We can waste an incredible amount of time making sure the foundation is secure. Or we can plan for the shifting sands, like Google building commodity-hardware-failure into their business plans. Larry and Sergey didn't try to make computing hardware more reliable; they planned for it to fail.
To the contrary, many complex things are sexy. The iPhone is greatly complex, both in software and hardware, but it's still sexy. By the way, what if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were happy just running a small electronics store in Palo Alto?
Interesting to see your opinion of "reaching for the stars". Also interesting to see you write 2x as much about what "isn't reaching for the stars".
Ok, another perspective: why would a PHD waste his time on trivial conveniences alike web chat and voice recognition just because they are hard to solve, when there are unmet needs in a much larger market called media?
Or how about this: the key to solving problems correctly is to solve them as close to the root cause as possible. Why write a speech recognition when you can get the same functionality much more effectively by eliminating the microphone altogether and interfacing directly with the user (just a hypothetical scenario)? Why write it for iOS when the only reason the person is carrying a phone is so they can be connected on the go, and the only reason they are on the go is to learn something they could have read on Prismatic this morning? You'll never tackle any of these problems if you think that the lower layers are already solved problems cemented in concrete, only worthy to be maintained by tech monkeys.
Why do we make software and hardware? Why do people farm? Why do we do anything?
It's about advancing our society. Making more efficient use of our human resources to enable us to discover new ways of making more efficient use of our human resources. To raise quality of life. To allow more humans to live, which increases our pool of labor and of brainpower, both of which we can use to multiply the other further.
Why do we do this? At this point we're descending into existential ennui. When you look into the abyss, remember the staring game -- make it blink.
I'm all for exploration and self discovery or whatnot, but we're talking about here is effective use of resources. My perspective of your opinion is you feel that PhDs should keep fitting into the spots where they are requested by big corporations, to develop their products that require high technology and expertise to be done quickly and cheaply, because everything else is just a solved problem that an expert would be wasting his time on.
My counter is that these things that we take for granted are not "solved problems" and innovation in this space is the most fundamental and disrupting innovation one can engage in, and increasingly the press would turn the public's eye away from this fact since obviously those who control the aggregation of news can control what a large number of people think about different topics. But perhaps you already knew that and find change at this level and its consequences too scary to contemplate.
To the contrary, many complex things are sexy. The iPhone is greatly complex, both in software and hardware, but it's still sexy. By the way, what if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were happy just running a small electronics store in Palo Alto?
Interesting to see your opinion of "reaching for the stars". Also interesting to see you write 2x as much about what "isn't reaching for the stars".