From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Tue May 27 2003 - 15:04:10 MDT
> > Since when does it take an "expert" to accomplish anything? History
> > is full of discoveries and advances made by dilletantes and "fans".
> > Indeed, "experts" in a field tend to have blinders that prevent them
> > from seeing solutions that are outside of their training and experience.
>
> Agreed, definitely!
>
> However you define an "expert", my question still stands: When it comes to
> future technologies, how many of us are actually involved in these fields
> such that our unique viewpoint really could influence a design decision,
> trigger a new avenue of research, or invent/discover some new solution? And
> how many of us work "regular" non-futuristic jobs and just talk about this
> stuff over beers in our spare time?
One can do both, of course: during the day I earn my mortgage payment
mostly by the rather non-extropic task of putting junk mail into your
cable and phone bills. At night I do penance for this by maintaining
the software for Wikipedia. But even a perfectly ordinary tech job like
mine serves the goal in unexpected ways, not the least of which is
keeping the bills paid so we can sit around talking over beers with
other people who might not otherwise be aware of us at all.
True, I'm unlikely to ever be involved in building a rocket or a
clone or a nanobot (except perhaps very indirectly through some open
source software library or something), but we're all involved in
spreading the ideas and perhaps occasionally providing an inspiration
to someone with more means to effect real progress.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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