The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is
wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision
for what's really coming.
The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as
the "new normal," where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or
trading in bitcoins is as good as it's going to get. Another foresees a
dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and
business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological
revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric
cars.
But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive
an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will
characterize as the "Roaring 2020s." It will come not from any single
big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three
primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines.
Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from
which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical
capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are
undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all
of this is the Cloud, history's biggest infrastructure, which is itself
based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and
artificial intelligence.
We've seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove
the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a
similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new
information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power
plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single
inventions don't drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes
convergent revolutions in technology's three core spheres--information,
materials, and machines. Over history, that's only happened a few times.
We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long
boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And
this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud
amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.
