Kind of tried to tie the star trek vision of common endeavor to the NASA age of common endeavor. The one we sold off to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
The viewers largely didn’t, and now Trek is very pretty to look at, and even arguably more of a fun ride, but doesn’t lean into conveying the message of human aspiration and cooperation as it once had. That kind of ended with Enterprise, and I miss that.
In this case I’m glad. We are close to achieving the technology to let technology self-iterate and propagate.
The direction our species chooses to apply this technology will be a reflection and measure of who we are with commensurate rewards and/or consequences.
Will some voices of sanity let us harness the power of this atom to enlighten the world? Or will we follow tradition and use our newfound power to make big boomie boom rival tribe over there, yet again?
The workers built the means, they just never owned them.
Let me guess, you think Steve Jobs made the iPhone because he pulled it out of his pocket on a stage and took the credit of engineers standing on the shoulders of publically funded basic research? Steve jobs couldn’t engineer his way out of a wet paper bag, and that is well documented.
Hey now, if we don’t keep ruining real people’s lives by brutally enforcing imaginary lines on this Earth we all share, the terrorists win… or something.
Because if we can’t feel superior to people accross that line over there, and they can’t cope by feeling superior to other people accross a different line, how will we console our fragile human egos?!
Then we will fall to fascism in the near future. Maybe not this election, but soon.
You can’t get people en masse to support you on the message of “Your tangible situation will continue to be horrible, but letting those guys win will cause unimaginably worse horror” cycle after cycle and continue to get them to care, and it is understandable to for them to eventually wash their hands of it, because at the end of the day, voting associates you with this system, and it feels dirty to participate because it makes it feel like you bear responsibility for what a Faustian bargain it is every cycle.
I will keep showing up with a funeral dirge in my heart to vote for the lesser evil and attempt to hold back the bloodthirsty fascist horde yet again without hope for things actually improving, but I’m not the norm. Most sane people will eventually just walk away from it sooner or later because the reality is too unpalatable.
I don’t know. I’d take explaining a complex concept to a 6 year old over a 70 year old any day. A 70 year old will probably rely on faded memories that have over time become wholly corrupted from disuse, yet still leaned upon, adding an extra layer of having to correct what they “know.” They may give you a head start on a few sub-concepts/aspects of the concept, but in my experience working with A LOT of seniors in a former Master’s level helping profession, you’re far more likely to make faster progress with a 6 year old, and far more often then not for an elderly person, you’ll hit an insurmountable road block of understanding if it’s a concept they were never familiar with.
With effort, patience and available time, you could teach an 6 year old of average intelligence significant aspects of calculus reliably. I would wager the average 70 year old whose career was never math centric, with only faded memories of minimally complex algebra, would take multiple times as long to do the same, if at all. The elasticity for new complex anything is extremely limited, outliers who have maintained some flexibility through uncommon determination and regular, vigorous mental exercise notwithstanding.