
An integrated circuit is a set of electronic components and their interconnections. Pictured above is detail of part of a chip through four layers of copper interconnect, down to the polysilicon (pink), wells (grayish) and substrate (green). (Photo by @ David Carron at English Wikipedia)
It was a strange place, calling itself a British pub. There were no crisps or pickled eggs. There was no lager.
Yet, the weirdest thing about it was the clientele: all young men, with the exception of me and then two other women who straggled in. A similar scenario elsewhere at the time, 20 years ago, and it might have been a gay bar. It was not.
And it was not in Britain. It was in Silicon Valley, California, and it was a popular spot for engineers, consumed, during their days and nights, with drawing and designing computer chips. They spoke in acronyms: CPUs (central processing unit), RAMs (random-access memory) and ROMs (read-only memory), and buses transferring information between components.
And they spoke only with their workmates.
They were not anti-social. They were asocial, lacking the capacity for social interaction. They were at home with complex circuit systems. Many may have read history and literature, but they read in a vacuum. There would have been few pathways with which to develop empathy.
Wealthy engineer Elon Musk and others of his ilk have the ear of Donald Trump, who is on the cusp of being sworn in as president of the United States. Their solutions to social problems are not grounded in reality. They are simplistic.
Under their shepherding, the U.S. and European political crisis of imagination will only deepen to our detriment.
I did not vote for Donald Trump; I voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. However, the winner of the U.S. presidential election was Trump, not the founder of SpaceX.
I am hoping that President Trump soon will relegate Musk and the other hangers-on to a less influential social circle.
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