In countless panel discussions on the future of technology, I’m not sure I ever got anything right. As I look back on technological progress, I experience first retrospective surprise, then surprise that I’m surprised, because it all crept up on me when I wasn’t looking. How can something like Google feel so inevitable and yet be impossible to predict? I’m filled with wonder at all that we engineers have accomplished, and I take great communal pride in how we’ve changed the world in so many ways. Decades ago I never dreamed we would have satellite navigation, computers in our pockets, the Internet, cellphones, neither robots that would explore Mars. How did all this happen, and what are we doing for our next trick? The software pioneer Alan Kay has said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, and that’s what we’ve been busy doing.
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