Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

the coming of stage III, Internet-linked computers by which one person could interact with millions of computers. Today, the only place you can find a stand-alone computer is in a museum.
    So the future of the computer is to eventually enter stage IV, where it disappears and gets resurrected as a fashion statement. We will decorate our world with computers. The very word
computer
will gradually disappear from the English language. In the future, the largest component of urban waste will not be paper but chips. The future of the computer is to disappear and become a utility, sold like electricity and water. Computer chips will gradually disappear as computation is done “in the clouds.”
    So the evolution of computers is not a mystery; it is following the well-worn path of its predecessors, like electricity, paper, and running water.
    But the computer and the Internet are still evolving. Economist John Steele Gordon was asked if this revolution is over. “ Heavens, no. It will be a hundred years before it fully plays out, just like the steam engine. We are now at the point with the Internet that they were with the railroad in 1850. It’s just the beginning.”
    Not all technologies, we should point out, enter stages III and IV. For example, consider the locomotive. Mechanized transportation entered stage I in the early 1800s with the coming of the steam-driven locomotive.A hundred people would share a single locomotive. We entered stage II with the introduction of the “personal locomotive,” otherwise known as the car, in the early 1900s. But the locomotive and the car (essentially a box on rails or wheels) have not changed much in the past decades. What has changed are refinements, such as more powerful and efficient engines as well as intelligence. So technologies that cannot enter stages III and IV will be embellished; for example, they will have chips placed in them so they become intelligent. Some technologies evolve all the way to stage IV, like electricity, computers, paper, and running water. Others stay stuck at an intermediate stage, but they continue to evolve by having incremental improvements such as chips and increased efficiency.
    WHY BUBBLES AND CRASHES?
    But today, in the wake of the great recession of 2008, some voices can be heard saying that all this progress was an illusion, that we have to return to the simpler days, that there is something fundamentally flawed with the system.
    When taking the long view of history, it is easy to point to the unexpected, with colossal bubbles and crashes that seem to come out of nowhere. They seem random, a by-product of the fickleness of fate and human folly. Historians and economists have written voluminously about the crash of 2008, trying to make sense out of it by examining a variety of causes, such as human nature, greed, corruption, lack of regulation, weaknesses in oversight, etc.
    However, I have a different way of looking at the great recession, looking through the lens of science. In the long term, science is the engine of prosperity. For example,
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History
cites studies that “ attribute 90 percent of income growth in England and the United States after 1780 to technological innovation, not mere capital accumulation.”
    Without science, we would be thrown back millennia into the dim past. But science is not uniform; it comes in waves. One seminal breakthrough (for example, the steam engine, the lightbulb, the transistor) often causes a cascade of secondary inventions that then create an avalanche of innovation and progress. Since they create vast amounts of wealth, these waves should be reflected in the economy.
    The first great wave was steam power, which eventually led to the creationof the locomotive. Steam power fed the Industrial Revolution, which would turn society upside down. Fabulous wealth was created by steam power. But under capitalism, wealth is never stagnant. Wealth has to go somewhere. Capitalists are ceaselessly hunting for the next break, and will shift this wealth to invest in even more speculative schemes, sometimes with catastrophic results.
    In the early 1800s, much of the excess wealth generated by steam power and the Industrial Revolution went into locomotive stocks on the London Stock Exchange. In fact, a bubble began to form, with scores of locomotive companies appearing on the London Exchange. Virginia Postrel, business writer for the
New York Times,
writes, “ A century ago,