Keeping an Eye on Technology Futures, No Hidden Agendas, New Attitudes, No Platitudes!
The last century saw several transformations: Electrification, telephony, automobiles, radio, electronics and TV, and the dawn of the Internet.
In this new century, three grand technological transformations are led by America: Big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution. The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. It will be defined by talent, not cheap labor.
Information technology has entered the big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that dwarfs the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud" ? a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look like an antique. Astronomical feats of data crunching will enable previously unimaginable services and businesses. We are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.
Smart manufacturing is the first structural shift since Henry Ford launched the economic power of "mass production." We are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science. Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level, optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving quality and reducing waste.
Devices and products are already appearing based on computationally engineered materials that literally did not exist a few years ago: Novel metal alloys, graphene instead of silicon transistors, and meta-materials that possess properties not possible in nature; e.g., rendering an object invisible.
This era of new materials will be economically explosive when combined with 3-D printing ? literally "printing" parts and devices using computer power, lasers and basic powdered metals and plastics, soon leading to "printing" of entire final products.
Finally, there is the unfolding communications revolution where soon most humans on the planet will be connected wirelessly. Never before have a billion people ? and soon billions more ? been able to communicate, socialize and trade in real time.
The implications of the radical collapse in the cost of wireless connectivity are as big as those following the dawn of telegraphy and telephony. Coupled with the cloud, the wireless world provides cheap connectivity, information and processing power to nearly everyone, everywhere. This introduces both rapid change ? e.g., the Arab Spring ? and great opportunity. Again, both the launch and epicenter of this technology are based in America.
Few deny that technology fuels economic growth as well as both social and lifestyle progress, the latter largely seen in health and environmental metrics. But consider three features that most define America that are essential for unleashing the promises of technological change: our youthful demographics, dynamic culture and diverse educational system.
