Can Robots Whittle?

Venkatesh Rao, writing on Ribbonfarm Lab, explains that he bought a $34 beginner whittling kit instead of a $149 Oak-D Lite AI camera, partly to pursue older, low-profile technologies rather than frontier gadgets. He argues that much technology progress comes from people chasing curiosities that have nothing to do with current hot problems, with breakthroughs often coming from ideas abandoned years or centuries earlier. Whittling, he notes, may be the oldest engineering activity, and he plans to learn it by carving a spoon and then a rabbit sculpture from the kit's bass wood blocks.