By Matt Stafford

I was having lunch with a friend a while back, in fact not even this year, so immediately my title doesn’t work. I’m going to have to build back your trust. Please bear with me.

Anyways… after lunch he showed me something on his mobile phone he had been working on. My friend is a television weatherman, and he set up cameras in his backyard; each camera was pointing toward a different weather gauging apparatus. The video was live on his phone, and the information he was receiving came in real time. He could see how much precipitation his backyard was receiving during a storm or how hard the wind was blowing his patio furniture around. I’ll admit, my response to his new backyard weatherman setup was a bit of a placeholder; I said something along the lines of, “wow, it’s pretty cool that you can track all of that.” His response is what stuck with me. For some reason I haven’t been able to shake it.

“I mean, it’s 2014; you can pretty much do whatever you want.”

Really? Anything? I’m not trying to pick on my friend here; his statement might have been as generic to him as mine was to me, but that statement sent my mind to a lot of places. I began thinking about moments in history when people would have thought they were really high tech but were actually far from it compared to modern standards. Can you imagine Henry Ford driving a buddy down a dirt road in the late 1800s, showing off an early prototype of his automobile. His buddy says, “Wow Henry, it’s pretty cool that we can get across town in less than 20 minutes without horses!”

You can guess Henry Ford’s possible response…

“I mean, it’s 1896; you can pretty much do whatever you want.” Henry and his buddy weren’t hopping on a jet. “Beam me up, Scotty” wasn’t a part of the lexicon of the time. They wouldn’t have known who Elon Musk was or thought about his hyperloop idea. Riding a mechanical buggy across town was some pretty sophisticated stuff for those days.

Ford was a high beam leader. He saw the future and had the vision to merge technologies around him into a product that would change the world. Ford knew that oil was being found to be more useful all of the time, the internal combustion engine was developed in the late 1800s, and the design of carriages had been improving for as long as people had been hitching them to horses. Ford pulled those pieces together to raise the bar; oh yeah, and his assembly line method of manufacturing was a step up too.

Sure, things are going great here in 2015. Technology advancements are humming right along, but are we really to that “anything we want” point? Will we ever be? Can we ever be? Healthcare has come a long way but we’re far from being in full control of human health; there are no explorers traveling the far corners of our universe (if it has corners); the world isn’t completely running on renewable resources that we have an infinite supply of, and transportation moves a little faster than in Henry’s day although we could still probably move a little quicker.

“It’s