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We Are Entering A New Era Of Innovation. Here’s What We Need To Do:
In Mapping Innovation, I wrote that innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and that those three things hardly ever happen at the same time or in the same place. Clearly, the Covid-19 pandemic marked an inflection point which demarcated several important shifts in those phases.
Digital technology showed itself to be transformative, as we descended into quarantine and found an entire world of video conferencing and other technologies that we scarcely knew existed. At the same time it was revealed that the engineering of synthetic biology — and mRNA technology in particular — was more advanced than we had thought.
This is just the beginning. I titled the last chapter of my book, “A New Era of Innovation,” because it had become clear that we had begun to cross a new rubicon in which digital technology becomes so ordinary and mundane that it’s hard to remember what life was like without it, while new possibilities alter existence to such an extent we will scarcely believe it.
Post-Digital Computing Architectures
For the past 50 years, the computer industry — and information technology in general — has been driven by the principle known as Moore’s Law, which determined we could…