I was a young child, I’ve absolutely loved Legos. Now, because I work for a software / media company that’s all about gadgets, I get to do things like write articles about the newest gadgets out there. Today, it was robots.

So, I thought you might be interested in reading the article I wrote on TechLore about my experiences with the new Lego 8527 Mindstorms. I also wanted to encourage some discussion around the topic of robots in general.

A friend of mine recently made the following two predictions concerning robots coming into their own…

1. Robots will be “bigger than PC’s” — meaning that their impact on society will be even more signifcant than that of the personal computer.
2. Robots will mature twice as fast as computers have — meaning that what computers / PC’s have done in the last 30 years (from the Comodore 64 to the Pentium Duo laptop with a nice 17″ LCD widescreen and 2 GB of RAM), robots will do in 15.

So my question to you is, “What do you think?”.

I admit that robots are going to be hot and that they’re getting there fast, but my friend’s claims are HUGE. For me, I think he’s a little overzealous. Plus, frankly, I think geo-political realities could get in the way of technology just running amuck in the robotic world. I think space travel, medicine, and other fanciful soon-to-no-longer-be-science-fiction topics have the potential to suffer the same fate. If the wars keep raging and the economy keeps stretching and we keep investing in the gimme-gimme-gimme society we’re building, we’ll end up being so buried in all the crap that we might not be able to make all the cool stuff happen any time soon.

I’m sure I’ll follow-up more on that topic later. But for now, what say you? Robots making a bigger splash than PC’s in half the time? Or not?

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