Why Worry About the Future?

“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

-Yogi Berra

Blowback against high tech is growing. Recently we've seen:

• Flock camera surveillance challenges

• A $17 billion legal judgment against Meta's social media business

• Resistance to the largest infrastructure investment in US history; new data centers

Are rapidly advancing tech capabilities a good thing or a bad thing?

No one knows!

When I started my first big boy job as a commodity price analyst:

-We used rotary dial phones.

-Long-distance calls were charged. Supervisors audited out-of-state calls to hometowns.

-There were no personal computers…none.

-There were no fax machines.

-There were no cell phones.

-There was no internet.

When I explained this to a millennial, she replied, “So, what did you do all day?”

That was a good question!

I told her we did research using statistical periodicals, books, and phone calls to government and industry sources. Additionally, our company maintained a library with full-time staff.

She just stared at me.

Funny thing is, we thought we were high-tech. We had a 12” X 12” cathode ray tube TV called a Quotron that piped in real-time agricultural commodity price quotes from the Chicago Board of Trade. We also had a teletype machine with landline connections to our country grain traders—cutting edge stuff!

I remember ordering the company’s second fax machine. I had to justify the expense to the communications department explaining why it was an improvement over snail-mailing purchase orders to suppliers. Soon afterward we got our first desktop computer (there was a sign-up sheet to reserve it).

All that seems funny now. The future turned out nothing like we expected!

What about the next 50 years?

The Rational Optimist Society (ROS) sends out a weekly email that gives us a glimpse:

-In 1975, a watt of solar cost $128. Today it’s about 11 cents. Solar was 54% of all new US energy capacity in 2025, the top new source for the fifth year running. (ROS Newsletter 8/15/26)

-The chip inside the new iPhone packs 19 billion microscopic “switches” called transistors onto a square of silicon smaller than a fingernail. New chips, the size of a dinner plate, are under development that have over 4 trillion transistors!” ROS Newsletter 2/1/26

-Running data centers today takes fabulous amounts of energy. Extropic is a startup that uses the natural noise of the universe to power a new generation of computer chips. Extropic believes it can run AI workloads with 10,000 times less energy.

-A new company, Lightmatter, is designing a silicon wafer that sits underneath computer chips. It contains thousands of tiny pipes that enable data to travel at the speed of light, breaking the bandwidth bottleneck and turning a warehouse of disconnected computers into one massive brain. ROS Newsletter 2/1/26

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Last week was my maternal grandmother’s 134^th birthday.  When she graduated from High School in 1910, I doubt she anticipated:

-Broadscale electrification of homes and businesses

-The airplane and commercial aviation

-The automobile and mass production

-Radio and TV

Change is more dramatic and happens even quicker today.

People have always worried about the future. CEOs of AI companies are calling for regulation to keep us safe. I wonder what game they are playing? They certainly can’t believe Congressional oversight will help guide our technological future.

Recently I had a problem with my Apple hardware. I called Apple, hoping to reach a senior technical advisor, but could only get a bot.

“Crap!” I thought, Apple has turned into the cable company. With no apparent alternative, I explained my problem to the bot, which understood me with no trouble. We engaged in a detailed problem-solving exercise that ultimately solved the issue. I was blown away.

Separately, you may have watched a humanoid bot beat Usain Bolt’s world record in the 100-meter dash last week.

What next?

The future may feel like it’s already here! But we haven’t seen any thing yet! As to what it will look like, Zoltar’s guess is as good as mine.

But I’m not losing any sleep over it!

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