> The greatest hope I see for the future of humanity is the incentive for a brilliant mind/leader to become the next Bezos/Musk via climate change technology
> ...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.
I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts?
The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants.
The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea.
Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.
> ...isn't something we can rely on and is a lot more wishful thinking about the state of humanity rather than a sober look at the reality.
I don't mean for this to sound too critical but how do you square these two concepts?
The idea of a great inventor/scientist/theorist is to me kind of obsolete. It existed in a time of much more low-hanging fruit but today most scientific/theoretic progress is slow and the collective result of many groups slow, focused, and methodical work. Even before, even the greats stood on the shoulders of myriad giants.
The idea of hoping for a "great leader" who is solely capable of "fixing" things is to my mind a very concerning and alarming idea.
Even if you may not think that... the idea that "one good idea" is enough to solve our problems immediately, or even just quickly enough, feels like escapism to me. No matter how good of an engineering solution is achieved there will be a slow and painful process of rolling it out fraught with cultural and political questions. It doesn't behoove us to push that off, even if the engineering questions feel more essential. It's an inevitable problem. We should consider it earlier rather than later.