Conventional wisdom as to how technology will change the future is wrong.
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 a broad economic boom over the coming decade, one that history may come to know as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in technology’s three 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 everything, are undergoing a complementary transformation. At the center of 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 have wrung much of the magic out of the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. This time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.