There are a number of awesome things in the world. Staff favorites include the Delorean, Vikings, even a bear with shark arms drinking Jack Daniels; I, however, prefer Xbox games and Monsters. However, all of these pale in comparison to the most awesome thing ever: Robots.

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) robotics has been challenging high school students to build a functioning robot specified to certain game requirements since 1992.

And since 2002, my old high school, Bishop Foley, has been building bots to compete in each year’s competition. The 2010 game is called Breakaway. No, it wasn’t inspired by the Kelly Clarkston song, and is similar to a soccer game with towers and speed bumps.

Team 910, the Foley Freeze, allied with team 70 (Goodrich High School’s Martians) and 67 (Huron Valley’s Heroes Of Tomorrow – HOT) dominated the finals of the Kettering district this Saturday and brought home gold.

The 2010 robot can run 15 seconds of autonomous movement with the programming code we’ve worked on since day one; with manual control it can gather and shoot balls and will soon be able to clear a 12-inch high speed bump on the track.

Six long, hard weeks were put into this award winning masterpiece. And we couldn’t be more proud.

But once our voices are gone, our legs are weak from jumping and cheering, and all our banners are on display, we have time to think and are left to wonder:

A small team of 16 year olds built a functioning robot. What the HELL is the future?

As much as I love robots and watching them pin opponents and shoot soccer balls, I’ve always kept a big fear secret. What happens when our robots get smart? And I don’t mean able-to-lock-on-to-a-target-with-a-camera smart, I mean like, taking over the world smart.

That’s right; we spend six weeks building the very thing that may cost us our jobs, maybe even our future LIVES. Scary, isn’t it?

Call me crazy, but remember what people thought of computer technology way back when? “Psh, yeah right; like THAT will ever happen.”

Guess what. It happened. I’m typing on it right now. And one day this little laptop of mine is gonna take offense to a sentence I write, snap its lid down on my hands and take me to human prison.

We all have hopeful dreams of living in peace with the mechanic beings; no, sorry, we dream of living in peace while the bots do all the dirty work for us. Technology users expect miracles from the robots we use today. If it’s not working right, whose fault is it? Not the ones who built it, of course.

We build them so we can use them. When they start building themselves … we may find ourselves with much less than losing our gaming platform.

No more will robots do math for us. They’ll make us remember everything an overabundance of technology made us forget. We’ll have to pull out our rusty old bicycles because cars will boycott us for all the years we used them.

The future is a dark and gloomy place where the newspapers are printed in binary.

I can see the future government now. President Optimus Prime sits beside his vice present, R2D2, to address the future Senate. Of course, they’ll have to speak with them via telecommunications; you can’t expect the Borg to just fly down from the Delta Quadrant with the click of a mouse.

Hopefully Bender will have some sort of something position too; but us humans won’t have a say at all.

You can’t say we haven’t been warned. We’ve had movies like Terminator, The Matrix, A.I., even Wall-E tried to warn us.

We already know that the robots that may one day bring our groceries inside could one day later drop the eggs on purpose. Our ignorance may lead us to our impending doom.

Unfortunately, robots are so damn awesome that even these thoughts can’t stop me from returning every year to help build one as long as humans are around. Maybe they’ll even take pity on us FIRST kids when they’re exacting their revenge.

Team 910, you have my undying love and support until the robot overlord tells me to stop.