[gumby]

Science fiction, even more than historical fiction, is always about the present, which is why SF novels rarely age well.

But good literature is good literature and she sure had the knack, which is why I believe her work will continue to be read for quite some time to come.

In her brief essay (more of a note), she uses the word “technology” to invoke its own root: τέχνη, just means practical art (hence artifact).

The inclined plane is as much technology as the lithographed transistor. Yet when I was on a school board 15 years ago the teachers and in particular the heads were quite concerned that the kids be tought “technology” by which they meant Word and PowerPoint, lest the kids be left behind in the technological future.

I’m sure those hours helped exactly zero of the students who could have spent the time on something useful, like mathematics, painting or recess. At least the classical Greeks understood that better than the pedagogues of today. Le Guin did too.

[pixl97]

When you look at the DNA of a creature it is filled with all kind of stuff that we consider junk and we have no idea what it does. But then some new disease or predator shows up and it turns out that DNA had a use, but you could not have predicted it before hand.

The issue with knowledge is it's really hard to know what bits of it are going to be important in your future. Learning powerpoint probably put food on the table of a great number of people, it turns out our economy had a lot of places for that, and seemingly less, or less new jobs that wanted a deep knowledge of mathematics.