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

railroad companies accounted for half the securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange.” Since the locomotive was still in its infancy, this bubble was unsustainable, and it finally popped, creating the Crash of 1850, one of the great collapses in the history of capitalism. This was followed by a series of minicrashes that occurred nearly every decade, created by the excess wealth spawned by the Industrial Revolution.
    There is irony here: the heyday of the railroad would be the 1880s and 1890s. So the Crash of 1850 was due to speculative fever and the wealth created by science, but the real job of railing the world would take many more decades to mature.
    Thomas Friedman writes, “ In the 19th century, America had a railroad boom, bubble and bust. … But even when that bubble burst, it left America with an infrastructure of railroads that made transcontinental travel and shipping dramatically easier and cheaper.”
    Instead of capitalists learning this lesson, this cycle began to repeat soon afterward. A second great wave of technology spread, led by the electric and automotive revolutions of Edison and Ford. The electrification of the factory and household, as well as the proliferation of the Model T, once again created fabulous wealth. As always, excess wealth had to go somewhere. In this case, it went into the U.S. Stock Exchange, in the form of a bubble in utility and automotive stocks. People ignored the lesson of the Crash of 1850, since that had happened eighty years earlier in the dim past. From 1900 to 1925, the number of automobile start-up companies hit 3,000, which the market simply could not support. Once again, this bubble was unsustainable. For this and other reasons, the bubble popped in 1929, creating the Great Depression.
    But the irony here is that the paving and electrification of America and Europe would not take place until after the crash, during the 1950s and 1960s.
    More recently, we had the third great wave of science, the coming of high tech, in the form of computers, lasers, space satellites, the Internet, and electronics. The fabulous wealth created by high tech had to go somewhere. In this case, it went into real estate, creating a huge bubble. With the value of real estate exploding through the roof, people began to borrow against the value of their homes, using them as piggy banks, which further accelerated the bubble. Unscrupulous bankers fueled this bubble by giving away home mortgages like water. Once again, people ignored the lesson of the crashes of 1850 and 1929, which happened 160 and 80 years in the past. Ultimately, this new bubble could not be sustained, and we had the crash of 2008 and the great recession.
    Thomas Friedman writes, “ The early 21st century saw a boom, bubble and now a bust around financial services. But I fear all it will leave behind are a bunch of empty Florida condos that never should have been built, used private jets that the wealthy can no longer afford and the dead derivative contracts that no one can understand.”
    But in spite of all the silliness that accompanied the recent crash, the irony here is that the wiring and networking of the world will take place after the crash of 2008. The heyday of the information revolution is yet to come.
    This leads to the next question: What is the fourth wave? No one can be sure. It might be a combination of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, telecommunications, and biotechnology. As with previous cycles, it may take another eighty years for these technologies to create a tidal wave of fabulous wealth. Around the year 2090, hopefully people will not ignore the lesson of the previous eighty years.

MIDCENTURY (2030 TO 2070)
    WINNERS AND LOSERS: JOBS
    But as technologies evolve, they create abrupt changes in the economy that sometimes lead to social dislocations. In any revolution, there are winnersand losers. This will become more evident by midcentury. We no longer have blacksmiths and wagonmakers in every village. Moreover, we do not mourn the passing of many of these jobs. But the question is: What jobs will flourish by midcentury? How will the evolution of technology change the way we work?
    We can partially determine the answer by asking a simple question: What are the limitations of robots? As we have seen, there are at least two basic stumbling blocks to artificial intelligence: pattern recognition and common sense. Therefore, the jobs that will survive in the future are, in the main, those