Career Advice from the Outer Rim
2024-07-14
Smuggler. Pilot. Mechanic. Translator. Rebel. Veteran. Hero.
It's quite the resume LinkedIn profile.
Han reminds me of that dog with the coffee in the burning building.
I used to think that this meme was ironic, because "haha, why would the dog think things are fine?" But the dog is fine! The dog knows what to do. They've been here before. And they just need a sip of their goddamned coffee first, okay?
Han's that dog. Roughed up, competant, full of gallows humor, and - most importantly - a big ol' surface area for luck to make its appearance. Never tell me the odds!
Look, to survive in the Outer Rim, you need to be a jack-of-all-trades. A TTTTTTT-shaped person, if you will. Cause you never know when you're going to crash-land on a strange asteroid (or is it the belly of a space worm?), with a broken hyperdrive and a bunch of baddies looking for you.
It reminds me of frontier-life (at least what I can recall from my much-loved set of Little House on the Prarie books). Embrace Murphy's Law. Respect the challenge. Build your skills. Learn from others. Develop your "gut." Adhere to Polya.
It's amusing, then, that Han's not a big fan of droids. Cause wouldn't they help him out in these scraps?
Clearly, the Star Wars universe reached some threshold of AGI (slightly?) ahead of ours. And everything didn't go all Terminator, which is nice (General Grevious, notwithstanding). Instead, droids are these helpful (frustratingly-so, if you ask Han) companions for our heroes. You probably wouldn't want to go to Dagobah without one, but at the same time, you never know when they're going to get snatched away by Jawas or just accidentally electrocute themselves into a cold stupor, and then you're S-O-L and back to square-one, with whatever you can string together between your wits and your (hopefully) incredibly-varied skillset.
Still, even Han would admit that it's important for us to learn how to work with LLMs and other AI-fangled-things and eventually our adorable droid companions, cause they're here and they're getting better all the time. Want proof? Even Han let this lil' cutie help fix the Falcon:
AI tools and adorable companion droids are coming. And they'll help us chart new corners of the universe. But things will go wrong (cause they always do) and it's going to be even more important for us to be scrappy and resourceful and self-reliant to survive.
A final note on self-reliance. That does not mean fully on your own. Friendship is everything. Friendship makes it all worthwhile. And, no matter how lucky or multi-disciplined you are, everyone has a bad day.
Even Han.
