I’ve been fortunate in that my career has spanned four revolutions:

• The PC Revolution
• The Internet Revolution
• The Cloud Computing Revolution
• The AI Revolution

Well since the last one is not over yet that’s three and something. Perhaps three and a quarter.

If I had to pick one factor that all these have in common it is that during the revolution nobody knew how it would turn out. There are at least two significant contributing factors to this. Firstly, when you’re living something it’s almost impossible to step outside the ethos and take an “objective” view. Secondly knowing how something will turn out requires the ability to predict the future, and that is simply impossible. I’m not saying that you can’t make an educated guess, but when I hear people say “my prediction would have been correct but for” instead of acknowledging that they were wrong, I tend to shudder.

However, I certainly believe an attempt at prediction is important in some circumstances. For instance, in formulating a framework, legal or otherwise, to manage the outcome of the revolution, prediction is a valuable tool. Perhaps the best predictions here are those that acknowledge the potential for a variety of outcomes, and then seek to mitigate the outcomes that have a large amount of downside risk. I guess I could just have said “hope for the best, but plan for the worst”.

Is the Cloud Computing Revolution on a par with the others? Perhaps not, although without it we would not have the AI Revolution. So, while Cloud Computing may not be as much of a paradigm shift as the others it is foundationally revolutionary.

One thing about revolutions is that sometimes you do not see them coming. Either your intel is not good enough or perhaps the revolution is obscured by other developments. Maybe the quantum computing revolution is being drowned out by the noise around the AI revolution. That’s a topic for another day.