Technology And Economy.

I'm hardly an economist, and the economy isn't the focus of this journal. But given the tie-in between the economy and the possible technology trends that we just explored, it's interesting to gain some perspective on the economic side of things from Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock. (I thank RCFoC reader Cindy Blake for bringing Toffler's comments to our attention.)

According to Toffler, in an excellent article well worth reading in-full in the March 29 Wall Street Journal (http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB985829231298844352.djm),

"Yes, Virginia, there is a new economy, and it's just getting ready to launch its next phase."

Mr. Toffler makes the case that during the journey from an agrarian culture's emphasis on muscle power, to the Industrial Age's early value on electricity and fossil fuel power, and later its value on mind-power (innovation), each transition caused changes in the "right stuff' that made businesses profitable. Changes, yes -- including the demise of some businesses -- it didn't matter if you made the best, most technologically-advanced, most cost-effective buggy whip... But these disruptions hardly banished profits, overall.

Similarly, as we now transition into the Knowledge Age, Mr. Toffler believes that,

"Revolutions, by definition, are marked by surprises, reversals, upsets, wildly volatile swings, and a heightened role for chance... [Now,] on an even bigger, faster scale, a new economic and social system is taking form. It, too, will transform just about everything else... "

"There are today more than three million digital switches for every human being alive on the planet... There are nearly half a billion PCs on the planet -- one for every 13 human beings... Are hundreds of millions of mobile phone users going to throw their phones away?"

What are the elements that will take us beyond the transistor, which lifted us out of the Industrial Age and is now thrusting us, headlong, into the Knowledge Age? Toffler suggests that,

"What comes after the first digital revolution?... It is, of course, in genetics and biotechnology that the most powerful effects are about to be unleashed... Many [of the effects] have implications that will feed back into, and change, the future of information technology itself, whether in the form of biochips or DNA-based computing, and, who knows, new communications technologies based on DNA models and biochips...

If you think the revolution is over, get ready to be shocked again as information technology fully converges with, and is in turn remade by, the biological revolution."

Rather interesting, in light of what we just heard from the research labs -- eh? What can I possibly say, but:

Don't Blink!

This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc . Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000, Compaq Computer Corp."