I have recently been introduced to a term for something I have probably been doing most of my life: horizon scanning.

The phrase describes the disciplined practice of looking beyond what is immediately in front of us for early signs of change. Those signs may be technological, economic, social, environmental, or political. Individually, they can seem insignificant. The important question is what happens when several of them begin pointing in the same direction.

I think I learned this practice long before I had a name for it.

I grew up on a dairy farm near Pickford, Michigan. Farming teaches you to watch the horizon, sometimes quite literally. Weather matters. Markets matter. Machinery matters. Soil, animals, fuel, labor, timing, and a hundred other variables matter. You learn that today’s conditions do not necessarily tell you what tomorrow will bring. More importantly, you learn that preparation often has to begin before you know exactly what is coming.

Later, as a signals intelligence analyst, watching for signals became much more explicit. The job was not simply to collect information. It was to distinguish signal from noise, recognize patterns, understand context, and notice when something changed. A single observation could be meaningless. A collection of seemingly unrelated observations could tell a very different story.

Those two experiences may seem worlds apart, but I increasingly think they taught me the same lesson:

Pay attention to what is changing at the edges.

The Signal Is Convergence

That lesson has been on my mind as I look across the work I have been doing in broadband, data, artificial intelligence, education, energy, workforce development, and community technology.

For years, we have tended to organize these subjects into separate conversations.

Broadband people talk about broadband.

Educators talk about education.

Economic developers talk about economic development.

Utilities talk about energy.

Information technology teams talk about computing.

Researchers talk about data.

Workforce organizations talk about skills.

Increasingly, I think that separation is becoming artificial.

The signal I am watching now is convergence.

Broadband is becoming computing infrastructure. Computing infrastructure is becoming energy infrastructure. Buildings are becoming networks of sensors, controls, communications, computing, and power. Artificial intelligence is increasing demand for data, processing capacity, electricity, and new kinds of technical talent. Educational resources are becoming software and data. Research is becoming more computational and collaborative. And communities are discovering that their ability to participate in all of this depends on much more than simply having an Internet connection.

These developments are usually discussed separately. Horizon scanning asks us to step back far enough to see the pattern connecting them.

That pattern may be more important than any individual technology.

From Connectivity to Capacity

For much of the past decade, one of the dominant infrastructure questions in rural communities has been straightforward: Can we get connected?

That question is not going away. Reliable and affordable connectivity remains foundational.

But I think the next question is becoming more important:

What can we do once we are connected?

That is fundamentally a capacity question.

Can a community use connectivity to support education, entrepreneurship, research, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, energy management, artificial intelligence, and new forms of collaboration? Can local institutions share knowledge and infrastructure? Can students learn with the same computational tools being used by researchers and industry? Can small communities participate in increasingly data-intensive economic activity rather than simply consuming services produced somewhere else?

Those questions lead beyond broadband deployment.

They lead toward intelligent infrastructure.

I use that phrase broadly. Intelligent infrastructure is not simply smart buildings, AI systems, data centers, fiber networks, or advanced energy systems. It is what happens when communications, computing, power, data, automation, knowledge, and people begin operating as parts of a larger system.

That is the horizon I think we should be watching.

Knowledge Is Becoming Infrastructure

There is another signal in that convergence that I think deserves much more attention.

We have historically treated infrastructure as something physical: roads, bridges, electrical systems, water systems, telecommunications networks, buildings.

Increasingly, knowledge itself is becoming infrastructure.

Educational resources can be versioned like software. Research can become reproducible rather than simply published. Data can be connected through semantic models and knowledge graphs. Courses can move between learning platforms through interoperability standards. AI systems can help people navigate large bodies of information. Communities can build shared repositories of evidence, experience, and local knowledge.

Projects I am working on, including the Digital Opportunities Intelligence Network, have pushed me to think more deeply about what that means.

A knowledge system cannot consist only of documents and databases. Information exists within culture and context. The same data can mean very different things to different communities. Local experience matters. Institutional memory matters. Relationships matter. Provenance matters. Knowing where a claim came from may become just as important as being able to retrieve it.

The next generation of community infrastructure therefore may not simply connect places.

It may help communities remember, learn, and make better decisions together.

The Next Workforce Is Already Emerging

There is also a workforce signal hidden inside this convergence.

When communications, computing, power, automation, cybersecurity, and data begin overlapping, the traditional boundaries between occupations start becoming less useful.

Someone working on tomorrow’s intelligent building may need to understand fiber optics, Ethernet, wireless networks, sensors, power delivery, automation, cybersecurity, and cloud services. Someone working in community technology may need to move comfortably between GIS, broadband, policy, data engineering, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence.

We should not wait until employers tell us that these roles exist.

The technologies are already telling us.

That creates an opportunity for schools, community colleges, universities, apprenticeship programs, utilities, technology companies, and regional organizations to begin designing learning pathways around the systems that are emerging rather than the occupational categories we inherited.

Horizon scanning should inform workforce development precisely because education operates on a delay. If we wait until a skills shortage is obvious, we are already behind.

The Signal for Next Week

So what signal am I watching next?

Not a particular AI model.

Not a particular data center.

Not a particular broadband program.

Not a particular energy technology.

I am watching the connections between them.

I am watching what happens when open educational resources begin behaving more like continuously developed software. I am watching what happens when statewide data infrastructure becomes learning infrastructure. I am watching what happens when broadband networks, distributed computing, advanced power systems, and community facilities begin to converge. I am watching what happens when AI increases the value of local data and local knowledge rather than merely increasing demand for distant computing resources.

And I am particularly interested in what all of this means for rural places like Michigan’s Eastern Upper Peninsula.

Our geography has often been described in terms of distance: distance from markets, universities, population centers, capital, and opportunity.

Connected infrastructure changes the importance of distance.

Knowledge infrastructure could change it even further.

The opportunity is not to recreate Silicon Valley in the Upper Peninsula. It is to build something appropriate to this place: distributed, resilient, collaborative, locally grounded, connected to the wider world, and capable of turning regional knowledge into regional capacity.

That possibility is still faint.

But that is exactly why it is worth watching.

Keep Watching the Horizon

Horizon scanning is not prediction. I cannot tell you exactly what the next decade will look like, and I am skeptical of anyone who says they can.

The purpose is not to predict the future perfectly.

It is to notice change early enough that we still have choices about how we respond to it.

Growing up on a farm taught me to watch the sky before the storm arrived. Signals intelligence taught me to look for patterns before their meaning became obvious. My work today in broadband, data, education, AI, energy, and community technology keeps bringing me back to the same discipline.

Watch the horizon.

Look for the weak signals.

Pay attention when previously separate systems begin connecting.

And when enough signals begin pointing in the same direction, do not wait for someone else to declare that the future has arrived.

Start building toward it.