I'm doing some serious development right now for the first time in 12 years, and it's way more fun and much easier to work with a geographically dispersed team

I'm doing some serious development right now for the first time in 12 years, and it's way more fun and much easier to work with a geographically dispersed team than it ever was before. It may not be hand-wavy object magic.. but let's be real about this: we're not a future-oriented culture anymore. We're all about the present. Lots has been written about this elsewhere. The secret to creating advanced tools is to minimize the magic. Crazy powerful tools still require the expert user to have a predictive mental model of what is really going on so that accurate decisions can be made and valuable experiences can be accumulated on the learning curve. I would say, though, that the programming we do is by its very nature futuristic. So few humans have been able to interact with information the way programmers today do. The tool churn and huge volume of ideas and trials that we're going through will, eventually, become a mainstream way of working with ideas. It may take a long time. The other thing is.. a hammer may seem like a simple and obvious tool, but there is still a huge gap between an expert and a novice when it comes to pounding nails. You still need a lot of practice.