-- Deng Xiaoping

Several years ago, I worked for the Asian branch of a U.S.-based news provider. During this rosy period, this company was buoyed exuberant by what's now known as the Internet Bubble. Our fledgling Hong Kong bureau was tasked with collating Asian tech news and pasting it online each night-using a bare-bones HTML editor.

One day, my boss tucked his laptop under his arm and headed for the airport. "Don't worry about the site," he said, "I'll update it from my hotel room in Beijing."

This offhand business-as-usual comment spoke volumes. Throughout the centuries, humans have been obsessed with predicting the future. Sporting-event outcomes, fashion trends, or impending cataclysms, we love to prognosticate. In the 1950s, crystal ball-gazers envisioned cities covered with transparent weatherproof domes, while business commuters fly to their offices in personal airplanes. The fifties were the decade of Hollywood's prime science-fiction films, and predictions spun wildly like glitzy flying saucers.

But 50 (or 20) years ago, the idea of an American citizen traveling to the capital of the People's Republic of China, with a computer the size of a textbook, plugging it into a telephone line and broadcasting text to the entire world, wasn't science fiction. It was pure lunacy. If you'd suggested it (or declared that Putonghua would be a good study choice as a future business language) you'd have been laughed out of any boardroom-and most universities-in the West.