The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming.
According to Mills in The Cloud Revolution, a convergence of technologies will drive an economic boom over the coming decade. It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence.
We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next boom starts now.
Mark Mills is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, a Faculty Fellow in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University and a cofounding partner at Cottonwood Venture Partners, focused on digital energy technologies. Mills is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and writes for numerous publications, including City Journal, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Real Clear. Early in Mills’ career, he was an experimental physicist and development engineer in the fields of microprocessors, fiber optics and missile guidance. Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Ronald Reagan and later co-authored a tech investment newsletter. He is the author of Digital Cathedrals and Work in the Age Robots. In 2016, Mills was awarded the American Energy Society’s Energy Writer of the Year. On October 5, 2021, Encounter Books will publish Mills’ latest book, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s.
