It’s exciting because I believe them.

And it’s exciting because these people are embracing big, complicated issues that affect all of us, not just running away into a corner to design yet another salt-and-pepper pot for an Italian luxury goods company.

And it’s exciting because, in this postconvergent world, we really can fix a lot of the stuff that didn’t serve us well before. We can make sure that impos-sible-to-program crap like VCRs don’t happen again. We can connect ourselves to virtually anyone around the planet, for any number of reasons and for a fraction of the price. We can fix shopping for disabled people. We could even convert a bus system into a book-your-seat personal limo service.

We can do almost anything we can imagine now, if we put our minds to it. Which puts us

squarely in the same position as our forebears were in the early 16th century with a new age of technology and capability stretching out in front of us, as far as the eye can see, if we only choose to.

So now it’s no longer down to what we can do—it’s about what we should do. And that takes more than just imagination; it takes wisdom. For instance, distributing power generation to the point of use, such as in the infrastructures imagined in the Hydrogen economy, could utterly revolutionize the way we live.

It doesn’t have to be done all at once. We can do it a bit at a time and still win. Even apparently tiny changes can still make a phenomenal difference. In the U.S. three years ago, five large schools got together to assess the impact that tiny folding aluminium scooters made on the daily trek to school. Fuel sav-

ing was calculated over a year when Mom wasn’t using the SUV to take Junior to school, but instead walking with him while he scooted his little steed. They made a phenomenal discovery. Over only five schools, the fuel saving was an amazing 830,000 gallons of gasoline, almost enough to drive a compact European car to the Sun!

There’s nothing on the planet that can’t be made just that bit better (rather than just that bit different). But before you do it, you need to have an idea of where you want all this to go eventually, a vision of the future, with a set of stepping stones to let you get from the now into the future in an effective and efficient way. “Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future,” an exquisitely illustrated comic strip, did this beautifully in the ’50s and ’60s, portraying a virtually utopian future with recognizable “emo-

May + June 2008