I get bonked for saying this again and again, because people get annoyed with an oversimplified analogy or the use of whateverfallacy,

but can someone please try to set aside their knee-jerk reactions for a while to give a good reason:

  WHY do humans NEED to understand the basics of something?

× You don't know how to farm — That doesn't prevent you from having food or cooking good meals.

× You don't know how to mine raw materials — That doesn't prevent you from using computers/phones made with aluminum, copper, glass etc.

× You don't know how to fell trees and shape lumber — That doesn't prevent you from sitting in that comfy chair.

× You don't know assembly language or how to write operating systems — That doesn't prevent you from using Windows or macOS or Linux.

—

EVERYDAY you use hundreds of things made from THOUSANDS of technologies you don't understand, because other people already MASTERED them.

so YOU can go on to go do GREATER things.

(but you CAN still go do farming, mining, logging, writing your own OS, if you ENJOY it — nothing's stopping you — you just won't be as good as the technology that has been specialized for that over centuries, and almost certainly you won't be bringing anything new to those fields, and it'll take time away from doing other things.)

—

Maybe we shouldn't be wasting time on "oshit how do we uninvent or slow down this new technology because it makes things easier than what we grew up on"

and focus more on "what other greater things can we move on to?"

There's a whole freakin universe out there and we haven't even stepped off our home planet yet.