ABSTRACT
We cannot heartily proclaim what societies or economies will look like far in the future. Given our collective world history, it would have taken superhuman accuracy to have predicted, in the 1890s, what has transpired between then and now. In fact, when leaders and spokespeople from that era were asked to predict what the 1990s would be like, some of the answers came close to the mark, but many did not. In considering the future of the then-new technology of telephony, for example, John J. Ingalls, a Kansas politician, had this to say:
Telephone instruments, located in every house and office, will permit the communication of business and society to be conducted by the voice at will from Boston to Moscow and from Denver to Hangchow—just as readily as now occurs between neighboring villages [1].
