Every so often, we find ourselves in the middle of a massive technological wave that starts to upend our presumptions and our ideas about the past, present, and future. These waves come with excess—optimism, excitement, hype, and speculation. Since non-believers don’t invent the future and speculators are always on a hustle, I often turn to practitioners to get a fix on the coordinates of reality. It has always helped me maintain a sense of pragmatic optimism when the rest of the world around me...