Do you believe in magic? An otherworld of incredible new technology.

• Author: Collier, Steve

The exploding power of electronic devices and digital communications is creating a magical new world. This new world is not just about improving things that we already do or making it possible to do things we wish we could. Rather, it is about doing entirely new things that we never before imagined. How is this happening? And how is it changing the expectations of consumers across industries--including rural electric cooperative members? Let's look at it several different ways.

Explosive Change in Technology Results in Powerful "Magic"

The famous science fiction author and futurist, Arthur C. Clarke observed: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We live in a world that even a few years ago would have been considered science fiction ... or magic.

There is steadily accelerating increase in the power of telecommunications and information technologies due to the superposition of several widely acknowledged "laws" of technology advancement:

Moore's Law--Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, suggested in 1965 that electronics performance doubles every year or so at the same price. This has held true ever since, and is projected to continue for decades. His prediction has become the guiding principle for the delivery of ever-more powerful computer chips at steadily decreasing prices. Metcalfe's Law--Robert Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet--a standard of communication widely used for local area networks--observed at about the same time that the performance of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of devices connected. Gilder's Law--George Gilder, controversial best selling technology author and former White House technology advisor, subsequently asserted that bandwidth grows at least three times as fast as computer power. And, in jumps and starts, this has prevailed. Kurzweil's Law--Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in the field of optical character and speech recognition technology and a recognized guru on artificial intelligence, has explained how improvement in computing power in turn facilitates the design of even more powerful computers. This positive feedback loop of innovation continuously accelerates returns. Collier's Law--Indulge me as I suggest that all of the laws noted above are based upon what we already know and are familiar with. What about incredible new developments that we can't even imagine yet? Things that will create quantum leaps in the power and affordability of electronics and telecommunications? Every now and then, technology will leapfrog the hyperexponential change already occurring as a result of the four laws described above. Magic Powers Will Improve Lives

The exponential increase in the capabilities of electronics devices and networks is being matched by accelerating adoption in the market. Consider how long it took for each of the following technologies and applications to attract 50 million users:

Figure 1 Technology Adoption Rates Years to Reach 50 Million Technology/Application Introduced Users Electricity 50 Telephone 50 Radio 38 Personal computers 16 Televisions 13 Cell phones 11 Sony Walkmans (original portable personal 10 stereo player) Video cassette recorders 10 Digital cameras 9 eBay (online shopping and auction website) 6 DVD players (device for playing digital video disks) 5 iPods (market leading brand of portable media player) 5 Internet (worldwide system of interconnected 4 computer networks) iTunes (an online site to download music files 3 for iPods) AOL chat (online site where people can communicate with 2.5 each other in real time via text and voice) Skype (a service that allows voice and video 2 communications over the Internet) Napster (online source of downloadable music) 1.5 MySpace (a social networking website with an interactive 1 network of blogs) The adoption rate for many technologies (e.g., electricity, telephone, radio, TV, cell phones, Internet) was limited by the slow build out of the necessary infrastructure. Once the infrastructure was in place, however, the adoption rate of new applications...