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

of Columbus, spices and herbs were extremely expensive. They were prized because they could mask the taste of rotting food, since there were no refrigerators in those days. At times, even kings and emperors had to eat rotten food at dinner. There wereno refrigerated cars, containers, or ships to carry spices across the oceans.) That is why these commodities were so valuable that Columbus gambled his life to get them, although today they are sold for pennies.
    What is replacing commodity capitalism is intellectual capitalism. Intellectual capital involves precisely what robots and AI cannot yet provide, pattern recognition and common sense.
    As MIT economist Lester Thurow has said, “ Today, knowledge and skills now stand alone as the only source of comparative advantage. … Silicon Valley and Route 128 are where they are simply because that is where the brainpower is. They have nothing else going for them.”
    Why is this historic transition rocking the foundation of capitalism? Quite simply, the human brain cannot be mass-produced. While hardware can be mass-produced and sold by the ton, the human brain cannot, meaning that common sense will be the currency of the future. Unlike with commodities, to create intellectual capital you have to nurture, cultivate, and educate a human being, which takes decades of individual effort.
    As Thurow says, “ With everything else dropping out of the competitive equation, knowledge has become the only source of long-run sustainable competitive advantage.”
    For example, software will become increasingly more important than hardware. Computer chips will be sold by the truckload as the price of chips continues to plunge, but software has to be created the old-fashioned way, by a human working with pencil and paper, sitting quietly in a chair. For example, the files stored in your laptop, which might contain valuable plans, manuscripts, and data, may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the laptop itself is worth only a few hundred. Of course, software can be easily copied and mass-produced, but the creation of new software cannot. That requires human thought.
    According to UK economist Hamish McRae, “ in 1991 Britain became the first country to earn more from invisible exports (services) than from visible ones.”
    While the share of the U.S. economy coming from manufacturing has declined dramatically over the decades, the sector that involves intellectual capitalism (Hollywood movies, the music industry, video games, computers, telecommunications, etc.) has soared. This shift from commodity capitalism to intellectual capitalism is a gradual one, starting in the last century,but it is accelerating every decade. MIT economist Thurow writes, “ After correcting for general inflation, natural resource prices have fallen almost 60 percent from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s.”
    Some nations understand this. Consider the lesson of Japan in the postwar era. Japan has no great natural resources, yet its economy is among the largest in the world. The wealth of Japan today is a testament to the industriousness and unity of its people, rather than the wealth under its feet.
    Unfortunately, many nations do not grasp this fundamental fact and do not prepare their citizens for the future, relying instead mainly on commodities. This means that nations that are rich in natural resources and do not understand this principle may sink into poverty in the future.
    DIGITAL DIVIDE?
    Some voices decry the information revolution, stating that we will have a widening chasm between the “digital rich” and the “digital poor,” that is, those with access to computer power and those without. This revolution, they claim, will widen the fault lines of society, opening up new disparities of wealth and inequalities that could tear at the fabric of society.
    But this is a narrow picture of the true problem. With computer power doubling every eighteen months, even poor children are getting access to computers. Peer pressure and cheap prices have encouraged computer and Internet use among poor children. In one experiment, funds were given to purchase a laptop for every classroom. Despite good intentions, the program was widely viewed as a failure. First, the laptop usually sat unused in a corner, because the teacher often did not know how to use it. Second, most of the students were already online with their friends and simply bypassed the classroom laptop.
    The problem is not access. The real