Every year, the renowned magazine Time awards the title of Person of the Year. The nominees for this award come from various categories of people: musicians, politicians, businesspeople, actors, scientists, and many others. The reasoning behind the selection is quite clear: those who are in the spotlight, those who are trending, those who have made some influential contributions in that year. By the way, this award has been given since 1927. It is essentially a formality that means very little, much like the Ballon d'Or in football, which has been awarded for several decades to the most prominent football player, but not necessarily the best one, since statistically, it is awarded more often to attacking players rather than defenders and goalkeepers. This is understandable because people remember how many goals you scored in a season rather than how many successful tackles or saves you made to prevent goals. However, let's return to the nomination for Person of the Year.
Before I explicitly state whom I would support for such awards, I would like to highlight an obvious problem that exists in the society of any country. Our society is somewhat doomed to degradation in the sense that we always choose the wrong heroes. The whole world knows who Gagarin is - the first human to travel into space - but it should be understood that there were other cosmonauts ready to fly that day. His flight would not have happened at all if it weren't for the great Soviet engineer and designer Korolev - a name known only to a few. Everyone honors athletes for their achievements, but few recognize the coaches who stand behind those accomplishments. Everyone listens to the musical hits of various performers, but hardly anyone can name their producer or the songwriters and composers. People use hundreds of applications and play hundreds of games, but no one can name the developers who created them. Once, when asked about great programmers, I was seriously told about Durov and Zuckerberg. Even in the films that we all watch hundreds of times, we cannot name the directors, although the actors are certainly well-known to us. We know leading astrologers, but we do not know leading astronauts. The examples could go on indefinitely.
The problem is obvious: people benefit from the creations of others without knowing the names of those who created that benefit. Only a few drive scientific progress forward, while the rest utilize their results and developments without even knowing the names of these individuals.
Any society that values athletes and musicians more than engineers and scientists is an unhealthy society. The problem is that, so far, I do not know of any country or society where it is not the case. Nevertheless, I believe that in a few hundred years or millennia, everything may change.
As you may have guessed, in such an award, I would support and vote for scientists, engineers, and other individuals who advance the scientific process and create something beneficial for all of humanity. For example, in 2023, the Person of the Year was a singer, even though Sam Altman - the CEO of OpenAI, one of the leading companies in the field of information technology - was also nominated. In fact, in the realm of information technology, the word of the year in 2023 was "AI." Hundreds of neural networks were developed for various needs and tasks. Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, in my opinion, it would have been much fairer if this award had gone to Sam Altman.
