Many years (decades?) ago, my father said to me: The world is going to end, not with a bang, but because no one will know how to fix anything anymore. I'm not going to to talk about the disposable society we live in -- we don't fix things, we buy new ones -- but about how we don't even understand how things work anymore. And, yes, this is important. Science Fact-tion I remember reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy as a child. As was the case in the dying stages of Asimov's Empire, we are becoming further divorced from understanding the technology we use. I think back to the "engineers" in the power plants, who had no idea how they operated. These engineers were now hereditary roles of caretakers for these power plants that ran themselves. When something did eventually break, they had no idea how to fix it. If you have a car, you don't have to understand internal combustion or anti-lock brakes. You take it to the service station, tell them a symptom, and (for the most part) they