I am firmly in the camp that we have a glut of capability in terms of what an average individual can accomplish using the low cost, power efficiency, and enormous functionality of modern devices like microcontrollers, motors, and sensors.
But we also have an extreme paucity of people coming up with those ideas for what to do with our staggering collective potential; the skill to produce creative solutions to problems which may not have been identified yet is one that I believe we will have some difficulty teaching to machines in the short or medium term.
What you see as an intractable problem, I see as a deficit in training, education, and investment in workers. These days, people are fully capable of learning about any topic which sparks their interests; there are tutorials and how-to's from basic to advanced levels in both text and multimedia formats on everything from genetic engineering to programming to circuit design to working with materials like wood/leather/metal/plastic...the list goes on.
People either don't seem to realize that they can retrain themselves, or they don't have the resources and especially time to do so. We can help with both, but there doesn't seem to be much appetite to cough up any money for educating adults.
But we also have an extreme paucity of people coming up with those ideas for what to do with our staggering collective potential; the skill to produce creative solutions to problems which may not have been identified yet is one that I believe we will have some difficulty teaching to machines in the short or medium term.
What you see as an intractable problem, I see as a deficit in training, education, and investment in workers. These days, people are fully capable of learning about any topic which sparks their interests; there are tutorials and how-to's from basic to advanced levels in both text and multimedia formats on everything from genetic engineering to programming to circuit design to working with materials like wood/leather/metal/plastic...the list goes on.
People either don't seem to realize that they can retrain themselves, or they don't have the resources and especially time to do so. We can help with both, but there doesn't seem to be much appetite to cough up any money for educating adults.