At the end of an otherwise ordinary “so, you have a new book” interview in Salon, sci-fi author William Gibson drops this remarkable take on emergent technologies:
I think what scares people most about new technologies — it’s actually what scares me most — is that they’re never legislated into being. Congress doesn’t vote on the cellular telephony initiative and create a cellphone system across the United States and the world. It just happens and capital flows around and it changes things at the most intimate levels of our lives, but we never decided to do it. Somewhere now there’s a team of people working on something that’s going to profoundly impact your life in the next 10 years and change everything. You don’t know what it is and they don’t know how it’s going to change your life because usually these things don’t go as predicted.
… I find that both dreadful and exhilarating.
-Greg Dahlmann