"It is not hard to imagine, within the span of this century, a new economic system emerging that is so different it may no longer look like an "economy" at all. Clearly, there is rapid, qualitative change going on that makes it reasonable to think that we are at the threshold of a very different world economic order. At some point, quantitative difference becomes qualitative. Scientists tell us that chimpanzee genes and human genes are 98 percent identical. That 2 percent difference obviously transformed this planet, and put a few footprints on the rest of the solar system to boot." * Lewis J. Perelman ** http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/l_perelman_1.html ---- The Pillars: * UnlimitedBandwidthCommunication * AutomatedIntelligence * BioTechnology ''Interesting, I would say: * Ubiquitous Computing and Communications * Sustainability * InformationEconomy over the the industrial, physical economy. (cf. CreativeEconomy)'' ---- "TheNewEconomicSystem" sounds like it is already coming, but because it depends on these pillars and though we may imagine them to come about shortly, this may not be so. Some may assume that this will not happen at all or in an indefinite future. YourMileageMayVary. ---- FreemanDyson wrote a book called TheSunTheGenomeAndTheInternet that also discussed three technologies that could revolutionize the economic system. Interestingly, 2 of the 3 (The Genome <=> BioTechnology, UnlimitedBandwidthCommunication <=> The Internet) have parallels on this page. Personally, I think Dyson's guess on the third is more likely than AutomatedIntelligence; we're likely to get much farther letting the 4 billion or so disenfranchized humans think about the few billion dumb computers. -- JonathanTang ---- See also: EndOfEmploymentSingularity