A few years after I graduated from university, I became obsessed with getting a BCS membership. The British Computer Society. It sounds formal because it is.
My reasons were a mess of small motivations tangled together. My good friend from the college I attended had already gone through the process. The college, a Greek institution affiliated with the University of Sheffield, wanted more of its graduates to set a precedent. And I wanted a stronger case in case I ever needed my degree recognized by the Greek state.
That last part needs explaining. My degree was from a local college that ran a UK university’s program. The degree itself was real. Same curriculum, same exams, same piece of paper from Sheffield. But the Greek state wouldn’t recognize it. Their position was simple: if you didn’t physically study in the UK, it doesn’t count. It didn’t matter that the education was identical. You had to have been there.
So a BCS membership felt like it might help. Professional recognition from the British computing establishment. Something official with my name on it that couldn’t be dismissed as easily.
The process was extraordinarily bureaucratic. And I say this as a Greek. My country is famous for bureaucracy the way Italy is famous for pasta. It’s part of the national identity. But the BCS process made Greek public services feel streamlined. Paperwork in stages. Portfolios of evidence. Letters and forms and waiting. A lot of waiting. And all that, snail mailing back and forth. I remember sitting at my desk at home, stuffing envelopes, walking to the post office, and then waiting weeks for a reply.
And then came the interview.
One step in the process required me to fly from Thessaloniki to Athens and sit before a panel of BCS members. These were professors at the Athens University of Economics. Notable people in Greek computing. I had to convince them I was worthy of membership.
It was a warm morning in Athens. I remember the taxi from the airport, the traffic, the way the city felt louder and faster than Thessaloniki. A kid from a city of about a million, traveling to a city of six million. I felt like I was coming from a small village, ignorant of the huge city norms.
I found the university building and walked in. Long corridors, fluorescent lights, the faint smell of coffee and old paper that every Greek university seems to share. I found the right office and knocked. Two professors were waiting inside, sitting behind a desk covered in folders. I sat across from them in a chair that was slightly too low.
The nervousness of being evaluated by strangers in a formal setting. The kind of experience where you rehearse answers in your head on the plane and then forget all of them the moment someone shakes your hand.
The interview was going fine. Standard questions about my background, my work, my interests. Then one of the professors asked me to name a few of my favorite books.
I mentioned What Will Be by Michael Dertouzos.
Both professors immediately started laughing. Not a polite chuckle. Uncontrollable laughter. The kind where one of them leaned back in his chair and the other covered his face with his hand.
I sat there. The fluorescent light humming above us. That specific kind of confusion where you don’t know if you’re in on the joke or if you are the joke. I asked them why they were laughing. They wouldn’t tell me. They just moved on to the next question, still smiling.
I never found out why.
Maybe they thought predicting the future of technology was naive. Maybe there was some academic gossip about Dertouzos that I wasn’t aware of. Maybe they just found it funny that a young candidate from Thessaloniki, sitting in Athens trying to prove his credentials, would name a book about the future of the internet as his favorite. I don’t know. I still don’t.
But here’s the thing. Whatever they were laughing at, they were wrong to laugh.
What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives came out in 1997. Dertouzos wrote it during his long tenure as director of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. The web was maybe three years old as a mainstream thing. Google didn’t exist yet. Most people still thought of computers as beige boxes on desks.
The entire book orbits one idea: the Information Marketplace. Dertouzos was Greek himself, born in Athens. He drew the metaphor from the flea markets of his childhood. He imagined a digital version of those Athenian markets where people and computers would buy, sell, and freely exchange information and information services. The internet of 1997, he said, was only a first modest step toward this.
A Greek kid from Thessaloniki, flying to Athens to be interviewed by Greek professors, naming a book by a Greek MIT director who based his central metaphor on the markets of Athens. There’s something circular about the whole thing that I didn’t appreciate at the time.
Dertouzos made a distinction that reads sharply today. He said the marketplace would trade in “information nouns” (passive content like documents, music, film, data) and “information verbs” (services that process information on your behalf). That noun/verb split is essentially the difference between the static web of 1997 and the world of APIs, SaaS, and AI agents we live in now.
The things he got right are almost eerie.
On-demand everything. All the music, film, and text ever produced, available in our homes whenever we want it. Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, Kindle. He described them twenty years before they existed.
Wearable computing. He called them “bodynets.” Devices that let you make calls, check messages, and pay as you walk. The Apple Watch and AirPods in everything but name.
Remote work. He predicted telecommunications would radically alter the role of face-to-face contact. COVID accelerated it, but the trajectory was exactly as he described.
The digital divide. He warned that infrastructure gaps would widen the distance between rich and poor. Painfully correct.
Information overload and cybercrime. He called them “infojunk” and “infocrimes.” Both are now entire industries.
But the prediction that matters most, the one that hits hardest on re-read, is what he called “electronic bulldozers.” Tools that would offload brainwork the way the machines of the Industrial Revolution offloaded muscle work. He didn’t predict transformers or neural networks. But he predicted the category. The idea that mental labor would be mechanized the way physical labor was. That framing is the thesis of every serious essay about large language models written in the last three years.
He also talked about software that would negotiate and transact on your behalf. Agents. Not the kind that answer questions, but the kind that take actions across services. Agentic AI is a direct descendant of what he was describing in 1997.
He wasn’t right about everything. He imagined haptic bodysuits and full VR immersion. Still not here. His vision of the fully automated household is nothing like the clunky smart home reality we have. He underestimated the attention economy. His marketplace metaphor implied honest exchange, not surveillance advertising. And he was more optimistic about technology bringing people together than about it fracturing them into tribal bubbles. Social media’s polarizing effect wasn’t in his model.
His timing was off too. He thought ten to twenty years. It took closer to twenty-five or thirty for most of it.
But the big picture? The direction of travel? He saw it.
Dertouzos died in 2001. His follow-up book, The Unfinished Revolution, was published posthumously. In it, he pushed hard on the idea that computers should serve humans rather than the other way around. He was frustrated that we still had to boot up, wrestle with interfaces, adapt ourselves to machines. The modern LLM interface, where you type in natural language and it understands what you mean, is arguably the first technology that starts to deliver on his vision of human-centric computing.
He missed it by about twenty years. That’s the part that’s hard to sit with.
Here’s one more thing I can’t let go of. When Dertouzos was sixteen years old in Athens, he came across the work of Claude Shannon, the mathematician who invented information theory. That discovery drove him to study at MIT. Shannon’s ideas became the foundation Dertouzos built everything on. The Information Marketplace, the electronic bulldozers, all of it grew from seeds Shannon had planted.
One of the most capable AI assistants today is named Claude. After Shannon. It is, by any reasonable definition, one of the electronic bulldozers Dertouzos predicted. The thing that was named after the man who inspired him as a teenager turned out to be the thing he spent his life pointing toward.
He would have loved that.
I did get accepted into the BCS, by the way. After all the trouble. They let me in. I kept the membership for a few years. Then I let it lapse. I never renewed it.
And the degree recognition I was so worried about? In twenty-eight years of working in tech, across GitHub, GitBook, Zed, my own company, and now Workbrew not a single person ever asked whether the Greek state recognized my degree. Not once. The thing I was trying to protect myself against never came.
The bureaucracy, the flight to Athens, the panel of professors. None of it mattered for my career. But it gave me a story. And it gave me that moment in a room where two professors laughed at a book that turned out to be right about almost everything.
Dertouzos never got to see his predictions come true. I never needed the membership that brought me to that room. Sometimes the things that matter most are the ones we didn’t plan for. A book I read in my twenties. A name I said out loud in an interview. A man from Athens who looked at the flea markets of his childhood and saw the future.
They laughed. He was right. And I’m still thinking about what will be.
A tribute to Michael Dertouzos 1936 – 2001.
Here’s what I am doing
At Workbrew, I help our customers succeed, while working on docs, fixing bugs, and developing internal tools. At Amignosis, I pour my heart and skill into crafting slowly brewed software, one thoughtful line at a time. I am craftsman in a world of complexity and low-quality solutions. I am a shoemaker. I take the time to create simple, timeless software built to last. Check what I am doing now and talk to me.