> The '60s and early '70s were a fertile time for #computerscience ideas, reminds Victor, but even more importantly, it was a time of unfettered thinking, unconstrained by programming #dogma, #authority, and #tradition. 'The most dangerous thought that you can have as a #creative person is to think that you know what you're doing,' explains Victor. 'Because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things. You become blind.' He concludes, 'I think you have to say: "We don't know what programming is. We don't know what computing is. We don't even know what a computer is." And once you truly understand that, and once you truly believe that, then you're free, and you can think anything.'"
TBT that time the #NYTimes published an article saying manmade flying machines (yeah, just...flight) would take more than a million years to develop, and was therefore a complete waste of time and money.
Dogma, whether social, political, religious, or, yes, SCIENTIFIC, is never beneficial to progress, yet we seem incapable of learning this lesson at a societal or institutional level, comfortable in our current paradigm, whatever that may be.
No one can say where the future will lead, but the only near-certainty is that we won't be standing still. We will learn things that shatter our preconceived notions and make our previous knowledge seem foolishly naive.
The best thing you can do, in all things, is to keep an open mind.