- Understanding history helps us to make sense of our times
and where we may be trending in the future.
To get a better grasp on the context
for a new generation of computing power
we'll briefly review the human journey
that has brought us here.
We won't go back too far but instead focus
on a series of revolutions with an emphasis
on the Third Industrial Revolution.
For much of human history we were farmers and craftspeople.
We lived off the land and produced most goods by hand.
It is only 300 years ago in 18th Century Britain
that the nature of the human experience radically shifts
and changes the world.
In particular, the use of steam power, railways, and steel,
among many transformative innovations,
ushered in an age of mechanical production and transport.
Factories and rapid urbanization changed how we lived,
worked, and played.
This first Industrial Revolution created a sharp turn
in human destiny that has shaped our world to this day.
Barely 100 years later another revolution got underway
that was largely defined by the deployment
of electricity at scale
and the phenomena of mass production.
Electricity, for example,
enabled the invention of the telephone,
a singular technology of consequence.
The era of global telecommunications began in earnest
and still continues today.
Both of these Industrial Revolutions
set the stage for a third Industrial Revolution.
It began in the 1940s.
As steam power and electricity largely defined
the core technologies of the previous transformations,
the invention of the transistor
was at the heart of the third revolution.
Accelerated by the U.S. space program,
the popularity of radio, and later commercial applications
such as the handheld calculator,
transistors enabled the miniaturization
of electrical switches.
Switches enable or disable the flow of electricity.
To be on or off, so to speak.
They are the essential building blocks
of electronics and modern computing.
Miniaturization of switches or transistors
resulted in the microchips we have today.
The low cost mass production of microchips
democratized computing and thrust the world
into a third Industrial Revolution.
Rather than analog innovation,
this revolution has largely been defined by digitization.
In other words, taking analog information,
that which is not electronic in nature,
and converting it to the language of computers.
Ones and zeroes, on and off switches,
so that can be stored, processed,
and transmitted electronically.
Digitization is ubiquitous today.
It powers just about every electronic device we use.
It has enabled the creation of the internet
and the World Wide Web,
two platforms that no one would argue
have altered the course of history.
In fact, where the internet takes us
and the complex challenges it presents in the years ahead,
is still a story to be told.
The third Industrial Revolution,
built on transistors made from silicon,
continues to define our current times.
Our digital world has modified our destiny
and created completely new opportunities and challenges.
The benefits of remarkable computing power
teases us at what may be possible in the future,
as we increase performance and intelligence
in our hardware and software.
Even as the third Industrial Revolution plays out,
a new wave of change is beginning to emerge.
The convergence of the digital,
physical, and biological worlds
combined with new global demographics and economics,
is hinting at the opening stages
of a fourth Industrial Revolution.
While it's still early the evidence of even more radical
and disruptive change for humanity is ahead,
without question, quantum computing will be a central player
in this new revolution.