In 1969, humanity succeeded in landing on the moon with Apollo 11. A gigantic societal endeavor with countless potential single points of failure. Recently, we successfully launched – and assembled – the James Webb Telescope into space, with an astounding 344 single points of failure. And yet: At the beginning of every airplane boarding, we hear the familiar sound of dot matrix printers. For how many decades have we been trying to solve synchronized calendars (and appointment invitations)? How long will we continue to use search-and-replace?

While we continuously make small but incremental progress, the truly big challenges that should drive us as companies and societies remain largely untouched. Unstructured data piles up in our systems. We continue to devote ourselves fervently to the minutiae. Meanwhile, we push the big challenges into the background. Our time is finite. Have we given up?