“Coal mining may be your life, but it’s not mine. I’m never going down there again. I want to go into space.”
– Homer Hickam in “October Sky”
I look at it a little differently. I think about what happened in the movie “October Sky”. Without science, Homer would have made a decent living in the local coal mine. It would have been good, honest work.
In the Star Trek movie “Wrath of Khan” there’s a scene where Spock says to Kirk that commanding a starship was Kirk’s “first, best destiny”. Would coal mining have really been Homer Hickam’s “first, best destiny? I don’t think so. I think he was born to reach higher.
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence aren’t just technologies, and they’re not just about what happens on Madison Avenue or Wall Street.
The real reason these technologies matter is because they give us the very real potential of rocketing the entire world out of our individual “Coalwoods” — tedious jobs that don’t leverage what make us special.
Just having data is not the exciting thing. The cool thing is how you turn that into processes that make a difference. To me, the whole reason for technology is to create new opportunities. Maybe it’s nerdy, but… I want the future that Star Trek promised. We need more Homer Hickams to get us there.
We can rocket out of Coalwood. We can reach for the stars. How cool is that?
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