Word: ages
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have their own Bibles, and for the progress of individual liberties, which became inevitable once information and ideas flowed freely. The transistor and the microchip have cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of more than a million. The result has been a transition from an industrial age to an information age...
That will open the way to the next phase of the digital age: artificial intelligence. By our providing so many thoughts and preferences to our machines each day, they'll accumulate enough information about how we think so that they'll be able to mimic our minds and act as our agents. Scary, huh? But potentially quite useful. At least until they decide they don't need us anymore and start building even smarter machines they can boss around...
...powering the digital age up until now has been Gordon Moore's: that microchips will double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so. Bill Gates rules because early on he acted on the assumption that computing power--the capacity of microprocessors and memory chips--would become nearly free; his company kept churning out more and more lines of complex software to make use of this cheap bounty. The law that will power the next few decades is that bandwidth (the capacity of fiber-optic and other pipelines to carry digital communications) will become nearly free...
...democracies are often maladroit at dealing with minorities that seek group empowerment. The second challenge will be fundamentalism. Capitalism can be cold, consumption oriented and spiritless, alienating those who feel repelled by its modernity and its materialist values. Some will respond by embracing traditional religions or New Age spirituality, but there is also likely to be, especially in the Islamic world, a more fierce religious challenge that rejects individual liberties as well as the materialism that comes with capitalism. Finally, there is the radical environmentalism of the Green movements, which could start seeming less radical and more urgent...
...explain, at least to Adams' comfort, why America was accelerating into the future at such a frightening rate. His theory was eventually published in The Education of Henry Adams but makes less sense today than his brilliant description of the President as perhaps the fundamental motive force of our age: "Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts...Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter--he was pure...