Supertrends

12.THE FINAL RULE

We are approaching the end of this story, so I guess now is a good time to ask if there is one simple common denominator – do the accounts of all the different topics lead to one overarching conclusion? In the very last line of this chapter, I will attempt to formulate one, but before doing so, here are a few highlights that strike me as particularly important.

• There is no end to innovation. As we saw with Ziman's Law, human scientific activity seems to double every 15 years and grow 100-fold every 100 years. It appears that this can continue as far as the eye can see, since computers will handle increasing parts of it at an ever-faster pace. Furthermore, since innovation is essentially about recombining what already exists, the more we have developed in the past, the more new things will be possible to create in the future. For these very reasons, innovation is, to all practical intents and purposes, endless and only limited by the extremely generous laws of physics plus the existence of liberal societies that permit free thinking. And whereas often the first market response to new core technologies may seem disappointing, over time people figure out new business models and applications, which trigger endless cascades of new business opportunities and technologies. Infinitely.
• On that note, we have lots of technologies with exponential or hyperexponential growth. An increasing number of technologies exhibit exponential or hyperexponential growth. This includes, ...