SAN JOSE, California -- A couple months ago, when news of a purportedly revolutionary device called "Ginger" first broke, Dean Kamen, the thing's inventor, gained something that engineers rarely get: fame.
But speaking at the Association for Computer Machinery's ACM1 conference here Wednesday, Kamen said that celebrity engineers shouldn't be so rare.
"We rarely see technical people take the reins (of culture)," he said, "and in a media-driven age, we should create an organization that does for thinkers what the Olympics does for athletes."
The press turned up to see if Kamen would say something about the hyper-hyped Ginger. That device -- which made headlines because a few so-called visionaries who'd seen it said that it could change the world -- is a motorized scooter with an emission-free hydrogen engine, according to a story appearing this week in the print edition of Inside Magazine.
But Kamen was mum on Ginger, not mentioning it in his 40-minute speech or to reporters who not-so-coyly tried to peel details from him afterward. Instead, he spent most of his time proselytizing "FIRST," an organization he founded nine years ago to promote science and technology in society.
FIRST -- "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" -- sponsors robot-building competitions for students all over the country, with the particular intent of involving women and minorities in technology.
During the last few years, FIRST competitions have grown to be huge events, with the finals, held last year at Disney's Epcot Center, attracting thousands of students and resembling rock concerts. And that's precisely how scientists ought to be seen in society, Kamen said -- they should be as revered as rock stars, athletes and movie stars.
Why does science need this facelift? Because "the world is in a race between technical competence and catastrophe." He said that the ever-increasing pace of technological "progress" comes at a price, which is a reduced ability to predict the consequences of technologies.
"Tech people tend to be optimists," he said. But scientists and engineers rarely take the time to explain their technologies to an unprepared world. "They think that the technology itself will be a good thing. But that's like handing a machine gun to an ax murderer."
So we need more scientists, he says. "We need to get every person we can working on these problems, and keep turning lemons into lemonade."
And to get that army of lemon-juicers, you need to make science look attractive to young people.
Kamen delivered his talk while sitting in iBot, a revolutionary, stair-climbing wheelchair that balances on two wheels (as Ginger is rumored to be capable of doing). At the end of his talk, he sat in the chair and tossed around a 25-pound bag of sand to show that iBot can keep its balance under anything, and then he climbed down the stage in it.
The press hounded Kamen after he got down, and of course their first questions concerned Ginger, not the pretty-cool device he was sitting in. But he said that he was sick of talking about that, and he was also a little bit upset that the media hadn't devoted nearly the same amount of ink to iBot or FIRST.
"I'm working on a lot of projects," Kamen said, "and they only ask about that one." So then, seeing that Kamen was really not going to say anything about Ginger, the press seemed stymied.
Many of the questions were business related -- concerning the chair's cost and FDA approval, boring stuff. Someone asked him what he thought about the Internet and whether eBay had a good business model. Kamen sort of shrugged off the questions.
Then, a bit later, outside the main ballroom, Kamen met some of the kids from FIRST who had come to the conference to show off their Lego robots. Seeing the iBot, the kids' eyes lit up, and they started peppering Kamen with the kind of questions he seemed to love: How does it balance on two wheels? How does it climb stairs? What's the gear ratio in that?
"Does that thing run on batteries?" one of the kids asked.
And this seemed to be the magic question. "Yes, that's the limiting factor in all of our current devices.... But in the next few years, that's all going to change," he said, hinting at Ginger.
