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It's a great pleasure to be with you on this really glorious day. I've beenhaving, for the last couple of weeks, a Hamilton College experience recognizingconnections that I never knew existed between my life and this campus'. It'sanother example of that strange phenomenon where after 20 or 40 or 50 years youlearn a new word or you learn a new fact and then the next day you see it againapparently for the second time in your life. And it makes you realize that welive our lives walking through a torrent, a tidal wave of information andabsorb only the tiniest few drops. There are a few that we're interested in orcan connect to at any given moment and the rest of the flood passes us byunnoticed. It's a very lowering phenomenon, but one that I think every time youexperience it one of the most interesting and strange of our psychology.

It reminds me of one of my favorite stories which happens to be about thegreat Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, who was interviewed at the height of hisfame. He was asked what he thought about Babe Ruth, who was also at the heightof his fame at that moment. And Caruso, who was very polite, said that he hadheard the name, of course, but that he hadn't yet heard her sing. And, it didremind me of how narrow a little bit of the universe we all live in as we goalong.

I must also say, before I begin, for those of us who were lucky enough lastnight to hear Bob Wilber's sublime music, words seem very pedestrian for thismorning, and I actually made the suggestion that we'd all be happier listeningto him play than me talk. But it didn't go over too well, so I am going to talkwith you today about the future, about your own individual futures and, moregenerally, about our collective future.

This is, by the way, is a very high risk exercise, because anyone who has everspent any time going back to earlier predictions of what the world was going tolook like or how technology would evolve cannot help but be struck by howpeculiarly bad we seem to be, we humans, at looking ahead. My favorite exampleis Charles Darwin, who spent a lifetime thinking about how things change overtime and then wrote in his autobiography, "I rejoice that I have avoidedcontroversy."

Expertise is also no protection. In 1955, this is another one these lookingahead exercises I once stumbled across, one of the greatest scientific minds ofhis era, John von Neumann, was asked to forecast technological development overthe coming quarter century, that is until 1980. By then, he predicted man wouldhave mastered climatic interventions so that such routine disturbances asnorthern winters, not to mention extremes like tropical hurricanes would beeliminated. El Nino had not yet been discovered or I'm sure he would haveincluded that as well. And he wrote "What power over our environment, over allof nature is implied! Well, I guess anyone who has lived through four HamiltonCollege winters knows that he too was not exactly on target.

This expert penchant for getting things drastically wrong when looking aheadis multiplied when you put a lot of experts together. With very few exceptionsthe more distinguished the commission that is convened to think about thefuture, the sillier its predictions look in hindsight. The only saving graceabout engaging in any of these exercises, including the one I'm about to launchmyself on, is that by the time people are laughing over how dumb you wereyou're probably dead, or at least not in the same neighborhood.

I say all this at the outset in the spirit of full disclosure, a kind ofspeechmaker's caveat emptor, because not only am I going to make somepredictions about the future, but what appears to be the hardest category ofall to deal with, namely change that is driven by new technology, in this caseinformation and communications technologies.

It's surprising, but turns out to be true, that with all genuinely newtechnologies, it is extraordinarily difficult to tell where one is heading andhow it's going to change our lives, even after it's been invented. Let me giveyou a few examples. When the French first developed the forerunner of themachine gun in 1870, it looked to them like an artillery piece and so theydeployed it that way in the then current war, way behind the lines where it hadrelatively little impact, and therefore lost a huge potential advantage. Ittook three decades until it was realized that the machine gun was actually aterrific infantry weapon and when it was deployed that way on the front linesin World War I it became a defining weapon of that conflict.

Much more recently when the Xerox machine was invented in the 1950s, no lessan authority than our National Academy of Engineering predicted that itsnational market would be 5,000 units. That many machines, the National Academythought, could copy everything that anyone could conceivably want to copy. Putdifferently, before we had copying machines, there was simply not that muchapparent need to copy!

What both examples illustrate is that new technologies are first inserted intothe old way of doing things. They bring modest improvements that way, but thebig gains, and the huge increases in productivity, are only captured later whenthe systems themselves change. The problem is that seeing how the systems aregoing to change is very, very tough. And if all thi

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