Talkin' 'bout Information Revolutions - ' Each Revolution is Unique '

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But each revolution is unique both in its opportunities and its dangers, in the progress it brings and the problems it creates. That is the social challenge that faces us in each surge. Institutional innovations are needed now to accompany and foster the technological and organizational ones.

Thoughts on what the next revolution may focus on?

I expect the next one to be structured around biotechnology, bioelectronics, nanotechnology and new materials, which in the next decades are all likely to take significant strides and have many isolated successes within the logic of the ICT paradigm. That is how it has always been. No revolution emerges from thin air; the future components must have been in gestation for some time before irrupting as a constellation.

Decades before the microprocessor, the world had electronic tubes, and then transistors; it had radar and analog control instruments; it had telecommunications by phone, telex and radio; it had television as well as cash registers, electric typewriters and, especially, mainframe computers. They were all disjointed and they developed under the logic of the mass-production paradigm. If you look at the history of semiconductors, you realize that the original diffusion of transistors was to make radios and record players portable. The microprocessor breakthrough makes information processing powerful and cheap, and the devices using microprocessors can become smaller and smaller; the computer chip enables the coming together of control, processing and transmission of information, and that synthesis gives birth to a whole new engineering logic.

A similar analysis can be made of the internal combustion engine, oil as fuel and petrochemical raw material, the early automobiles, made one by one as luxury vehicles in machine shops, and so on.

We do not know the nature of the breakthrough that will usher in the next revolution. By definition, a radical leap is unpredictable. What we can expect from historical experience, with a high level of likelihood, is that the present wave of opportunities and transformations will reach maturity in a few decades, and will be transformed in the next surge. It occurs to me, however, just as a stab in the dark, that within a bio-nano-materials revolution, perhaps bioelectronics could do for semiconductor information technology what the shift to steel did to iron railways: a quantum jump in power and possibilities. But I am sure your readers can hazard their own guesses about that.

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