Source : « The Great Scientists: From Euclid to Stephen Hawking », from John Farndon
I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato or before, just wanted to share, what a time.
B.t.w., we know about ChatGPT, some about Sam Altman, but nothing about the researchers, and the same goes for every other technology, it’s a choice of society 🤷(, causes&consequences).
Edit : Transcript :
All the same, if anyone wanted a proper education, Alexandria in Egypt was the place to go, and here Archimedes went as a young man.
At the time he was there, the city was the greatest centre of learning in the ancient world. Although the museum or university there was barely 20 years old – the city itself had been founded by Alexander the Great just half a century earlier – it already held an unrivalled library, containing at least 100,000 scrolls, including all of Aristotle’s priceless personal collection.
It was here that the great Euclid taught geometry, that Aristarchus showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and that Hipparchus made the first great catalogue of constellations, categorizing stars in terms of their brightness. And it was here that, much later, Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential book about the nature of the universe for 1,500 years.
Euclid was probably dead by the time Archimedes was there, but Archimedes undoubtedly met Eratosthenes, the brilliant thinker who measured the circumference of the world to within 4 per cent of modern figures, and made a measurement of the year’s length as precise as any until barely half a century ago.
We likely don’t know much about the researchers of modern technology because they’re often created by a huge team of hundreds of people. There’s no single person responsible for the bulk of the work. In the case of ChatGPT and the line of work leading up to it, it was very much also the researchers’ choice as well to not name a specific person as being the main contributor. For example, the transformer paper had all the author names shuffled so the credit doesn’t all end up with one person.
Still, some are closer to the source of these ideas than others, think about awards attributed to individuals for example. And if our “idols” are singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers, then we’ll produce singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers. Why don’t we have more emissions that will interview each week a researcher on h.er.is studies ? Just that we’ll have the population we deserve, that’s all.
Also, they bring everything but the money goes to the investors(, not really what Ayn Rand claimed).
And we’re using objects everyday without understanding how they work.
For now, we’re working all day and spend our free time entertaining ourselves and spending time with our family, i’d certainly be wrong to judge, but if our time ever gets liberated(, e.g., with machines, longevity, …), then i just hope that our civilization will seek a higher purpose than entertainment 🤷.
This is where the researchers would disagree with you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in research (or startups). There’s a common saying that ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s much more so the work you do that’s important, not the idea itself.
Notice how being in the spotlight is an important aspect of all the professions you’ve listed. That naturally selects for people who are comfortable with or enjoy being on camera and are good at that kind of live performance. Similarly, science selects for people who are good at doing science. Sometimes, there’s an overlap, but it’s not that common.
If you’re interested in interviews with prominent scientists, Lex Fridman does quite a few of those. But if you want more people to do this, you’ll have to contend with the fact that most scientists simply have no interest in being on camera and probably never developed the skills needed for it.