Hindsight is a wonderful thing. As they say, it is always a 20-20 vision.

With hindsight, we can always make the correct decisions, spot the life-changing technological breakthroughs before they happen… With it, we all have the opportunity to become “geniuses”, able to see things no others can see.

Now comes the million-dollar question: how can we achieve that, given our human fallibilities?

Close following of trends (and convergence of various trends which build up a certain critical mass) has been suggested as a possible approach. However, trends tend to suggest only the natural outcome of things. Naturally, things are improved upon, but changes are mostly evolutionary.

On the other hand, disruptive changes – those things that entirely change our world – are not normal. In fact, by definition, they introduce discontinuities into our lives, so much so that it is invariably only after the fact that we realise how much has been changed!