"I was a sucker for Star Trek when I was a kid. They were always fun to watch. What made the show lasting was it wasn't actually about technology. It was about values and relationships. Which is why it didn't matter that the special effects were kind of cheesy and bad, right? They'd land on a planet and there are all these papier-mâché boulders. [Laughs.] But it didn't matter because it was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems. A recent movie captured the same spirit—The Martian. Not because it had a hugely complicated plot, but because it showed a bunch of different people trying to solve a problem. And employing creativity and grit and hard work, and having confidence that if it’s out there, we can figure it out. That is what I love most about America and why it continues to attract people from all around the world for all of the challenges that we face, that spirit of "Oh, we can figure this out." And what I value most about science is this notion that we can figure this out. Well, we're gonna try this—if it doesn't work, we're gonna figure out why it didn't work and then we're gonna try something else. And we will revel in our mistakes, because that is gonna teach us how to ultimately crack the code on the thing that we're trying to solve. And if we ever lose that spirit, then we're gonna lose what is essential about America and what I think is essential about being human."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Barack Obama, “BARACK OBAMA, NEURAL NETS, SELF-DRIVING CARS, AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD”, Scott Dadish, Wired, (November 2016)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Star_Trek%3A_The_Original_Series
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Star Trek: The Original Series
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