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

electricity and running water, they eventually become utilities. With capitalism driving down prices and increasing competition, these technologies will be sold like utilities, that is, we don’t care wherethey come from and we pay for them only when we want them. The same applies for computation. “Cloud computing,” which relies heavily on the Internet for most computing functions, will gradually gain in popularity. Cloud computing reduces computation to a utility, something that we pay for only when we need it, and something that we don’t think about when we don’t need it.
      This is different from the situation today, when most of us do our typing, word processing, or drawing on a desktop or laptop computer and then connect to the Internet when we want to search for information. In the future, we could gradually phase out the computer altogether and access all our information directly on the Internet, which then charges us for the time spent. So computation becomes a utility that is metered, like water and electricity. We will live in a world where our appliances, furniture, clothes, etc., are intelligent, and we will talk to them when we need specific services. Internet screens are hidden everywhere, and keyboards materialize whenever we need them. Function has replaced form, so, ironically, the computer revolution will eventually make the computer disappear into the clouds.
    • Targeting your customer
Companies historically placed ads in newspapers, on radio, on TV, etc., often without the slightest idea of the impact the ads had. They could calculate the effectiveness of their ad campaign only by looking at upticks in sales. But in the future, companies will know almost immediately how many people have downloaded or viewed their products. If you are interviewed on an Internet radio site, for example, it is possible to determine precisely how many people have listened. This will allow companies to target their audience to tailor-made specifications.
      (This, however, raises another question: the sensitive question of privacy, which will be one of the great controversies of the future. In the past, there were worries that the computer might make Big Brother possible. In George Orwell’s novel
1984,
a totalitarian regime takes over the earth, unleashing a hellish future in which spies are everywhere, all freedoms are squashed, and lifeis an unending series of humiliations. At one point, the Internet might have evolved into such an all-pervasive spying machine. However, in 1989, after the breakup of the Soviet bloc, the National Science Foundation in effect opened it up, converting it from a primarily military device to one that networked universities and even commercial entities, eventually leading to the Internet explosion of the 1990s. Today, Big Brother is not possible. The real problem is “little brother,” that is, nosy busybodies, petty criminals, tabloid newspapers, and even corporations that use data mining to find out our personal preferences. As we will discuss in the next chapter, this is a problem that will not go away but will evolve with time. More than likely, there will be an eternal cat-and-mouse game between software developers creating programs to protect our privacy and others creating programs to break it.)
    FROM COMMODITY CAPITALISM TO INTELLECTUAL CAPITALISM
    So far, we have asked only how technology is altering the way capitalism operates. But with all the turmoil created by the advances in high technology, what impact is this having on the nature of capitalism itself? All the turmoil that this revolution is creating can be summarized in one concept: the transition from commodity capitalism to intellectual capitalism.
    Wealth in Adam Smith’s day was measured in commodities. Commodity prices fluctuate, but on average commodity prices have been dropping steadily for the past 150 years. Today, you had breakfast that the king of England could not have had 100 years ago. Exotic delicacies from around the world are now routinely sold in supermarkets. The falling of commodity prices is due to a variety of factors, such as better mass production, containerization, shipping, communication, and competition.
    (For example, today’s high school students have a hard time understanding why Columbus risked life and limb to find a shorter trade route to the spices of the East. Why couldn’t he simply go to the supermarket, they ask, and get some oregano? But in the days