...in the movies his robots seemed to dominate. "Technology can give you an edge," said Jacobsen, "but it will not mean anything if the story doesn't pull people in." In other words, the technology has to be for something, whether it's telling a story or accomplishing a task, and that something has to be of value to the larger communitu. Jacobsen's company, Sarcos, got into dinosaur fabrication because they originally built prosthetic arms and hands that were graceful and sturdy, just the qualities that theme parks and filmmakers need in robots like the 80,000 pound t-rex on the screen behind Jacobsen. And Sarcos continues to take on medical projects, even after getting into the entertainment biz. PAPPALAROO PROFESSOR of Mechanical Engineering Woodie Flowers, PhD '73 (Jacobsen's roommate when they both were students) also talked about what technology is for. "You can't make people happy by taking away the things that make them unhappy," Flowers observed. You can, he said, make people (particularly MIT people) happy with "hard fun", the rarefied conjunction of learning, hard work, and fun, often mixed with equal parts frustration and exhaustion, that makes designing mew technologies intensely rewarding for its practitioners. Engineering designers, Flowers continued, get to stand on the shoulders of giants, inheriting technologies and carrying them to a new level, but they are obliged in their work to think about society and its needs...