Very nice article, I was introduced to a lot of concepts under a historical perspective. However, it does not cover emerging patterns (startup culture) or what would be the most plausible alternative future trends. Can someone suggest some good reads?
Great paper that compares and contrasts the 3 industrial revolutions: 1) steam/railroads, 2) electricity/internal combustion engine/running water/chemicals/petroleum, 3) computers/phones/internet. Author reflects on likely future challenges and what we can do to get back to growth.
My thoughts, in response to an article about the end of Moore's Law, and the need to design more efficient software as advances in hardware slow down:
I think we're going to see this phenomenon - wringing efficiency out of what we have now - across a lot of different fields and industries in the coming years.
One example is the whole IoT movement. Most of the real (industrial, medical, automotive) applications are efficiency/cost-savings focused. The central theme is connecting devices that we have now to better monitor, analyze, and utilize what we've already built.
Another example that is a bit further removed from computers is the whole Uber/car sharing trend. At any given time 95% of the cars in the world are parked somewhere, not in use. Even if we could only bring that down by 5%, we would be utilizing billions of dollars in capital more efficiently.
I also strongly believe that we will see this reflected in living situations with growing urban cores/hubs of activity and jobs. Suburbs are no longer economically viable at the scale at which we built and inhabited them post WWII, and as the infrastructure begins to decay and inequality increases, more and more people will move to the city to take advantage of the economies of scale of living a dense, vertical lifestlye.
Nit - taxi services utilize the capital of the vehicle more efficiently, but are far less efficient at roadway/energy utilization (As a taxi/uber has to travel to pick up its passenger.)
It's a private gain, at a public loss. If we really wanted efficient travel, we'd be investing into mass transit.
How is it a private gain? The cost to travel to pick up a passenger is built into the price of the trip. Efficiently routing these fairs could be far cheaper than owning a vehicle that's idle most of the time, while also far more convenient than hoping your route criscrosses enough with public transit not to be inconvenient.
I personally believe the future consists of transport networks that allow you to enter your expected trip, either the present moment or planned in the future, and an autonomous system will translate your request into transit based on the price you're willing to pay (and desired level of predictable reliability). So if you travel to work around the same time every day, you can probably achieve a fairly low price with high reliability. Uber is the beginning of such a network, and if self-driving cars existed, the model would take off to a whole new level. Imagine if the vehicles were capable enough to deliver freight and packages between businesses and residences overnight while not in use (or less in use) for passengers.
