THE FUTURE USUALLY LOOKS WRONG BEFORE IT LOOKS INEVITABLE
The future has a branding problem.
It rarely arrives looking elegant.
More often it looks like somebody gave an engineer too much money and removed adult supervision.
Too loud. Too ugly. Too expensive. Too unnecessary. Occasionally all four.
Then, if it survives long enough, something deeply unfair happens:
everyone pretends they always saw it coming.
We are remarkably generous with hindsight.
The strange becomes interesting.
The interesting becomes useful.
The useful becomes normal.
And eventually someone younger than you looks confused when you explain that people once argued about whether we needed it.
This is one reason I’m suspicious of the sentence:
“Nobody needs that.”
Humanity has said it about an impressive number of things it later became emotionally incapable of living without.
Of course, plenty of stupid ideas remain stupid.
Novelty is not evidence of genius.
Sometimes an ugly thing is simply ugly.
Sometimes disruption is just bad manners with venture funding.
But new things have one genuine disadvantage:
we judge them with standards created by the world they are trying to replace.
That is like evaluating the first airplane by asking whether it is a good horse.
The more interesting question may be:
What assumption does this thing make obsolete if it works?
Because the future rarely asks permission from the present.
And by the time it looks inevitable, the interesting part is usually already over.