You mean everyone and their grandmother will be a robotics expert?

Most of the people I run into today working on "big data" could still effectively fit the workloads in a single powerful MySQL box.

Pragmatic question: I'm a mathematician by training, and currently a machine learning engineer at a large Silicon Valley company. How does one in their late twenties jump into really working robotics? Machine learning was something I could watch lectures on, read papers about, work the math out on paper, then spend years in Python/C++ getting a feel for across various problem domains. Physical robots don't seem as accessible.

arduino, lego mindstorms, linear algebra

Actually, a lot of the math for 3d game engines transfers directly to robotics. Matrix coordinate transformation to/from each joint to figure out where/how to place it.