Tech predictions are dodgy, but you need a plan

The future of technology is never particularly easy to discern. That was why John Pierce never ceased to point out that anyone in the  business of making predictions was destined to make a humiliating false step. And yet if you worked at Bell Laboratories, and were therefore entrusted by the United States government with the future of telecommunications, you still had to have a plan.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 234