Conventional wisdom as to how technology will change the future is wrong.
Mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars.
But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive a broad economic boom over the coming decade, one that history may come to know as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in technology’s three domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move everything, are undergoing a complementary transformation. At the center of all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence.
We have wrung much of the magic out of the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. This time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.
“Entertaining and educating while linking history, technology and unusual savvy, Mark Mills’s The Cloud Revolution shows an unprecedented
upcoming convergence of technological forces from whose acquaintance you can’t help but be a much better investor.”
–KEN FISHER
Founder and Executive Chairman of Fisher Investments
Multi-national Columnist and Bestselling Author
“A compelling case for optimism: An economic boom in the immediate future driven by the convergence of three evolving technologies aided by the Cloud. Tons of verifiable data support the case. . . . An antidote to the doomsday scenarios that seem to tint everything today.”
—JULIO M. OTTINO
Dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Northwestern University
“Makes the exciting—and convincing—case that we’re on the cusp of a fantastic new era of technological breakthroughs that will vastly enrich our lives. What a timely— and much needed—antidote to the debilitating pessimism that now reigns.”
—STEVE FORBES
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media
“This is a book about how the future will work. The ‘20s’ will roar because of the new economy made possible by the Cloud. ‘Data is the new oil’ not because it replaces oil but because of the wide range of new industries and innovation it will spawn. This is a book that one will learn much from—and be amazed by.”
—DANIEL YERGIN
Vice Chairman of IHS Markit
Pulitzer Prize-winning Author of The Prize and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
Mark Mills
Encounter Books, published January 2020
Interviews with the Author
Peter Huber and Mark Mills
Basic Books, paperback edition published April 2006
Table of Contents and Preface
FORTUNE: A few quick hits. First: best book you’ve read lately…
GATES: There’s one called The Bottomless Well, about energy, that I love.
—Fortune interview with Bill Gates
“An amazing new book. . . . The lesson of Huber and Mills is that it’s foolish to worry too much about energy, and especially foolish to conserve it. We should spend it—indeed waste it!—because the more energy we use, the more we produce. . . Burn, baby, burn!”
—Smart Money
“Here is an insight of genius: The real source of energy is human intellect. It’s infinitely renewable. It produces no emissions except a puff of CO2 when smart people say, ‘Aha!’ But there can be an energy crisis nonetheless—due to a severe intellect shortage when public policymakers think about energy.”
—P. J. O’Rourke
“This is the book for anyone who deplores ‘group think’ and demands original analysis. The authors by careful research and a clear eye destroy the six myths about energy they say constitutes today’s conventional wisdom . . . . Anyone with an open mind will never think about ‘the energy problem’ quite the same way after reading this powerful and provocative book.”
—Walter B. Wriston, former chairman, Citicorp
“For more than a century, experts have told us we were hitting the Earth’s limits. In every generation, some popular author, usually past his prime, has told us humanity was doomed. All such predictions have been bad bets . . . . Huber and Mills argue that efficiency doesn’t really save energy, because the more energy-efficient we make our appliances and cars, the more appliances and cars we buy. Huber and Mills are right about this so far.”
—Seattle Times
Huber and Mills have caused something of a sensation with the contention that the oil well is bottomless, while trying to counter claims that the planet is now drinking its final drop.”
—Capital Area Coalition
“It’s . . . entertaining to watch these guys unleash on conservationists and to consider the notion ‘that consuming energy is the essence of humanity.’”
—The Week
“This book is a fun and worthwhile antidote to the gloom often found in reports and articles about energy and electricity. Read it—and then start those engines.”
—New York Sun
“An important forthcoming book.”
—National Review Online
“The authors develop intriguing contrarian challenges to the conventional wisdom (improved energy efficiency, they argue cogently, boosts energy demand instead of curbing it) and their discussions of new technologies . . . that may profoundly reshape energy usage is illuminating.”
—Publishers Weekly
“No one with a responsibility for policy—or an interest in it—can grasp the new realities of energy and the environment without mastering the iconoclastic themes and insights of this supremely true and contrarian work.”
—George Gilder, author of Telecosm
“Huber and Mills . . . succeed in a book that is entertaining, fascinating, informative and even visionary.”
—Richard S. Lindzen, Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, MIT
“Peter Huber and Mark Mills wrote one of the best-ever books on energy technologies: The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.”
—Instrumentation, Systems, & Automation Society