There will be more and longer meditations on this thought in the near future (if teleconferences and such don’t kill me first).
But here’s the essence of the idea:
The way we know the future has arrived is when we find ourselves doing something without thinking about it.
Here’s a (bad?) example. Web browsing. In 1996 you barely had a visual web browser to work with. Opening web pages and surfing were new things – you had to know where you wanted to go, and then you were lucky if the page opened and rendered well. Today, you want to place a quick order for something, you open a browser – or an app – and search (maybe by voice) for your product, click “buy” and assuming your chosen site has your $$ information, boom you’re done. No thought required. And there’s the key. Not that you didn’t think about the purchase. You didn’t think about how you made the purchase. That’s the key. Welcome to the future.
Now here’s where the rubber hits the road:
In five years, what will we not be thinking about as we use it in our daily lives?
Digital Crossroads 