.... just before they start showing up on the mainstream media.
Whether it's technology (the web), or policy (nuclear arms control agreements), or issues we should be planning for (global warming, or the loss of agricultural diversity) -- Gore's been pointing them out regularly. Just one of these things would have been a career-maker, in the academic world. Gore will ask a question like "what makes a family/community resilient?" (several years before Katrina smashed New Orleans), or simply observe something like "people enjoy looking at satellite photos because it gives them a sense of their world" (compare the proposed Triana project to the popularity of Google Earth).
He even foresaw the popularity of in-depth "single-topic" books like Kurlansky's natural history of salt (before he became VP he was going to write one on "the history of sodium").
p.s. In a world that's changing so rapidly, people who can do this are EXTREMELY valuable. To have them out there, walking ahead of the pack, seeing decades or centuries ahead -- they can help keep societies from stumbling into traps, or even aid them in finding new ways to do things which are both profitable, and change how we think about the world. It takes a special kind of combined creativity and intelligence, and a willingness to consider new ideas which may appear to be off-the-wall. (In the art world, DaVinci and Picasso are examples of this.) Getting this kind of vision, in a person who's disciplined enough to work at it, and serve as a public official, is quite amazing.
(Gore is modest enough not to compare himself to people like Leonardo DaVinci, but I think it's significant that for all DaVinci's brilliance, he was unable to implement most of his ideas, and not just because of his era's technological limitations. DaVinci couldn't or wouldn't explain them to the general public. Gore, like most of us, is not as smart as DaVinci -- but he's been able to get many of his ideas out there for people to work on, within his lifetime.)
"After dinner in Toronto, Gore and I walk across the street from the hotel to the cinema where An Inconvenient Truth has just finished screening. Gore is talking about his fascination with the future and what an oddball it has made him politically. “We had this meeting in London for Generation”—his investment fund—“and there was a presentation that looks at all the business ideas that can be invested in. There’re ideas that are mature, ideas that are maturing, ideas that are past their prime, venture-capital-stage ideas—and a category called ‘predawn.’ And all of a sudden it hit me: Most of my political career was spent investing in predawn ideas!” Gore laughs. “I thought, Oh, that’s where I went wrong!”"
http://newyorkmetro.com/news/politics/17065/index4.html
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