CES is the event to get every brain storming … but where will it lead?

Exhibitors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas hope the event will encourage some happy accident that will propel them into the future

I love a remote mountain cabin perhaps slightly more than the next person, so imagine, if you will, the opposite of that. It's probably Las Vegas, where I am right now, sitting on a suspiciously wipe-clean faux leather chair in a hotel room with walls so thin I can hear humans on every side expelling every possible fluid in every possible way. It's no less depraved and vulgar than when Hunter S Thompson came all those years ago, only he wasn't here for the Consumer Electronics Show.

CES is often described as revealing the future of technology, but really it's about the now. Everything here has been in gestation for years, a slow and carefully managed process from conception to development to marketable product, and with a (usually) contrived finale of a January CES launch to bring it to a variously eager, ambivalent or completely ignorant public, depending on the product. As the public interest and appetite for technology has expanded, so has our recognition that it is no longer one industry but part of every sector.