There is a strange side effect to getting older that nobody really warns you about. When you're young, the world introduces you to people constantly. School. College. Friends of friends. First jobs. Apartment complexes. Weddings. Birthday parties. Every year seems to scatter…

There are moments when the future stops being an abstract idea and becomes personal. For me, one of those moments was not in a lab, or a server room, or while reading some breathless prediction about artificial intelligence. It was in a conversation with my daughter before her…