Newsmaker: Segway inventor scoots to bigger matters

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Do you use solar or wind power at home?
Kamen: I have a bunch of wind turbines, and I do as much of that stuff as I can.

Do you use the Segway on a regular basis?
Kamen: Oh yeah, I use all sorts of things. I've got airplanes, I've got helicopters, big trucks, Humvees, fire engines. I've got little cars, I've got an electric car, I've got an 1899 steam car. There's a place for dump trucks, helicopters, Humvees. It's very easy to paint with a broad brush who's good for the environment and who's bad. The simple solutions (like driving only little cars) tend to be naive.

Yes, I use a Segway, but I wouldn't get on it and try to cross the country with it. I'm not a naive tree hugger who believes that everybody should use a Segway to get around.

I'm not a naive tree hugger who believes that everybody should use a Segway to get around.

How do you feel about how people are using the Segway, given the recent recall?
Kamen: If it's a really good idea, you wonder why everybody doesn't do it and do it quickly. But I invented insulin pumps for diabetics when I was in college and my brother was in medical school. It took a couple of years to develop the product. It took 15 years for it to become standard of care. Even with Moore's Law, people keep changing at the same slow rate they always change. The new generation has to do it their way, and the old generation is going to take a generation to change the way they think.

The iBot's a perfect example. Do I believe that 10 years from today, someone is going to be sitting in a power wheelchair saying, "I can't go up a curb. No, I can't reach anything on the stove. Why should I be at eye level looking at people?"

It's absurd to me that anybody will be doing that. But in the meantime, somebody is going to read about an iBot. And by tonight, they'll get out of their wheelchair and get back into bed and get back into it in the morning. I'm sure that 100 years ago, Thomas Edison had invented the lightbulb, but people got their newspaper, they lit their candle, and they read about that lightbulb. They kept lighting those candles and reading about the lightbulb for years.

I cannot explain to you where people derive the sense of when it's time to change and when they'll give up the security of where they are. I've come to believe the whole definition of technology ought to be anything that wasn't available when you were a kid. To your grandmother, technology is the television; to your parents, technology is the computer. To kids today, the Internet is infrastructure. They don't even think about it as technology.

How much time do you spend on the Internet?
Kamen: Not a lot. I'm not one of these people that spends most of my time at a desk. You get on Google, and you're done. I don't spend hours and hours a day cruising the Internet.

You've said that you'd like children to view scientists as rock stars, as cultural heroes.
Kamen: In our current culture, most kids are way more interested in sports, entertainment, Hollywood and the NBA than they are in developing analytic and mathematical skills, science, and understanding how to separate fact from nonsense. So I think a valuable way to leverage the media is to make science and technology as attractive as a sporting event. What the Little League is to baseball, we have the FIRST Lego League for middle schoolers.

One year, the theme was to build these things that would help people in the disabled community. Next year, the whole theme for the FIRST Lego competition is going to be around energy and power.

We had 45,000 professional engineers and scientists donate their time to mentor teens last year. By almost any metric, the thing is growing phenomenally. This year, we opened conference registration on our Web site, and within 48 hours, had something like 23 of our cities over capacity. We had to close out registration. Now we're over 10,000 schools.

What would you like to be different about technology today?
Kamen: One of the chilling things is, there are a lot of people out there that are antitechnology. Their solution is to say, let's replace this technology with no technology; let's go backward. The answer should be, let's replace this bad technology with better technology, and let's go forward. Getting rid of unintended consequences shouldn't be accomplished by rolling back the intellectual clock, because in the process of doing that, you'll wipe out a lot of good stuff.

How do U.S. laws affect inventors like yourself?
Kamen: Some people have found a way to game the patent system, just the way they gamed the accounting system at WorldCom and Enron. In those cases, we don't say, let's stop the world from having accounting and banking systems. But some people who have a loud voice in this debate about reforming the patent system in effect are saying, let's get rid of these; they make products expensive.

They might make that product more expensive for a limited time while that patent exists, but all the things you take for granted today are a result of people literally devoting their lives in search of great new solutions, trying to get that brass ring. How much of that entire process would be undermined by patent system reform, I don't know.  

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