One more: Buckminster Fuller had this concept of ephemeralization. He talked about how technologies get smaller and smaller until they are invisible. For exampl

One more: Buckminster Fuller had this concept of ephemeralization. He talked about how technologies get smaller and smaller until they are invisible. For example, water and sewage pipes are ephemeralized. They are ubiquitous (at least in first-world countries) _because_ they are invisible. I think that is what happened with semantic web. It didn't vaporize so much as ephemeralized. The AI/ML platform is interesting because I think a lot of it is shifting over to voice-based, rather then web-based (or mobile/tablet-based) interface. A voice-based interface is more invisible than a touch or mouse-based interface. Come to think of it, adding in the idea of ephemeralization might be a good way of getting a better estimate of timing for a technology. In such a case, voice-interface (and the AIs that power them) would probably be closer to being the next big thing than VR (based upon ephemeralization).