It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance, largely due to exponentially better and cheaper compute, as well as tools for distributed collaboration.

But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility.

So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history.

We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society.

We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective.

This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.

> It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance

I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.

I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.

The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.

We are in a cultural and scientific collapse

Scarcity and the relentless competitive zero-sum slugfest of living makes everything a cost-benefit calculation: I have a limited number of waking hours and most of them are dedicated to battling it out for resources so I and my family can live. You can put your time into Enterprise, Entertainment, or Enlightenment, but anyone who does anything other than 100% Enterprise is losing out to those who do.

I would love to choose to be an artisan, a craftsman, a changer of the world, a multi-discipline Renaissance Man, (or just an over-entertained couch potato) but I need to make my mortgage payment next month.

Go take improv classes. It's a lot of fun and now you have a skill that let you perform in any major metropolitan area without needing a script or much preparation, other than warmups if that's what they do.

But yeah, people should be curious and willing to try things, even things that doesn't seem to be the thing for them.

what should we build?