Nope. Not even close. We haven’t even made a user-friendly function editing tool. After that happens there will be another Cambrian explosion on the desktop.

Let me see if I can list more things like that...

Well, smart contracts. Those have approximately zero adoption and will probably constitute a double digit share of scripts in the future. We don’t even know how to write them yet. You won’t be writing smart contracts by talking to Alexa... not at first anyway.

What else... I think if I can come up with three I will have proven my point...

Well, a shared spatial computing environment. VR will encourage prototyping of libraries for structuring that stuff. But there’s nothing about shared computational space that necessitates a headset. I think most of what VR will do is show us new ways to structure desktop software.

And those are just things I, a person from the 80s, can point to and say “we haven’t figured this out on the desktop yet but we will”. That’s not even admitting the things we can’t even imagine.

I would say we have designed less than 1% of the computational structures that will come standard on a mobile phone in 2050.

We’ve been advances in for decades—approaching human lifespan timescales—so it sometimes feels like we’re close to the end. But we’re just at the very beginning of discovering the final form of “windows”.