“[By 2018] the transmission of pictures and texts and the distant manipulation of computers and other machines will be added to the transmission of the human voice on a scale that will eventually approach the universality of telephony. What all this will do to the world I cannot guess. It seems bound to affect us all.”

— J. R. Pierce, Bell Labs, 1968. From “Toward the Year 2018”, edited by Emmanuel G. Mesthene, as quoted in What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, New Yorker, 7 January 2019