The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

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When I was 13, my father took me to visit a computer trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was 1965 and he was excited by these room-size machines made by the smartest corporations in America, such as IBM. My father believed in progress, and these very first computers were glimpses of the future he imagined. But I was very unimpressed—a typical teenager. The computers filling the cavernous exhibit hall were boring. There was nothing to see except acres of static rectangular metal cabinets. Not a single flickering screen anywhere. No speech input, or output. The only thing these computers could do was print out rows and rows of gray numbers on folded paper. I knew a lot about computers from my avid reading of science fiction, and these were not real computers.

In 1981 I got my hands on an Apple II computer in a science lab at the University of Georgia, where I worked. Even though it had a tiny green and black screen that could display text, I was not impressed by this computer either. It could do typing better than a typewriter, and it was a whiz with graphing numbers and keeping track of data, but it was not a real computer. It was not rearranging my life.

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