Pixar's comment on the passing of Steve Jobs.

I'm mostly referring to the culture of specialisation - my take on it is similar to Robert Heinlein's, namely that "Specialization is for Insects". I don't mean this in a condescending way, but rather as a motivation to achieve bigger and better things. I've heard Job's himself being described as a polymath. I don't think that he would have had the vision that he did if he hadn't explored many areas of life and consolidated them into his world view. In fact, it's ironic that someone who expanded his mind so much didn't advocate the same for others.

>We all learn the things that are part of our expertise and try to avoid learning things beyond that. Can you fix your car if it breaks down (well, from the sound of you, you probably can to some extent)? I don't know how and I don't want to know how. I just want it to do what I bought it to do. I don't care why or how it works. The only thing I have to learn about a car is just the bits I need to get it to do the job I bought it for.

>It is naive and unrealistic to expect everyone to be an expert of everything. And why do they need to learn how to administer a linux server just because they want to look up some information that happens to be online?

Ofcourse it's unrealistic, this is from the perspective of an ideal. I think that each person's ideal is shaped by their assumptions. When considering the assumptions of a specialised society, it seems to be focused on making life as painless as possible while at the same time producing as much as it can. The assumptions I'm working with are that hardship and pushing one's self to go above and beyond what's merely necessary are tools for personal growth and development. I think that we all have the potential to be Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein but that our culture tends to discourage us from reaching our potential.

I know from experience that having a wide knowledge of things brings about unexpected benefits. The reason for this seems to be that all things are connected to and affected by each other. For example, when Chaos Theory was being developed, due to the fact that scientists in different fields and mathematicians were so disconnected from each other's domains, it took longer than it should for the full implications of the theory to propagate through the scientific domain. Had the mathematicians been trained in multiple sciences, these links would have been found much faster.

When one casts his net wide then he can see that the patterns found in one domain tend to pop up in other domains. That's not to say that knowledge should only be wide, it needs to be deep too. Due to the time constraints, a balance must be found. What has worked well for me is developing a deep knowledge of one domain (computer science) and more shallow knowledge of multiple domains (neurochemistry, philosophy, psychology, poetry, social interation, mysticism and music). I feel extremely ignorant after having done this because it has brought to my attention the sheer range of knowledge and how little I've covered, in spite of casting that net out. The other benefit is an increased tolerance of opposing views - after some time you see that everyone is mostly the same, whichever domain they're working in, yet they find it difficult to relate to each other because of superficial differences like the language used to describe things.

>Greed? Do you mean as in; for money? He wanted to change the world. How could it be greed? First of all; he became even more focused when he found out he was going to die (what good would even more money do him them) and second; he wasn't taking pay for what he was doing!

I'll admit that it's not my place to talk about the man's personal motivations, I didn't know him. The actions taken by him and Apple, however, do have the colour of greed painted on them. He certainly did change the world, but as others have argued, he utilised an approach based on fear and greed. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people like Richard Stallman who has dedicated his life to providing the whole world with building blocks on which this very medium we're communicating on stands - and all for free!

To summarise, I feel that our culture is taking an extreme approach with specialisation and would benefit from finding a middle ground. The benefits are real and would make a difference to everyone's quality of life. At the same time, nobody should be forced to do anything, this is more about convincing than forcing.