[sigilis]

The idea that picking low hanging fruit is bad is very confusing. We should pick those fruit and explore the possibilities of what we have now.

It’s not like big ideas are illegal. Anyone who has one finds themselves in an incredible environment to try them. Money may be less free than a few years ago, but you can still get funding for promising sounding stuff without having to deliver much in advance. More people than ever have access to the types of equipment needed to make hardware and software. Heck, today’s Phillip K Dick could self publish if others didn’t see the value in their work.

We do have incredible new technologies and big projects happening right now, too. Decarbonizing the electrical grid is a truly gigantic project that seems to be happening despite the best efforts of some to stop it. Personalized cancer antibodies are saving lives that would not have made it otherwise. We’re making strides into understanding what it means to be conscious and intelligent through AI research, even judging current efforts to be insufficient is a kind of philosophical argument that is common now. Talking about the death of space exploration as we launch more sophisticated and numerous payloads than ever into orbit is just absurd. Private companies are in a space race, for crying out loud.

This article seems to be misguided, an assessment of someone who is looking at two decades of progress in the past and judging it against this year, which just started. Look at 2004 to now and tell me that the world hasn’t changed.