A weblog that catalogs what's shaping the thinking at the DSB Policy Institute.

Friday, October 24, 2003

DSBPI analysts often argue about what time period will see more change, the last hundred years or the next hundred years. Despite the disconcerting news about the demise of supersonic air travel, the consensus usually falls to the next hundred years side of the debate. That the pace of change is itself getting faster, the change delta as our team says, is a consequence of change itself; namely, the technological inventions of the last hundred years is making new technological inventions faster and easier to create. Communication technology speeds collaboration, simulation technology speeds prototyping and faster processing power puts it all into overdrive. But that is the stuff of evolutionary change. What about revolutionary change, that is, something that is beyond the scope of our ability to predict? DSBPI thinks that any such revolutionary change will come not from the field of information technology (as perhaps it did over the last hundred years) but from biotechnology and genomics. That in the next hundred years, we will look back at the way we practiced medicine at the turn of the millennium and find it closer to the practicioners of the middle ages than the year 2100. This articleabout extending worm lifetimes by 6x the normal sparked this thought.

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