Still Room for Humans

CHAPTER 1

This Time, Change Will Be Different

Let me begin by being completely honest. No one can accurately predict the future. During the late 1890s, a reporter writing in The London Times looked at the tens of thousands of horses in New York City and forecast that the city would eventually be buried in horse manure.¹ If the automobile hadn’t come along as a disruptive technology that transformed the transportation industry, the reporter might have been right. No one could have forecasted how rapidly this technology changed everything. I assume someone who made buggy whips for a living never felt threatened by talk of horseless carriages until the buggy whip market suddenly collapsed. People in power are often the very worst prognosticators ...