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I'm confused as to why they're treating this like a counterfactual.
The richest men in the world made their money from technology. Isn't that already a form of celebration?
And what technology are we celebrating exactly? Unprecedented surveillance capabilities to monitor all communications for wrongthink? Israel's use of machine learning to swiftly and efficiently identify targets for liquidation?
(I'm not trying to be a moralist - you're of course "allowed" to celebrate whatever you want. I just think that people should have a clear-eyed view of the implications of their own position.)
Richard Sutton says "[AIs] might tolerate us as pets or workers. (...) If we are useless, and we have no value [to the AI] and we're in the way, then we would go extinct, but maybe that's rightly so. (...) We should prepare for, but not fear, the inevitable succession from humanity to AI". Do you also celebrate your "inevitable successors"?
Celebrations are best saved for the end - in moments of repose, after the long struggle where a certain spiritual vision was forged and executed, when conditions are finally such that we can pose the question of taking a proper accounting of things...
As for "science" insofar as it can be distinguished from "technology", people have never had a taste for such a thing and never will, we live in a world where a not insignificant number of people are unaware that it's possible to have individual preferences for reasons other than status-seeking or placating your interlocutor, asking such people to build an intrinsic appreciation for something as abstract as "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" is futile. It is already an eccentric predilection even among more highly developed natures, it could never become widespread save for genetic engineering.
Cynically, "celebrate" in the mission statement probably means 'get scholarships and burnish college resumes': FIRST doesn't pull in a lot for either, but it really clearly wants to have the cash of a sports team scholarship and the reputation of an Eagle Scout.
Less cynically, a lot of school environments teach tech, not just poorly, but also as a chore, even when it could or should have been fun. You don't and shouldn't celebrate or applaud things just for being present, but from physics labs to chemistry to programming to the complete destruction of the shop class, we've lost a lot of the framework for 'projects' as things that can be completed or have real win/lose states. For all my complaints, FIRST, even at its goofiest FLL versions, avoids that problem.
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