Sure, history attributes a few great minds with the discoveries, but that’s a small part of it.

Societies have always ridden on the backs of about 10% of their populations when it comes to innovation and leadership. We have all become marginally adept at technology, but how many could rebuild that technology from scratch if they needed to?

When our society depends upon the separation of labor/tasks to function it is vulnerable to disruption in our ability to interact with each other. Almost no one has the space or skillsets needed to survive outside of society, but not isolating from that society became a possible death sentence, and will remain so until Covid is eradicated.

We could have taken away a great lesson about how societies function during this time, but our learned resistance to anything that denied our privileged and petulant view of rugged individuality was not to be tolerated. Experts were shunned as imposters and snake oil salesmen were heralded as "truthtellers", even at the highest level of our leadership.

This phenomenon was evidence that the breakdown in our highly complex society predated Covid by quite some time. We should now be creating automation to replace the "essential" workers that saved our collective asses when we needed food and basic supplies. In doing so, we should allow them to retire if they so desire as a reward for their service.

As long as the goods and services are available there is no valid economic reason for not paying them what they would have made without automating their jobs. This, however, would require that our society, and especially its leadership, have the intellect and foresight to plan for our future, not simply reacting to, or manufacturing, social stimulus that keeps us partitioned into enclaves of false belief systems.