As somebody who spends his workdays evaluating investment opportunities in emerging/frontier economies, I receive a lot of business pitches involving new technologies. The time I spend listening to these accounts of how things can ultimately work out for the better balances my work in the national security realm contemplating how everything must "inevitably" collapse into conflict. I find the perspective it offers invaluable, because it reveals how often what we call "realism" tends to be hopelessly trapped in centuries past.