The Roaring 2020s: How the Cloud Will Unleash History's Biggest Economic Boom

When it comes to predicting how technology changes our near future, there are two camps. One says we live at a time of a "new normal" where we've netted all the low-hanging fruit and ordering a ride or food on a smartphone is as good as it's going to get. The other camp sees lots of changes but mainly in destroying jobs and traditional businesses. They're both wrong predicts Mark P. Mills.

History will record the 2020s as one of the rare pivots when technology-driven prosperity goes into high gear. It doesn't come from any single 'big' invention, but from the convergence of radical advances in technologies in three great domains: microprocessors infused into everything; machines used for making and moving everything; and materials, unprecedented and novel ones, from which everything is built. And now the "Cloud," history's biggest and newest infrastructure emerging from the building blocks of next generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence, accelerates progress across all those domains.

We've seen this pattern before. The structure of the technological revolution that drove the 20th century's great economic expansion can be traced to a similar convergence visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). It's true that we've wrung much of the magic out of technologies that fueled the last boom. But last time there was no Cloud. The next boom starts now. And the U.S. is again at the epicenter of these innovations, ones that promise to upend the status quo in manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy and entertainment.