Technology has no future? Somebody must have really peed in your oatmeal. Part of a dot.com startup?

I have never actually tallied it up, and Fortune makes you pay for looking at their top 500, but I'd bet a good portion of today's GNP is in things that not only were not industries thirty years ago, but that nobody had a single bloody clue would be industries thirty years later.

When I was in college, it was an article of faith on the part of the Bright Boys that the future would be totally controlled by IBM, General Motors, and others of that group.

Nobody--NOBODY--predicted personal computers, universal cell phones, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, low-cost airlines, Japanese cars, the Internet, digital cameras, satellite TV, video games, and many other things. It's kind of fun to read Heinlein, where spaceship navigators use slide rules, and Heinlein was no dummy.

If I knew what was going to be the big-ticket item of 2030, I'd end up a lot richer than I am. I could make Wild Assed Guesses in areas like biotech, decentralized energy production, and applications that would only be possible with optical computing. I have hopes for space tourism, of course.

Does creative destruction have a down side? Sure it does. In the old days, when everything was made in America and the Third World was dying quietly in reeking heaps comfortably out of our sight, a person with little education could get a decent job turning a bolt on an assembly line, buy a house and car, raise kids, and maybe even send them to college. The fact that maybe someone in India or Mexico can now aspire to this dream is not much consolation to an unemployed American. I don't think protectionism is the answer myself, but smart people whose opinion I respect, like Jerry Pournelle, think that some barriers to protect American jobs are not a bad idea.

I don't have all the answers, but all else being equal, economic and individual freedom tends to come up with more answers than a centrally-controlled economy, and that's what I want to keep moving towards.

BTW, labor without capital and brains isn't worth a lot. Check out an assembly line sometime, and look at the equipment the workers are using. The people who designed and built that stuff are the real motors of an economy. "American labor" doesn't design cars. The guys in the white collars with the engineering degrees design the cars. Incidentally, I bet I've known a few more CEOs than you have, and they weren't just there for decoration either.