Couldn't agree more! VR the first three or four times around. Fusion - the first 70 years it's been 20 years away. :) As you say many (most?) things that cha

Couldn't agree more! VR the first three or four times around. Fusion - the first 70 years it's been 20 years away. :) As you say many (most?) things that changed the world either started very small, or were serendipitous (freak accident if you prefer). Even engineering led discoveries started with few, if any, applications. Take the laser, originally thought it might be useful in spectography and radar. No one was conceiving of CDs, fibre optics, tattoo removal, barcode scanners and the numerous other uses. The entirety of our industry is based on what followed from building a machine to crack German codes, and from trying to calculate artillery firing tables quicker. Right about the time the US was commissioning ENIAC, HM Gov was smashing up Colossus and burning blueprints, and we'd have to wait 30 years to hear of Tommy Flowers and Colossus. I think it's safe to believe most of the truly ground breaking ideas will come from entirely unexpected people, places and fields, and that there's a lot more good ones tucked away behind increasingly hard to fund blue sky research. We'll get some slick applications of AI, VR and data driven computing, and many of them will be marvelous (and many not), and a fortune will be spent. But the actual world changers are likely elsewhere. I hope at least some will be from the founders who've cashed out a Unicorn and are now using their funds to chase the undelivered dreams elsewhere (SpaceX etc). I just wish there were a few more so we can get there a bit quicker! :)