It also underscores the value and incredible importance of reliable infrastructure and a well-oiled economic machinery. We're all humans, we can all use our time and energy to do "useful" things for ourselves or our peers. But the amount of useful stuff you can get done during a day is extremely dependent on the available infrastructure and support machinery.
This is incredibly obvious today when you can rent as much world-class computing machinery as you want at a moment's notice just by using your credit card, and when you have libraries and languages that took hundreds of man-years to create available for free. But the same is true all the way down to the point where we are running around in the jungle, naked, picking berries and nuts and attempting not to get eaten by lions. Computers, electricity, plumbing, roads, debt, currency, money transfers, automated farming, artificial fertilizers, remote communications technology, materials technology, engineering and physics, chemistry, mathematics, written language and spoken language.
It's all a giant pyramid of human accomplishment that allows us to produce wealth/do useful and interesting things so much cheaper and simpler than before that it is simply ridiculous.
This is incredibly obvious today when you can rent as much world-class computing machinery as you want at a moment's notice just by using your credit card, and when you have libraries and languages that took hundreds of man-years to create available for free. But the same is true all the way down to the point where we are running around in the jungle, naked, picking berries and nuts and attempting not to get eaten by lions. Computers, electricity, plumbing, roads, debt, currency, money transfers, automated farming, artificial fertilizers, remote communications technology, materials technology, engineering and physics, chemistry, mathematics, written language and spoken language.
It's all a giant pyramid of human accomplishment that allows us to produce wealth/do useful and interesting things so much cheaper and simpler than before that it is simply ridiculous.