Acknowledge the Unknown

I was talking with my dear friend and mentor Bernie Roth the other day, and he regaled me with a humbling story from the past. He’s a living legend and pioneer in the fields of mechatronics and kinematics. And yet, how difficult it is to predict the future…

“I used to take my Computer Aided Design students on field trips to SRI and Xerox PARC back in the heyday. The students loved visiting these cutting edge facilities. I didn’t really get the hype - even though I had booked time on a mainframe to write my thesis, despite the only spare capacity being available at 3 a.m.!

“I’d politely ask, ‘But what will you use them for?” and Doug Englebart would tell me, ‘You can write your thesis with it!’ But it was very recursive, like a dog chasing its tail. At PARC, Alan Kay picked up a legal pad and said, ‘Bernie, someday this’ll be a computer.’

“None of it made sense to me. They were sitting around on bean bags, smoking dope, and I didn’t get it. I didn’t get their vision of the future at all. But I humored him because he was my friend. I didn’t think they were right, but I enjoyed taking the students on tours.”

What struck me was how someone as smart as Bernie had trouble seeing what the future could be. For all the talk about “impending disruptions,” I find it’s appropriate to maintain a very humble posture towards the future: it will almost certainly surprise us in ways we can’t fathom.

As Bernie and I talked, we wondered about the thousands of predictions he disbelieved, and were proven untrue. He was certainly correct to be skeptical of almost every prediction. And yet, for every thousand false visions, there are some that may materialize.

What a world we live in.

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