"With risks you gain"

Before the flight that would become historic no matter how it ended, the pilot said this to posterity: “With risks you gain.” He said, “I’ve got a theory about this.” The flight in 1962 would rank him with other brothers from Ohio who were first in flight, 50 years before. The President in this pilot’s time said that we choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. The pilot had thought about it and said, “People are afraid of the future, of the unknown.” And then he explained the challenge, “If a man faces up to it and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control over his destiny.” The dare of the future.  “That’s an exciting idea to me, better than waiting with everybody else to see what’s going to happen.” Remembering this is to continue inspiring the next wave of thought to reach beyond what we know.

To fly beyond what we know is to plan for the worst, and expect the best. And if the bottom drops out– we planned for that, and we go on, better off because we took the dare. The first brothers in flight and John Glenn, that pilot in 1962, who orbited the earth, beyond the world we know, they knew the risks, and the limits. They recorded all the data from trials. Understood the one success in a hundred failures because of the teachings of things gone wrong. They knew the details of the craft they were building, and all the ways it would fail. But they knew there were greater things in the unknown than what they had designed.

They took that dare, just as we do in a time of disruption of technology from artificial intelligence — not the empty robotic mind of lookup tables, but the subtle help to make better decisions beyond the world we know.

“Bad news happens all at once. Good news happens slowly.”  This phrase is used in engineering and science quite often, and when evaluating the news cycle at any given time.

A few years ago there was no cure and no vaccine for Ebola. The world was defenseless. And the result was catastrophic. Now, December 22, 2017, there is a cure.

Nick Kristof wrote in his 9/22/16  New Times column that nine out of ten Americans believe that global poverty has worsened or stayed the same over the last 20 years. But as world leaders gathered for the United Nations General Assembly recently, he said, “The number of people living in extreme poverty [actually] tumbled by half in two decades, and the number of small children dying has dropped by a similar proportion. Historians may conclude the most important thing going on in the world in the early 21st century was a stunning decline in human suffering.”

Does a cure for a devastating virus, or does a 50% drop in world poverty, rate attention? Not much.

How about positive developments in electric transportation, artificial intelligence, and autonomous cars? Nah.

We can see the good news in the work of others who have taken the dare.  50 years after John Glenn’s flight, accepting the dare of the future, we accept that dare too. We have accepted  the challenge to see first what others are sitting back and waiting for. The challenge of floating, seemingly un-tethered, in the unknown and learning how to survive in that new-found weightlessness that is seething with risk, soaked, saturated — seething. But we are gaining more than we have lost. The way audio is developed, realized, and heard in cars today has changed and that change is on-going.

“The freedom of space and knowledge in our brains can not be warranted by any authority except our own. In this tonal and precise temporal landscape, our minds will be given new plains to wander and explore, either on a short commute or the long-distance ride.

“We are there already in that landscape of acoustic sound system design, captivating the automotive listener with deep tonal  texture and precise temporal qualities. We achieve this through traditional and advanced sound tuning techniques, but also with the next level of tuning algorithms that the new landscape can exploit even more. We are ready for the higher sense of hearing of future car captains.” read it here and here.

We’re still here, strong, and moving forward. With this risk there is gain.

“Zero G and I feel fine.”John Glenn (1921-2016)