Der kommende technologisch getriebene Boom

sehen im Wall Street Journal eine Boomphase kommen, die auf drei Technologien fusst, die in ihren Auswirkungen so wichtig wie Telefonie und Elektrizität sein werden.

1. Technologische Entwicklung: Informationstechnologien und Big Data:

Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the „cloud“—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

2. Technologische Entwicklung: Smart Manufacturing und 3D-Printing:

This is the first structural shift since Henry Ford launched the economic power of „mass production.“ While we see evidence already in automation and information systems applied to supply-chain management, we are just entering an era where the very fabrication of physical things is revolutionized by emerging materials science. Engineers will soon design and build from the molecular level, optimizing features and even creating new materials, radically improving quality and reducing waste.

Devices and products are already appearing based on computationally engineered materials that literally did not exist a few years ago[..]

This era of new materials will be economically explosive when combined with 3-D printing, also known as direct-digital manufacturing—literally „printing“ parts and devices using computational power, lasers and basic powdered metals and plastics. Already emerging are printed parts for high-value applications like patient-specific implants for hip joints or teeth, or lighter and stronger aircraft parts. Then one day, the Holy Grail: „desktop“ printing of entire final products from wheels to even washing machines.

Die Implikationen sind enorm:

The era of near-perfect computational design and production will unleash as big a change in how we make things as the agricultural revolution did in how we grew things. And it will be defined by high talent not cheap labor.

3. Technologische Entwicklung: Internet und Kommunikation:

The implications of the radical collapse in the cost of wireless connectivity are as big as those following the dawn of telegraphy/telephony. Coupled with the cloud, the wireless world provides cheap connectivity, information and processing power to nearly everyone, everywhere. This introduces both rapid change—e.g., the Arab Spring—and great opportunity. Again, both the launch and epicenter of this technology reside in America.

Die Autoren sehen den Boom vor allem in den USA, die mit ihren Unternehmen an den vordersten Fronten stehen.

Bleibt die Frage, ob auch wir hier in Deutschland und Europa direkt, statt ’nur‘ indirekt von den kommenden Veränderungen profitieren werden. Also werden wir auch eigene Epizentren bauen können oder werden wir nur Peripherie sein? Die Entwicklung der aktuellen Internetwirtschaft und die Ignoranz der hiesigen Politik gegenüber technologischen Entwicklungen und wirtschaftlichen Möglichkeiten deutet auf letzteres.

Egal, wie stark er wo seinen Ursprung finden wird, der Boom wird nur von einem Umstand zurück gehalten: Einer für den Rest der Wirtschaft toxischen Finanzwelt.