Other than maybe sci-fi writers, one thing people are actually pretty bad at is accurately

imagining the future.

That's partly because we get hung up on thinking that the situation we have now is the

situation we'll now is the situation will always have.

We're imagining a future based on a set of circumstances that might be totally

different once the future actually arrives.

Here's a simple example. William Gibson, one of my favorite

sci-fi authors, coined the term cyberspace back in 1984 in a book called

Neuromancer and basically predicted the internet. He also imagined

3D printers in another book in 1999 and even the kind of celebrity driven creator

culture we have today. But once when I asked him about his super

accurate seeming predictions he's sort of sighed and said well they aren't really that

accurate because the one thing he didn't see coming was smartphones.

So none of his super futuristic novels of the 80s and 90s

have iPhones in them.

What I'm trying to say is that the solutions you have now aren't necessarily the solutions

you'll end up with, or at least not in that form. This is where the layers come in.

Innovations piled on innovations.

Yes, we're super focused on batteries right now

to electrify transportation and store and distribute energy,

batteries that need lithium, lithium that has to come from the ground or

salty water, batteries not hydrogen, energy that comes from wind and solar and

...