Ten years ago, I sat down with someone who knows a whole hell of a lot more about computers than I do and asked him about the increasing use of mobile phones for targeted advertising. The way he saw it, he told me, was that since cell phones came equipped with GPS, they could figure out where people were and deliver ad messages via SMS text message.

So, if they detected that you were getting off at a particular exit on the highway, and there was a Wendy's at that exit, that might send you a text message suggesting you eat at Wendy's.

That was almost eight years ago. Does anyone still believe that we're going to start getting SMS text messages as ads on our phones? Probably not. We got it wrong because the mobile phones of today look and function radically different than they did back then.

In general, human beings are actually pretty poor predictors of what the future is going to look like. This rule doesn't just apply to technology. I'm not sure that anyone saw Chuck Berry, Kurt Cobain, or Timbaland coming ahead of time. They just showed up and took music in a different direction.

Civil rights took a while to get into place, and while it's still an ongoing struggle, I think that, as a society, we've made a lot of progress in the right directon. People in the 1930's would never have guessed our country would look the way it does today. So, it's anybody's guess what the future is really going to look like.

Maybe it's not only something to guess at; maybe it's also an opportunity. Since the future is a blank slate, it's ours to mold to our liking. And if nobody really knows what tomorrow will look like, no one is in any position to tell you that your vision is wrong.