Only connect

I have come to realize that our lab’s research isn’t really about technology. Yes, of course we invent things.

We write code, we build hardware, we publish technical papers. Sometimes we file patents.

But the questions our lab asks are really about people. Such as: What happens when you provide to people, in all of their magnificently messy, brilliant and irrational humanness, a new way of communicating with each other?

Sure, we sometimes create new technologies if they don’t already exist. As Alan Kay has so eloquently said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

But I the driving mission of our Future Reality Lab was captured even better in a quote by the great author E. M. Forster: “Only connect.”