I was working with a group of younger graduates last week, and we were talking about different technologies from decades past. I mentioned how email started being used more extensively in the 1990s. I also noted that wi-fi became popular in the 2000s. Quite reasonably, I was asked:

How did people access email without WiFi?

Session participant

The question was not naive but accurate. For that participant, email and WiFi are not sequential technologies. They arrived together, as a single experience – for them there was no before.

That pattern is worth tracking. Technologies do not just change how we work but eventually change what counts as normal. Once that happens, the previous state becomes literally unimaginable to those who did not live through it.

What are we doing now that will be equally invisible to someone entering work in ten years? More pressingly: what decisions are we making today that assume a baseline that is already gone?