I love this quote, and I'm totally going to steal it.
There's just something about the futurists and singularity folks that mimics the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you learn, the more you recognize that we're still operating on Cro-Magnon brains. All of our magnificent toys are merely low-hanging fruit in deference to the problems that seem to really matter.
I consider that extraordinary, and the exact opposite of low hanging fruit. It's hundreds of years of incremental progress across dozens of fields, resulting in reaching very high hanging fruit in the form of an iPhone and everything that goes with it.
I consider such amazing communication technology to be every bit as valuable to social beings such as humans, and to our general societal structures, as curing cancer is.
Search and traversal become increasingly difficult as any graph grows in size. It's not hard to generalize this to the graph of scientific and engineering knowledge. To maintain the connectedness of our ideas, we must either leave amazing literature and documentation or we must constantly seek to foster connections between those of separate, heterogenous fields and disciplines. Unless there is movement of ideas through collective human consciousness, key insights cannot percolate through to the point where they have the greatest impact. (For instance, not long ago biologists were still using Perl. :P) At some point, the time it takes for certain information to spread across the graph grows substantial enough that discoveries are simply repeated over.
Science and technology require ever-increasing levels of specialization. The network topology isn't going to get easier for the human mind to traverse. Imagine what kind of information lies just beyond your reach--the kind of insights that might truly propel you ahead, to reach your Eureka. If only you knew what you were missing out on. On the flip side, do you ever think about the places where your contributions would be the most impactful?
These problems are somewhat symptomatic of the fact that we haven't breached the complexity threshold of what our brains are capable of performing. We may have computer-aided tools to get us beyond some classes of problem--search and mathematical modeling come to mind. Still, our mastering of breadth at depth, our powers of abstraction and of reasoning, all have a hard limit. Everything we've ever done falls neatly within defined lines. Nothing being done today is substantially harder than what the previous generation did with its much more limited set of knowledge. (Have we discovered our generation's calculus or quantum mechanics? Advancements like that are special, truly rare, set apart by hundreds of years.)
Take your smartphone, for instance. You can't look at the following block diagrams and tell me they're too difficult to reason about:
* http://eda360insider.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-exy...
* http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-LG.png
* http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/insights/wp-co...
(Yes, I know the implementation details go much deeper and that these diagrams are meant for ease of conveying knowledge. You still understand them. And given time, a diligent student can learn to contribute to processor design using the pre-existing domain knowledge.)
Do you have a sense or appreciation for how complex the physical and chemical reality is by contrast? We can only partially understand minute samples taken from real systems. It's not especially owing to our primitive equipment or tooling; it's the sheer complexity that baffles us. There are things like helium atoms--we don't understand them. There's Hartree-Fock, but that's an approximation.
I find it hard to be beholden to the majesty of a phone when no one can stand up and explain a helium atom. I mean, don't you find it a little bit amusing we're still caking onto SGML, shoveling it onto handsets, and yet we don't understand the interstitial gas between us and the cell tower? The stuff we're breathing.
Anecdotes from the early days of AI research suggest that we didn't think we'd still be writing code imperatively, yet here we are writing Javascript module frameworks and the like. We have a stunningly powerful ability to underestimate how long and difficult things are. We are also often satisfied in rediscovery.
We're concerned with how to perform delivery in San Francisco, yet... can you imagine the vast number of computations the universe is performing every time a protein isomerizes? I wager it outweighs all of the computing power we have available to us through modern technology today. The modern smartphone could never compete in this arena; we would be comparing something not even at the level of a bacteria to the most omnipotent of gods. I'm not saying that one day we'll design computers out of polymers in solution. I don't even know if we'll survive as a species long enough to care. I'm just asking you to wonder.
Look to nature. Can you sense how incredibly infinitesimal and primitive we are as a species when you look up at the night sky? We've been feeding off of the cosmologically low hanging fruit, and we're still in the nursery. We spend on average 20 years learning what we need to begin making our cornerstone contributions to society. At that point, how much longer do we remain productive? It's a limited window with which we have to collapse all the reverse salients. Damn shortness of human productive lifetimes, and all of that. Oh well, there's always a new generation with which to start fresh. Rinse, repeat. Stand on a few more shoulders, see a little more of the picture.
Fill your mind with what might be possible. Let it be dissatisfied when you cannot reach a conclusion to a problem. Don't ever put a bound on the type of problems you're curious about. You'll scoff at press releases. Everything in our generation is transient, scaffolding for the next one gestating.
(Sorry for rambling. And also--I still hold that my flappy bird machine not even in the same galaxy when it comes to being as cool as science. It's a toy for which there will always be one better. How could it ever be so magnificent as the universe I get a few short years to experience firsthand?)
BUt it is, proof is that even after we invested tens of billions in funding basic research in cancer and other areas of biology we still know so little of practical value. Even the simplest organism is infinitely more complex than the most intricate human made object (which might very well be the microprocessor). We solved the fast computing and global communication problems first because they're way easier, and there's no denying it.