What if I were to tell you that the nursing profession would cease to exist by the year 2050? What would you do differently today? Those of us who have been in the nursing profession for a long time can look back and see that much of what we were taught at nursing school has evolved. Science moves forward with new discoveries and new knowledge, and nursing science is no exception. Will developments be different going forward? Will the changes in the next 30 years of nursing differ from changes of the past 30 years? The answers are “yes,” and the differentiator is technology—not just the existence of technology but the pervasive nature of technology.

Humans are incrementalists by nature, whereas technology increasingly is exponential.1  Thus, future changes, which are being led by technology, should be viewed as exponential and different from the incremental changes of yesterday. Incremental change...

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