> I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.

What a wonderfully humble sentiment, and so plainly said. It's disarming to hear an idea stated so precisely which you've treated largely as subintellectum, despite its truthiness having a foundational effect on how you move about the world [0]. This so perfectly distills my (and I suspect others' here as well) draw toward all things technical. They are all mysteries, whose workings we must largely abstract away for the sake of our own sanity. But they are categorically products of our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is out there for anyone to claim, or to extend! Looking at my surroundings, I see thousands of objects which I could not today begin to re-create myself, and for each object, thousands of questions which could be asked - all of which have at some point been answered, and whose answers await those who are interested to ask. What an endless and delightful thing for the curious! A lovely thought.

[0]: Perhaps this feeling is why Le Guin is such a celebrated author, and I am not ;)

Reminds me of the sentiment expressed by James Burke at the end of the Connections series.

“Maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability is there as long as it's explained clearly enough, and then go and ask for explanations”

https://youtu.be/hu9tb6fPCBw

Just want to say, thanks for writing this! It was lovely to read this expounding upon the depths and contours of the original statement. The point seemed so obvious when she expressed it that I skimmed right over it in my reading, but your post helped me see how profound it is.