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Robot camel jockeys. That's about half of what you need to know. Robots, designed in Switzerland, riding camels in the Arabian desert. Camel jockey robots, about 2 feet high, with a right hand to bear the whip and a left hand to pull the reins. Thirty-five pounds of aluminum and plastic, a 400-MHz processor running Linux and communicating at 2.4 GHz; GPS-enabled, heart rate-monitoring (the camel's heart, that is) robots. Mounted on tall, gangly blond animals, bouncing along in the sandy wastelands outside Doha, Qatar, in the 112-degree heat, with dozens of follow-cars behind them. I have seen them with my own eyes. And the other half of the story: Every robot camel jockey bopping along on its improbable mount means one Sudanese boy freed from slavery and sent home.


It's July in Qatar, one of the hottest months in one of the hottest places in the world, and in an air-conditioned double-wide that sits baking in the sun, there are two experiments going on. One to see if the robots themselves will work, and one, less explicit, to measure the reach and touch of technology. It's a moment created by rampantly colliding contexts: Western R&D, international NGO pressures, Arabian traditions, petroleum wealth, and benevolent despotism. If it works, the result will be both simple and powerful (one small step for robotics, one giant leap for social progress): The standard modernist gambit of taking a crappy job and making it more bearable through mechanization will be transformed into a 21st-century policy of taking appalling and involuntary servitude and eliminating it through high tech. Everybody will win a little. The children will be set free, the owners will get to keep their pastime, the US State Department will consider it a good start, and the camels will continue to do their camel thing.

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