I was sitting at home watching TV the other evening when a commercial came on the screen that blew me way. It depicted the life and times of an old gas station, sitting at the foot of snow-capped mountains—an American outpost where the prairie meets the Rockies. As the time-lapse images progressed over the next minute, the station was demolished and rebuilt at least four times in those sixty seconds, each bringing us closer to a picture of the 21st century oil economy. And then the most unexpected thing happened.

A&G sat down with Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis, the authors (along with IEEE Fellow Hal Abelson) of Blown To Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion (www.bitsbook.com).

The authors paint a profound picture of the risks and rewards of our techno-enhanced future. In particular, we wanted to get their insights on the implications of ever-accelerating technological power on the legacy processes of the enterprise.

Greetings and welcome to the future. What future, you ask? 2008 doesn’t feel much different than 2007, right? Well, that’s the problem with linear thinking. We humans are hard-wired to draw perspective off the passage of time. We quickly recognize and categorize things that we have seen before and can accurately predict their behaviors in the moments ahead. That capability comes in quite handy if you are trying to spear an approaching saber-tooth tiger, or even hit a receiver on a post route down field.

The next 10 years of technology innovation will be unlike anything our world has ever seen. Corporations need to paddle like hell to catch this wave - or they might just be ripped asunder.