You gotta forgive people. We've all been a little eroded by regular assertions that a safe underhand throws, like turning a webpage into an electron app or whatever, are moonshots.
I for one love things like this. I wish we used a little more of our colossal production power to try manifesting the wilder things from our imagination. Maybe they can contract out how to make society have a better handle on balancing compassion for self and others. Or we could be realistic and get back to making a philosopher stone. ;)
Hope I live long enough to go on a modestly priced moon vacation up the H.R. Geiger space tentacle
Exactly, I am totally fine with us spending some tax dollars to try out these absolutely insane ideas.
But this isn't a matter of "let's spend more" because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics. So there is an upper limit on how much money can be spent if you're at the absolute tip of the iceberg.
> because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics.
I go back and forth with this. The further along the path I go, the more I weight good faith and sincere will to make a thing over ability-at-start. (drive + moxy + curious + perceptive - ego) is a better function to optimize for than buzzword count on a resume.
I think there's a lot of people who can do crazy things in a good faith kind of way that advances the wave front of humanity. It's possible that it's everyone, and it's all about conditions. "all about conditions" is doing some heavy lifting, but maybe you see what I'm trying to articulate.
But take something like quantum computing… even “conventional” computing has gotten to a point where there are a vanishingly small number of companies that can do anything with it.
ASML is the only company that can do EUV lithography, right? NVDA and AMD are the only game in town for high performance graphics cards.
So how many people are going to be able to move quantum computing forward? Theory, hardware, investment, etc.
Same with, say, supersonic and hypersonic flight. Only 2-3 governments have been able to build them.
It’s a combination of mostly money but also the talent. Only google has got as far as they did with autonomous driving.
Although a counterpoint to my above point would be autonomous driving. Seeing the number of teams that succeeded the first time in the DARPA grand challenge vs years later, shows that a whole ecosystem was able to build up with the right encouragement.
So maybe I’m also going back and forth on this one like you. :-)
I for one love things like this. I wish we used a little more of our colossal production power to try manifesting the wilder things from our imagination. Maybe they can contract out how to make society have a better handle on balancing compassion for self and others. Or we could be realistic and get back to making a philosopher stone. ;)
Hope I live long enough to go on a modestly priced moon vacation up the H.R. Geiger space tentacle