content: This hit me as well. It's easy to take for granted. I can't help but feel that a lot of the technological achievement today, although vast and extremely important in some fields of work, also amounts in large to a lot of frivolous convenience and escapist entertainment. Sure we have modern antiseptics and sanitation, antibiotic drugs and advances in surgery and medicine, modern plumbing, electricity. But can we attribute these to our generation? We keep making marginal improvements, and throw around words like "innovation" in a sickening way. I'm not discounting our advances. I'm really not. In terms of computing we are doing extraordinary things, and I think we're on the precipice of some paradigm shifts that will change the planet and the species. But there is also this counter force that feels regressive happening at the same time. Sort of that "good times create weak men" idea. To think, after the way this professor talked about the shared scholarship of universities in this period, that universities today are teaching gender spectrums...it's just fucking gross. Our scholarship today is teaching things we knew better than in 1400 AD.