“New Economy”= early sign of coming Singularity?
from the dismal-scientists-boggled dept.
From a widely-published Boston Globe story: "Greenspan's comments…indicated his strengthening conviction that a stunning surge in the productivity of U.S. workers will persist…ensuring that the longest-running expansion in U.S. history has no end in sight…[his] main point was about the world economy and the profound impact of technology and globalization…Economists said such strong gains in productivity are unusual, if not unprecedented." He compared the current situation to the railroads, which "helped elevate economic growth for a considerable period of time. But the pace of growth eventually slowed when full or near-full exploitation of the newer technologies was achieved." But will we stop seeing such gaps between newer technologies, as they arrive with increasing frequency?
August 26th, 2000 at 12:46 PM
Industrial Revolutions
I am not going to concern myself with trying to predict the entire future of the human economy, or even of the American economy for so long as it lasts. I will, however, point out hat we are in the midst of one industrial revolution at the same time we are beginning two more, and have at least one more on the visible horizon. The ongoing revolution is the microchip revolution. As regards discrete, big, powerful desktop-like processors, I expect we may actually be closer to the end of it than to the beginning. But that is sheer speculation. The two nascent revolutions are the telecommunications/bandwidth revolution and the biotech revolution. (The biotech revolution might also be broken down into revolutions for products and revolutions for direct human health, but let's not confuse the issues any more than we have to.) The horizon rervolution is, of course, molecular nanotechnology. What's more, these revolutions play off each other to a major degree– understanding of protein folding is facilitated by large computer simulations, and devices incorporating this understanding will be constructed with molecular nanotechnology for the purpose of improving human health. All of these contribute to economic productivity gains. In short, from a technologist's point of view, I don't see any reason to think ill of that side of the equation for another 40 to 50 years.