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Driven by rotten Dinosaurs

My son is 15 years old. He asked me what a FAX-machine was. He get's the strange concept of CDs because there is a rack full with them next to the bookshelf, which contains tons of paper bound together in colorful bundles, called 'books'. He still accepts that some screens don't react to you punching your fingers on them. He repeatedly asks why my 'car' (he speaks the quotation marks) is powered by 'rotten dinosaurs'. At the same time he writes an email to Elon Musks Neuralink asking for an apprenticeship and sets up discord-servers for don't-ask-me-what. And slowly I am learning that it is a very good thing to be detached from historic technology, as you don't try to preserve an outdated concept while aiming to innovate. The optimized light-bulb would be an a wee bit more efficient, tiny light-bulb. But not a LED. An optimized FAX would probably handle paper differently - it would not be a file-transfer-system. Hyper-modern CDs might have tenfold capacity and would use x-rays to read and write. It would not be a streaming service.

How astonishingly revolutionary did the crowd-sourcing of twitter look less than a decade ago, because it was not an extension of an existing concept modernized; and how normal is it today?! Almost unbelievable what a shakeup the iPad was; look at the pitying smile of my son when he looks at my iPad-1 (which was only called iPad then and is now referred to as 'the old iPad') - 'hide it when my friends come over!'

Obviously this must be part of modern education: don't dig into the concepts of today as a given to be adapted but rather look how they are embedded in today's thinking and try to understand their limits. Let an amazing goal search for its concept rather than tweaking existing concepts to somehow, one day, maybe reach a new goal. 

Drive an idea by the sun of audacity rather than by rotten dinosaurs.

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