I love a remote mountain cabin perhaps slightly more than the next person, so imagine, if you will, the opposite of that. It’s probably Las Vegas, where I am right now, sitting on a suspiciously wipe-clean faux leather chair in a hotel room with walls so thin I can hear humans on every side expelling every possible fluid in every possible way. It’s no less depraved and vulgar than when Hunter S Thompson came all those years ago, only he wasn’t here for the Consumer Electronics Show.

CES is often described as revealing the future of technology, but really it’s about the now. Everything here has been in gestation for years, a slow and carefully managed process from conception to development to marketable product, and with a (usually) contrived finale of a January CES launch to bring it to a variously eager, ambivalent or completely ignorant public, depending on the product. As the public interest and appetite for technology has expanded, so has our recognition that it is no longer one industry but part of every sector.

CES feels that way; there are device, security and robotics companies here, of course, but there are also every major car brand, government policy specialists, health experts, finance, entertainment, sports, education … in short, every part of our lives is being upended.

Beyond sales, what many of these executives are looking for, as they patiently navigate the incongruously flooded pavements and overpriced burgers of Vegas, is some kind of key to what this all means and where it is headed. Beyond the noisiest product launches, the hope is that the 2.4 million square feet of exhibition space, the conversations and (very often) the beer will encourage some happy accident of vision, a glimmer of some new idea that will propel them and their product into the future.

But this is the anomaly of CES. There is a tribal, sociable element to it, as there is every industry event. Vegas looks different when CES is in town; 170,000 people interested enough in tech to all want to come. And so there is a kind of shared mentality, a consensus around the biggest buzz, or the worst keynote, or the most surprising announcement. The scale and intensity of the event is overwhelming, but so is the shared identity. It leads to more than a little groupthink, some products are inflated with hype (and the marketing dollar, clearly) only to disappear from public interest later.

But the counterpoint is more interesting. Much as we pine for the log cabin, for some kind of antidote to the hyper connection, we need the critical, cultural, creative mass of others to encourage our own creative thinking. The author Steven Johnson has written about how individuals become smarter when they are connected to and contribute to a network, that the best kind of brainstorming is still a group of people sitting round a table talking.

But part of the power of being in a large networked, chaotic event such as CES is serendipity and discovery. In his 2014 book How We Got to Now, Johnson concludes by encouraging us all to explore, to take risks, and not to stick to conventional wisdom. “The innovators profiled in this book had the tenacity to stick with their hunches for long periods,” he wrote. “But there is comparable risk in being true to your own sense of identity … better to challenge those intuitions, explore uncharted terrain, both literal and figurative. Better to make new connections than remain comfortably situated in the same routine.”

There is no proven path to disruption and innovation, but embracing the chaos is to embrace the opportunity. CES is true of that, albeit within the limited confines of a corporate event.

Johnson, again, muses on the “hummingbird effect” in which seemingly small innovations in one field can end up significantly affecting something completely unintentionally: that the introduction of chlorine to drinking water led to public swimming baths, which, indirectly, led to women’s bodies being publicly on display; that Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press revealed a hitherto unrealised long-sightedness among readers, which led to the development of reading glasses; and that Las Vegas was only made bearably habitable through the development of air cooling systems which were advanced by the work of one Clarence Birdseye while experimenting with frozen food.

This is the law of unintended consequences, something intrinsic to technology and the impact it has. The myriad concurrent developments of technology, and consecutive competing and collaborative contributions, drive the pace of progress constantly, rhythmically.

We enjoy the ebbs and flows of all this progress, but we do need to ask better questions about the impact it has on us further downstream. Hemlines, reading glasses and Las Vegas are all very well, but unintended consequences can cut both ways.