I got a little worried, it was now 1:00pm and again I had not slept at all, but here I was fixing to take a quick shower so I could go see Mijo's project, even though he did not invite us. We jumped in Wife's car and Sweetie directed us to what building. I slept hard on the way up there and even though it was only a 30 minute nap, it would fuel me for a few more hours. Sweetie had us park by the front door to the building and she then took the car and parked it a couple blocks away in a garage. I was glad for that, save me some walking.
This engineering building is something else. About 5 stories tall, demonstration rooms all over the place and then all the students in their Sunday best, it was an impressive site. We got a pamphlet with the room number where Boy would be and we headed up to the 4th or 5th floor. Every room up there on that floor was filled with 3-5 displays of kids and their research. Boy explained that he was a little upset because the girl on the team had fried the circuit boards by ramping up the voltage to 30V.
Boy is very strange in that he doesn't like to share what is going on, specially if it is bad news. We only found out he was at this event because of the girlfriend saying something. The night before, Thursday, I had assumed he had spent the night at Sweetie's house, but the truth was that he was on campus until like 3:00am trying to do last minute fixes on their presentation robot. He said it was working well enough, the girl on the team decided the robot was being jerky and she read somewhere that ramping up the voltage would make it move smoother. She did it without asking the team and when she ramped up the voltage to 30v, she fried the specialized processor and another circuit board.
Boy's part of the project, for the last two years has been to get the software/hardware to recognize the different things that go into a burger, be they lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, so that one day robots can do this type of labor. Real world application, I find it kind of scary, because where are the low skilled workers going to find work when McDonald's and other burger places start using robots and thus reducing the number of humans necessary to run a kitchen?
As we walked through, all the projects are kind of designed to make life easier for humans, but at some point, the humans aren't going to really be needed, it seems. Cars that drive themselves, robotic tools to take care of crops, more efficient solar and wind power machines. You have a world with an increasing population, meanwhile the smarter people are working on ways to reduce the number of employees with automation, how are the lower half of society going to get by? I can see a world, and not that far away where the robots are doing most of the work, what are the humans going to be doing? This makes me nervous, I hate humans that aren't busy on their own. All I do during the week is work, I expect people around me to be doing the same.
Boy's project hit some setbacks, but we told him to be strong and as an engineer you just keep going, what would be the next step to keep the project going? Discuss that, show the code you wrote, if the professor is into that, so he sees the amount of work you put into it. Just because something doesn't work at exhibition time, does not make it a failure. He was upset at the time of the show, but he felt better later in the day, when he got home. He was just glad it was over.
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