Spurred on by Pittsburgh’s ongoing dominance in robot racing, robot nursing, robot soccer, and robot… well, just about everything, our Congressman has joined with a colleague from Tennessee to launch the Congressional Robotics Caucus. (The article is worth reading for the graphic alone.) Being a roboticist, I appreciate Mr. Doyle’s intent and the shout-out to all my peeps down at CMU, but I’ve got mixed feelings about this. The robotics sector is doing pretty well on its own — we make things that people want to buy and fund research into, because they’re useful, they’re cost-effective, and they’re just plain cool. The main power Congress has is to either toss regulations at us (which would slow down progress) or toss money at us. Money would maybe help things in the short term, but in the long term, it’ll harm our industry. Why? Because Congressional appropriations, and especially appropriations on the research side, distort the basic competitive process and especially distort the peer-review on which solid science depends. In the short run, some projects at CMU will go faster because they get the extra help. In the long run, our field could stagnate because people become too dependent on the political process instead of the engineering process.

We’ve got a pretty good thing going here, and it’s likely to become a major economic driver for our region. The best way to help it along, though, might just be to leave it alone.