Tree

Lina, you don't know the honest truth. In the military, you got your POGs... Person Other than a Grunt. Guys who don't shoot anything. You need them, because you need all sorts of specialties, but you can't trust their big-picture judgement, because the overall mission of the military is shootin' people, and they don't do that. In civilization, we have POMs. Person Other than a Maker. Dudes what don't build things. You might need them. But you shouldn't take them too seriously, or listen to them too much, because on some fundamental level, they are never going to get it. They are never going to understand. The fundamental task of civilization is making things, and POMs don't do that. "This is just a mash-up of existing technology" is the most POM-like typing you could ever hope to see. It's a tell that someone has never done a significant engineering project in a technical role. Experienced engineers not only understand differently, we eat, sleep and breathe the basic reality that 99% of engineering challenges are "get mechanism to work with other mechanism". Without breaking, shaking itself apart or blowing up. Every basic scientific principle behind the internal combustion automobile was understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans. And yet they were not only unable to harness those principles to make a primitive steam-powered automobile, they were unable to conceive of the very idea, because their ability to implement and integrate wasn't advanced enough. If you look at everything that Elon Musk has ever done, every company he has ever built, every technology he has ever brought to market, none of it was a purely new invention. It was ALL taking stuff that already kinda worked, and making it do new things. And not just do them, but do them so well that they actually became practical. SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. They made it reusable. Tesla didn't invent the electric motor or the battery. They made them practical for ground transportation. Neurallink didn't invent electrical nerve interfaces. They made them control a computer UI. This shit is incredibly hard. If you try to use the known principle of a cold-gas thruster to make a car fly, you're going to crash and blow up a lot. You're going to have to make mistakes, and fix them, one by one, until you run out of mistakes and the thing flies. Real engineers, real makers, know that this is what the word engineering means. POMs don't get it. Lina doesn't understand what she saw. She thinks she saw a publicity stunt to impress yokels. No. That was a publicity stunt to impress engineers. It wasn't a demonstration of a flying car at all. It was a demonstration of the engineering capabilities of team. It was a flex. "Look," they said, "we can reify the Gernsback continuum. Give us your silliest, low-effort science fiction meme tech, and give us enough time, and we'll make it real." The purpose of making a flying car isn't to let you do a jetpack leap over traffic. It's to learn all the little implementation details and balancing tradeoffs and gotchas that you have to master to make a car fly. It's not the big scientific discoveries that build civilization. By themselves, they are nothing but curiosities. What builds civilization is all the little discoveries that you make when you try to get the big ones to stop crashing and blowing up. When someone does that on a unprecedented level, you either help them, or you stay out of the way and keep your ignorant POM opinions to yourself.