With the enormous loss of Steve Jobs to his long battle with cancer, the world mourned and the collective voice rising from blogs, the Twittersphere and mainstream media was one of both grief and gratitude. We get what Steve Jobs’ did for us. As a visionary, he was both dreamer and doer. His employees said he sometimes set impossible goals, but he told them, “you can do it,” and you know what? They did.

Because of his persistence and powerful leadership, Jobs’ was first to market, leaving other tech companies scrambling for meager seconds, or worse, crumbs. Apple will go on. Apple will still innovate. And so will the rest of us techies out there. Below is a portion of the speech, “The Rise of the Techno Priests,” that Shane Kempton, CTO of Phase 2, gave at SXSW last year. I think it fittingly describes the impact this modern day Edison has had on our world.

We’re moving into an age where eco systems are the goal of many of the most powerful organizations. They create the ability to control and define both the type of information you can access as well as how you’re able to access it. These eco systems are becoming more essential to our daily lives, to the point that they are affecting as deeply as our core relationships.

Facebook changes how we access our friends and even subtle things like friend suggestions, while not as bold a thing, have similarities to the social contracts controlled by the church in Medieval Europe. And we’re increasing the technologist’s influence of our world-view as we augment our normal senses and reality with data and devices provided by these eco systems and their visionary creators.

"What we techies need to realize is that we are the gate keepers. We are the priests following the doctrine of Jobs, Gates, Berners Lee or Zuckerberg."

We are at the dawn of a change in civilization of such magnitude that it will dwarf every change that has come before, even agriculture. We are beginning to redefine what is possible for humanity, from the reach of our voice to the workings of our DNA. The ideologies and beliefs set down by our technology leaders today will affect us for a very long time.

We can’t take lightly the responsibility we have in shaping people's paradigm as we create the content and the means to access the content everyone uses to understand the world around them. If history is to be an example for us, these shifts can be very messy, and we will be the ones leading the charge, for good or ill.

I’ll leave you with this thought...

The lives of our grandchildren; from how they communicate, work and get information to how they understand and form the identity of themselves and others, will be shaped by the ideologies and beliefs of today’s device and content creators, by people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates & Mark Zuckerburg and by you & I.