"While the United States has spearheaded these developments, they are no longer an 'American' phenomenon."
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Revolutionary Wealth
EXCERPT
Page 6
Embedding Intelligence
Today there are more than 800,000,000 PCs on the planet -- one for every seven or eight human beings.
Today there are well over 500 billion computer chips on the planet. Many contain more than 100 million transistors -- on-off switches -- and Hewlett Packard announces it has found a way to put billions or even trillions of "molecular-size" on-off switches on a single tiny chip.
Today there are something like four billion digital switches clicking on and off for every human being alive on the planet.
Today an estimated 100 billion ever-more-powerful chips deluge the market per year.
In 2002 the Japanese built a computer called the Earth Simulator designed to help forecast global climate changes. It performed 40,000 billion calculations per second -- faster than its seven closest rivals combined. By 2005, IBM had reclaimed the lead with a supercomputer twice as fast, and scientists predict that computers may reach petaflop speeds -- a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second -- by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, the number of Internet users worldwide is estimated at between 700,000,000 and 900,000,000.
Does anyone really think all these chips, computers, companies and Internet connections are going to vanish? Or that the world's 1,400,000,000 mobile phone users are going to throw their phones away? In fact, these, too, are daily morphing into more and more advanced and versatile digital devices.
What we see, therefore, in parallel with the transformation of roles and boundaries in society is the even more rapid transformation in its knowledge infrastructure. Compared with the changes they make possible, everything done so far will seem trifling by comparison. And not just in a few "developed" countries. For while the United States has spearheaded these developments, they are no longer an "American" phenomenon.
Chinese will soon be the mostly widely used language on the Internet. Korean boys and girls now date in thousands of Internet cafes where they play multi-user computer games against counterparts in Denmark and Canada. Costa Rica, Iceland and Egypt export software. Vietnam hopes its software sales will top $500,000,000 in five years.
Brazil counts over 14,000,000 Internet users, and the city of Recife has attracted a cluster of foreign information technology firms, including Microsoft and Motorola, and hundreds of local companies. And, according to a U.N. task force, "The last five years in Africa have seen a mobile phone explosion" and, while the digital divide is still huge, "tele-centers, cyber cafes and other forms of public Internet access are growing rapidly in urban areas..."
In total, according to Digital Planet 2004, the world information technology market exceeds $2.5 trillion a year. It is served by 750,000 companies around the globe. But a lot more change is on its way.
Excerpted from Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. Copyright © 2006 by Alvin Toffler. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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