*This Editor’s Note will appear in the January/February Edition of WDD.
Human beings are obsessed with the future. As it relates to this space, engineers need look no further than this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which brimmed with concepts and technologies that promised to endure past mere trend and make life eternally easier for we sentient selves “of tomorrow.” Even on the day-to-day level, how many of us forgo the present moment because we’re thinking about “that thing” we have to do eight hours from now? (If you’re like me, you’re already nodding off in the distance, pondering wistfully about what you’ll be serving up for dinner. Mmm, burgers…)
There’s nothing inherently wrong with forward-thinking. It enables us to prepare as an individual, as a family, as a community and nation. It allows us to visualize potential—seeing the statue in the marble, as Renaissance great Michelangelo used to say—and take the steps towards realizing it.
In this spirit, I’m letting you know that my future (at least for now) will not be at WDD. After this week, I will be leaving this humble publication where I have worked for the last two years. I will not soon forget what I have learned and (in some adventurous instances) how I learned it: flashback to my second week on the job, when I was thrown with my kid swimmies into the biggest tradeshow pool the wireless industry has to offer. Somehow I made it out of IMS without drowning.
And while my departure means that I’ve essentially thrown away a free trip to Hawaii (where this year’s IMS will be held), I bid you aloha: a word that, at least in our American, colloquial sense, means both hello and goodbye. I say this because the future is non-existent. It is a dream—and not where our minds should dwell. As little green guru, Yoda, tells Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.”
And so, in parting, dear readers, who can say where the future will take any of us?
Aloha,
Sarah
Filed Under: M2M (machine to machine)
