This seems like the logical conclusion you arrive at being an engineer who can't effectively communicate with non-engineers. Although it's definitely true that it's easier to show people a product rather than explain it ahead of time.

Although the "communication skills" shortage you refer to is well understood amongst engineering types and a real problem on its own, I don't think this is solely to blame for the article's premise. For inventions that change behavior a lot, its not even enough to show a product, that still only allows the other person to see what they see, not what you see.

Email has been around for ages (the 60s in various early form), but it wasn't widely considered a killer app until the early to mid 90s.

On your first point, that's why things like the super-short "did you know that XYZ could do this...?" type of demos work great. Of course, see e.g. Kathy Sierra's writings for how to balance.

Re: your email example... You're missing the issue of network effects.

You can't see what you do not believe. That's just your hardware limitation. If there's no logical model for something your perception will filter it out. If you can read this you probably knew it already.

Is it possible for people to surpass their hardware limits, like self adaptive FPGAs, or are all our limits hardwired?

Meditate until you top level pattern matching code is not influencing your low level perception and new patterns are formed based on the true inputs.

Sounds like a line edited out of the original Matrix ;)

"When people ask me about my life's ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that's about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement."

I say the same thing except I'm serious.

I call the the "imagination gap".

When I was giving advice about the fbFund I had a number of queries about whether the applicants should build prototypes or film screencasts or just spend time writing their proposal.

My advice was always to do whatever it took to minimize the imagination gap. Figure out what shows off the idea in as concrete a form as possible. It is hard work to extrapolate in a way that is identical to the person with the original idea. Make it as easy as possible.

This is it exactly. When I first started at my current company my boss and I did not share a first language. And only just barely a second language. But we did share a sense of imagination, and we were astounded many times to see that in a meeting with several people present, he and I would be easily layering our ideas, while the other people in the room (all sharing his first language) needed to see very explicit drawings before hesitantly seeming to see what we were seeing.

Without imagination, the world is entirely composed of that which you have already seen. How boring.