In Part I of this two-part report, Seeing the Tech-Tsunami Before the Impact Futurist and CIOUpdate columnist Dan Burrus explored the eight
streams within the technological wave — the hard trends of technological advancement:
- Dematerialization;
- Virtualization;
- Mobility;
- Product intelligence;
- Networking;
- Interactivity;
- Globalization; and
- Convergence.
The Three Digital Accelerators
In addition to the eight pathways of technological advancement listed above, we have three digital accelerators making change possible. In fact, a closer look at this technological tsunami we’re about to experience shows that it is actually a braid of three powerful, interlocking hard trends. Each on its own is capable of driving a huge amount of change, but the impact of all three acting in concert is enormous. If you think of the forward advance of technology as a car, we are stepping down hard on the accelerator or, more accurately, on three accelerators at once.
Accelerator No.1: Processing Power – We all know Moore’s Law: computer processing power doubles every eighteen months. Those gains in speed have historically been obtained by shrinking processor components, but many of these have already reached microscopic levels; leaving developers few options for further reductions. So does that mean processing power will plateau? Not a chance.
For example, scientists have found that DNA nanostructures (about one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair) can serve as scaffolds for the assembly of computer chips. The process involves placing a long, single strand of viral DNA in a solution with short, synthetic strands. The large molecule self-assembles into various configurations, folding itself into a square, triangle, or other two-dimensional shape, with the short segments acting as “staples.” The structures are positioned precisely on a silicon wafer using electron-beam lithography and oxygen plasma etching.
Carbon nanotubes, nanowires, and other microscopic components can then be assembled on the scaffold to create complex circuits that are much smaller than any conventional semiconductors. Dubbed DNA origami, this breakthrough is one of many that will maintain an increase in processing power well into the future.
Another radically different method will be to access the processing power of a remote supercomputer from our smart phone or tablet. The processing power of our computing device will be less important with processing-power-as-a-service (PPaaS).
Accelerator No.2: Bandwidth – Today bandwidth is lightning fast compared to a few years ago, but it’s accelerating even faster than the doubling of processing power. We think websites are sophisticated today because we have high-quality graphics that load quickly, and even streaming video. But tomorrow it will be common to have 3D web sites that allow you to walk a virtual tour of your store, new house, or vacation site, in real time.
The acceleration in bandwidth that made possible outsourcing to India and ushered in a multimedia Web was generated mainly by advances in fiber optic technology, which translated into a huge increase in speed and doubling potential, as compared to glacially slower copper wire. Increasing these fiber optic strands’ capacities doesn’t require laying down new fibers, it only requires innovation in the switching units at the ends of each cable. In other words, we can easily multiply the capacity of our existing network by orders of magnitude without any substantial new investment in the infrastructure.
Accelerator No.3: Storage – Even as processing power and bandwidth climb at ever-increasing rates, the increase in our tools’ capacity to store all the information from that increased processing and bandwidth is going through an even steeper, more dramatic change.
My first computer didn’t even have a hard disk drive. Today, data storage capacity is so huge it’s almost unlimited and so cheap it’s practically free. That’s the continuing impact of the third digital accelerator: The capacity to store digital data is doubling every 12 months — faster than the increase in both bandwidth and processing power — and remote storage using cloud services provides us with almost limitless capacity.
While current laser technologies are continually increasing the amount of data stored by using shorter and shorter wavelengths of light, they are limited by the nature of their two-dimensional design. But scientists at GE are looking at new ways of increasing storage capacity using holographic principles. They have developed specialized polycarbonate materials that “write” data to a disk by chemically altering the composition of the material when exposed to specific types of laser light. This method allows them to use the entire volume of the recording medium instead of just the visible surface, permitting two hundred times more data to be recorded on the same size disk. Because surface area is no longer a factor, the size and shape of the media can be more flexible. And data retrieval is considerably faster with the use of parallel reading schemes.
You could someday store your entire movie collection on one DVD. But you probably won’t because, as you may have already begun to notice, even DVDs will soon be obsolete. After all, who buys CDs anymore? We download our music direct from iTunes. My current laptop doesn’t even have a hard drive. It uses solid-state memory chips with no moving parts. My data is sitting on a server I’m linked to on the “cloud.” And that’s today. What about tomorrow?
Here comes the “Big One”
As dramatic as the technological changes produced by these three accelerators have been up until now, they are only a hint of what lies ahead.
With bandwidth accelerating even faster than processing power, and storage capacity accelerating faster still, all three digital accelerators are coming together like a “perfect storm” to create an enormous force of transformation that is shooting up and off the charts of conventional expectations.
We are about to put the pedal to the metal.