Innovation Revolutions
Share this section Innovation Revolutions
We are living at the beginning of the sixth Innovation revolution.
Learn how the five preceding technological revolutions created jobs, but why many experts believe that "this time it's different."
First: The Industrial Revolution - 1771
New technologies / redefined industries
Mechanized the cotton industry
Wrought iron
Machinery
New / redefined infrastructures
Canals and waterways
turnpike roads
Water Power
Watch the Video Documentary: The Industrial Revolution
Second: The Age of Steam and Railways - 1829
New technologies / redefined industries
Steam engines and machinery
Iron and coal mining
Railway construction
Steam power
New / redefined infrastructures
Railways
Telegraph
Great Ports / worldwide shipping
City Gas
Watch the Video Documentary: The Age of Railways
Third: The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering - 1875
New technologies / redefined industries
Cheap Steel
Heavy chemistry and civil engineering
Electrical equipment industry
Copper and cables
Canned and bottled food
Paper and packaging
New / redefined infrastructures
Worldwide shipping and rapid steel steamships
Worldwide railways
Great bridges and tunnels
Worldwide telegraph
Telephone
Electrical networks
Fourth: The Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production - 1908
New technologies / redefined
Massed produced automobiles
Cheap oil fuels
Petrochemicals (synthetics)
Internal combustion engine
Home electrical appliances
Refrigerated and frozen food
New / redefined infrastructures
Networks of roads, highways, ports and airports
Networks of oil pipelines
University electricity
Worldwide analog telecommunications
Fifth: The Age of Information and Telecommunications- 1971
New technologies / redefined industries
Cheap microelectronics
Computers & software
Telecommunications
Control Instruments
Computer-aided biotechnology
New / redefined infrastructures
World digital telecommunications (cable, fiber optics, satellite
Internet / World Wide Web
Smart-grid electrical networks
High-speed physical transport links
Sixth: The Age of Robotics and Intelligent Machines - 2014
More to come .....
Books: A colorful and accessible picture of dynamic forces that are shaping our lives, our work, and our economies
The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.
“Technology is overturning the world’s economies, and The Second Machine Age is the best explanation of this revolution yet written.”
Amazon
How the financial system should work in the Internet era
Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to re-imagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike.
A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers.
MARC ANDREESSEN | DealBook NYTimes
Keith Bedford | Reuters
Technophobia distracts people from real economic problems
We might not have expected much resistance to the disease in earlier times, before evidence accumulated that the fears it inspired were irrational.
To judge from the symptomatic hand-wringing the epidemic is spreading, we are on the verge of mass unemployment as work becomes increasingly automated.
Parts of the nation’s commentariat have been seized with a nasty bout of technophobia.
Scott Winship | Brookings
The Second Machine Age: Fewer People ... More Technology
Our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before, relying on fewer people and more technology.
Something very, very big happened over the last decade. It is being felt in every job, factory and school. We are at the start of the Second Machine Age.
Thomas L. Friedman | The New York Times
Amazon.com
"most debated nonfiction book ... this year." - David Brooks
A steady, secure life somewhere in the middle—average—is over.
Widely acclaimed as one of the world’s most influential economists, Tyler Cowen:
High earners are taking ever more advantage of machine intelligence. This fact is forever changing the world of work and wages.
History suggests an Optimistic Possibility
Thanks to technology, the average wage in the United States today is over 10 times what it was 200 years ago, after adjusting for changes in the cost of living
Wages for ordinary workers in textile mills were stagnant for the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution. But as the technology matured, wages rose more quickly.
JAMES BESSEN | The Washington Post
H.C. Williams)
The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. It is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information.
Share Innovation ... Creativity ... Ideas
Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.
JOHN MARKOFF | NYTimes
Erin Lubin/The New York Times
Internet.org
Mark Zuckerberg | Internet.org
The Future of the World Economy is a Knowledge Economy
Watch the Video as Mark Zuckerberg explains what Facebook and their partners are doing to make Internet access available to the two thirds of the world not yet connected.
Robots for Consumers
flickr: JD Hancock
Kevin Smith | Business Insider
The question posed: "What emerging technology today do you think will cause another big stir for the average consumer in the same way that the home computer did years ago?: Gates answered: "Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we ...
It's More than Moore's Law
What allowed robots to go from blind, dumb, immobile automatons to fully autonomous entities able to operate in unstructured environments like the streets of a city....
The Post Singularity Economy
Haomiao Huang | ARS Technica
Suddenly, the robotic future doesn't look so far off.
Photo by SearchAll
Lobke Peers | Shutterstock
Tia Ghose | LiveScience
It's been the fodder for countless dystopian movies: a singularity in which artificial intelligence rivals human smarts.
From mass extinction to life extension, here are seven potential implications of super-smart robots.
Reason 5: Economy On Fire: Whereas the economy doubled every thousand years after the agricultural revolution, and every 15 years after the industrial revolution, a post-singularity economy could double every month... that blistering pace of economic growth could be so fast that humans couldn't ...
Share this section Innovation Revolutions
Work and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Why Wearable Tech Will Be as Big as the Smartphone
A Strategy for Keeping the Robots at Bay
What is Cognitive Computing?........
Pew Survey: Technology and the Future
The Sharing Economy Goes Corporate
