Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  Patterson says she doesn’t get frustrated too easily, a habit she ascribes to her father’s constant encouragement when she was a kid. But it’s also the case that amateurs have a different relationship to failure than professionals. At an office, failure is profoundly frustrating since it’s known to others and embarrassing. Failure and success are binary modes, up or down, and often tied directly to pay. Did you succeed or not? Failure can often lead to getting marginalized or pissed off or fired.

  But if the entire rig on your kitchen table is your own creation, hatched from street castoffs and dairy farmers’ lessons dating from the Eisenhower administration, then failure is just a glitch in the system you’ve built. Putting your hands in there, e-mailing other amateur scientists for advice, checking out colleagues on your common wiki, fixing what’s wrong, and moving one’s investigations forward are actually just other ways of being successful. Amateurs are often fixing things, their own devices, so there is this constant reinforcement of feeling smart and competent.

  People who study creativity and productivity say that this is a key feature of highly productive pursuits. Most people, when continuously frustrated, will walk away. But if competence is also defined as cunningly figuring out a problem with your lab, then staying with the program becomes a lot easier.

  Of course, that staying power can also become a treadmill that keeps an eccentric in his garage for a lifetime, convinced that if he tinkers just a little more he’ll eventually find the secret to perpetual motion. No one argues that amateurism is some kind of secret path to success, just that it’s a path. And, naturally, if your goal is a little more likely to actually occur in this time/space continuum, then this kind of motivation makes it easier to endure experimental setbacks.

  “If you go through many interactions where you feel really incompetent,” said Professor Edward Deci, the author of The Psychology of Self-Determination, “it has a big impact on you and you feel depressed in no time.”

  Deci has pioneered the study of what makes people go off and just do something, formally known as “intrinsic motivation” or “self-determination theory,” but in this context, let’s call it by its common noun, “amateurism.” In the workplace, getting people productive and creative in a capitalist sense involves a lot of human resource activity. The effort there is to ensure that everyone is working at his or her skill level and not below it (waste of human capital) or beyond it (the Peter Principle theory that one can be promoted beyond one’s skills and become useless).

  Outside the world of paid labor, intrinsic motivation becomes a different matter. Whether one is in a literal garage or a symbolic one (a wiki is, arguably, today’s figurative garage), research consistently shows that even working alone, one needs a few things to occur: The best amateurs require a sense of opened-ended playfulness—that sense that anything’s possible.

  Deci cites a study of nursery school children who were asked to draw for fun with some special markers. Afterward, some were given “good player” awards. Later, when the kids were asked to draw again with the markers, something surprising happened.

  “The youngsters given awards were less likely to draw at all, and drew worse pictures, than those who were not given the awards,” Deci has written. “Why did this happen? Children draw because drawing is fun and because it leads to a result: a picture.” But the “good player” reward redefined the pleasure narrowly as authority figure approval. Fun play turned into a form of paid work, the death of amateur passion.

  These experiments have been reproduced many times, revealing every time that play is more productive than work. That is, a sense of being on your own and just trying to do this thing (whatever that thing is) can be more productive than if you introduce either money or reward into the equation. Experiments where some kind of meaningless grunt work was asked of people as a favor to the experimenter resulted in extremely high productivity returns. The minute those same people were praised and offered money, the productivity rate plunged.

  One could argue that such productivity is related to belief in some higher calling—that you are enduring this donkey work because you have faith in the future (noble) rather than for money (labor). Soldiers will recognize this distinction as the same that exists between a citizen serving out of love of country and a mercenary earning a paycheck. The sense of satisfaction from within and the sense of pride flows together to create a motivation that money simply destroys. The word “amateur” comes from the ancient word for “love”—which, when encouraged with money, becomes a profession, a form of the oldest profession. An amateur’s love is both public and private, internally motivated but, in order to be productive, outwardly praised. It’s a kind of love that hasn’t very well spoken its name. It’s neither eros nor agape, nothing involving filial bonding or generous charity. It may be the least described love, ultimately personal, charged with the hope that there is a possibility of finding that new thing just over the horizon of the unknown and toting it back across, into the realm of the familiar.

  IV. Death Penalty Yogurt

  Over the months prior to my seeing Meredith Patterson’s lab, she had already been trying to coax the glow gene into her chosen yogurt bacterium, Lactobacillus acidophilus. She had tried to use the heat shock method to drive new genes into the cell’s nucleus.

  “When bacteria get to a certain temperature, they start producing these heat shock proteins which also opens up some holes,” she explained. And in that brief moment, the new genes sloshing around nearby can slip in. “In my head, it’s like, holy shit, it’s hot in here, let’s open some windows.”

  But that hadn’t worked at all, so she had moved on to electroporation, 150-millisecond pulses at 2,500 volts—the method we’ll be trying on my visit. In my head, I picture the tiny bacteria ballooning like a cartoon character with its finger in a socket—its flagella sticking out like hair—and its microscopic pores bulging open like wide eye sockets, such that the new material can rush in. For us, the question is, how do we administer these shocks to our bacteria. Patterson has already configured the timing mechanism on an Arduino—an easily customized computer board. It will handle the literally split-second timing: The 2,500-volt pulses last only 150 milliseconds each. All we need now is 2,500 volts—the precise amount, I recently learned, once used to carry out the missions of famous twentieth-century electric chairs, the insanely powerful ones from the early days that had nicknames Gruesome Gertie, Yellow Mama, Old Smokey, and Sizzlin’ Sally.

  To accomplish this, Patterson got hold of a transformer from an old neon sign. It takes in 12 volts and ramps it up to 3,000 volts. So it would make sense that if we fed the transformer 10 volts, it would then kick out 2,500. But Patterson’s voltmeter kept telling us something was dodgy here. So she started to connect different transistors to get the right combination to deliver the needed, precise amount of electricity. Patterson maintains a little tool cabinet containing various transistors, but none of them, or any combination of them, would get us to our magic number. The only solution, it was decided, was to jump in the car and drive thirty miles to Fry’s, a kind of Home Depot of everything electronic. We did this without hesitation because now the entire mission was stuck in the bottleneck of finding the right transistor mix.

  This effort went on for days, I should add. We must have tested the input and outputs of the Arduino board some fifty times. These tests amounted to us sitting on the wooden floor and carefully holding the (insulated) lines in place as we blasted away with, potentially, lethal streams of electricity. One day we spent ten hours trying to configure one wiring set-up after another. Hours of this fiddling passed, but maybe you know this feeling, it was as if no time had passed.

  Patterson’s cat Alexander continually appeared at the edge of our experiments, poking his nose in at the most inopportune moments. “We named him after Alexander Shulgin,” she explained, as if I should immediately recognize the name of the chemist who popularized the drug MDMA, aka ecstasy. “Do not name your cats aft
er chemists; they will want to do chemistry.”

  As we prepared to run some serious electricity through the Arduino board, Alexander came cantering over and just a millisecond or two before he put his foot on a live wire, I scooped him up and moved him to the other side of our little power grid.

  Meanwhile, the tiny amount of lactobacillus that Patterson had extracted from the yogurt and placed in the incubator was growing away. There was one new flaw with that device: Its two-bit thermostat had busted. There no longer was a way to automatically regulate the heat inside, so Patterson would carefully monitor the temperature by checking it on her own. She’d turn the incubator off after a while and wait for it to cool down a few degrees before turning it back on. This way she kept it from overcooking our bugs. We were now several days into constant experimentation, and we spent a lot of time together, staring at transistors, tending the incubator as if it were an old woodstove, sterilizing equipment, waiting for very slow things to happen. Patterson is a smoker, and in moments precisely like these, I allow myself a temporary relapse into a habit I enjoyed back in the Pleistocene era. So we’d take cigarette breaks, standing by her window, often talking. But already, we were comfortable enough to not say a word.

  One of those nights we had a brief discussion of flow, the notion developed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced “Me-high Chick-sent-me-high”—perhaps the most fun name to say, ever). This Hungarian-American psychologist holds that there is a very satisfying state of mind that occurs when one is totally absorbed by some action. It may sound as if this is some rare state of being, like a kind of secular nirvana, but it’s not. We all experience it pretty frequently. It doesn’t require special meditative skills, just the love of doing something so that one gets lost in the labor. One might experience flow while painting a complex landscape or painting the front porch. Or chaperoning an incubator or testing electrical currents on a floor.

  Its commonness is why we have so many phrases for this pleasant state of existence: being in the zone, losing ourselves in our work, being on the ball, or in the groove. According to Csíkszentmihályi (say it loud: “Chick-sent-me-high”), this state is marked by a total absorption such that one loses a sense of time and experiences a deep feeling of satisfaction.

  “Oh,” Patterson said, suddenly recognizing what I was talking about. You mean “codespace”—as programmers call it—“where the world just sort of disappears.” She knew it well. “That’s a good head space to try new things, especially if there’s something I think should work. So I try it and see if it does: ‘Oh, that didn’t quite work the way it was supposed to. Let’s check a few settings and see if this works.’ Sweet.”

  This was also the night that we were scheduled to meet up with some random hackers at a moveable geekfest known as SuperHappyDevHouse. Like Cowell’s crowd back in Boston, this is a gathering of mostly programmers who come together at someone’s house to exchange ideas and just generally relax. But we were physically incapable of leaving the apartment: The incubator required constant babysitting to keep it from overheating. As we sat in our own groove, occupied by long stretches of work, there appeared a solution, like a bubble slowly popping at the surface of our flow.

  “What about one of those light timers you can get to fool burglars?” I asked. Patterson instantly got it. Yes. A light timer. We could program it to turn the incubator off and on. Then we could leave the apartment building. We raced downstairs and drove across the bridge to a late-night Home Depot in San Jose. The new models were perfect for what we were doing and, as Patterson would say, only a few bucks. Digital controls allowed you to customize the on/off experience however bizarrely you wanted—on for five minutes, off for thirty, for instance.

  Problem solved. It was just one more jerry-rig for her duct tape and baling-wire lab. And we never did get to SuperHappyDevHouse; since dawn was on the way, we got back into our transistor flow, and there was always one more thing we had to improvise. But for now, there was this intense pleasure. We both stepped back, looking at a light timer plugged into a surge protector with, absurdly, an exhilarating amount of self-satisfaction. Time to light up.

  V. The Right to Marry Your Vacuum Cleaner

  When I first decided to start hanging around amateur groups to see how they might be different from your average R&D outfit, I originally looked no farther than my backyard. One of the oldest amateur robot clubs in America still meets in Hartford, Connecticut, every month. So I dropped in a few times, hoping to catch a glimpse of amateurs at play and to see how their motivations might be different from the more ordered investigations of academic research aiming for prestige, or private development looking for profits. Meeting in a local high school classroom, most of the members were either enthusiastic teens or adult engineers with a serious robot jones. But it took no time at all to surmise that the enfant terrible of the club was a fourteen-year-old named Nathaniel Barshay, a small boy with a barbershop haircut and a hesitant but inviting smile.

  His robots were magnitudes of complexity beyond everyone else’s, and everyone else knew it. Most roboticists fiddle with various programs to teach the machine how to walk a line or along a wall. When I first caught up with Barshay, he had purchased some new sensors and was teaching his robot how, in robot terms, to “see.” In the course of an afternoon, the crowd looked to him for advice, including the people leading the club. This particular club, the Connecticut Robotics Society, is sort of famous for producing these wunderkinds. Most of the members will tell you how DARPA, the Pentagon’s major research arm, occasionally sends a scout to the club to raid them of their best members. Barshay is clearly DARPA-bound, should he choose. When I first chatted with him, we talked about his favorite movies, how he got interested in robots, computer games. Then I asked him what he had done last summer, when he was thirteen years old. And here was his answer: “I taught robotics at Tufts University.”

  Despite being shy in the way that all young teens are around adults, it didn’t take long for Barshay to agree to let me watch him as he prepared to build a robot to enter into the Trinity College Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest (in Hartford). This is one of the oldest competitions, and Barshay had won it before.

  The mission is to build a robot—most of these tend to be about the size of a toy truck—that can navigate an unfamiliar maze until it locates a candle flame and then puts it out, usually with an onboard squirt of water. That’s a good number of complicated instructions; many robots never get near the candle. But many of the successful solutions were ingenious. It was hard not to be impressed by the kid whose robot was armed with nothing more than a balloon, which, as soon as it neared the flame, burst, and, of course, blew out the candle.

  Barshay didn’t win that year, but these contests were practically just signposts along the way of his constant tinkering in the basement (literally, his basement). A few months later, Barshay entered another contest. Sponsored by the iRobot Corporation, the competition asked amateurs to invent anything new, as long as you started with a stripped down version of their big commercial seller: the robot vacuum cleaner, the Roomba. In a weekend or two, Barshay installed a number of different sensors (cannibalized from his firefighting robot) and attached a long stick. The idea was to create a walking cane for the blind that would be better than both the traditional stick and guide dog combined. For instance, with Barshay’s idea, a blind person could simply ask the stick to take him to, say, the public library, and using information off the Internet and a built-in GPS and MapQuest system, the stick would figure out the surest path and then guide the person there.

  Many of the other entries in Roomba’s contest had a similarly practical cast to them—devices that would water your plants while you were away or take care of other domestic issues for the disabled.

  Notice anything? As my hang time with roboticists grew, I kept encountering this. Most of the robots getting hacked together, if they weren’t just toys, were extremely functional—putting out fires, helping the handicapped �
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  How quickly we seemed to have shot past those early days of BattleBots and other super-futuristic robotic visions. To begin with, how frumpy is it that America’s premier robot is a vacuum cleaner? You hear the word “robot,” and you’re primed to expect science fiction, not a soap opera commercial. Besides the vacuum cleaner, the company’s other big seller is exclusively for the Pentagon: “the iRobot 710 Warrior,” not to mention the 510 Packbot and the 210 Negotiator (which performs surveillance in lethal areas). If you’ve got a comic book image of a fighting machine, or the pilotless drones that drop bombs in Afghanistan, think again. The Warrior can locate mines, but it resembles a dentist’s extendable light on tiny tank treads. Crucial stuff, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that when one says “war-fighting robot,” the expectation is more Sergeant York and less mechanical ET.

  At first I thought this was just human nature, that all robots, like college graduates, begin with grand intentions but slowly settle into the mundane world of vacuum cleaners and office clerks (respectively). That is, until I set up a series of alerts to keep me constantly updated on robot innovations. Robot creativity seems to center on three essential sources—Japan, the United States, and Europe. The cultural differences of the three locations have heavily influenced the kinds of robots produced by both the corporations and the amateurs. America is still the land of Ben Franklin. There has always been a plain-Jane kind of pragmatism to our inventive calling. Franklin is the guy who invented the lightning rod and the bifocals and the public library—all because, on some level, he didn’t want his house to burn down while he read his borrowed books well into middle age.

  It is largely American imaginations that have turned their robots into not-all-that-glorified appliances. For the aged, we’ve invented the “intelligent walker” that responds to voice commands (“take me to the kitchen”); for construction workers, a serpentine robot that can climb to dangerous places for inspections; in hospitals, robots run medicines around from room to room while other robots down the hall are performing surgery. Even America’s most famous fictional robot, Wall-E, is a trash compactor.