Technology in Bloom: Implications for the Next 50 Years.

The article focuses on implications of computer technology for the next 50 years. Information technology (IT) has rushed from relays to tubes to transistors to integrated circuits in the past 50 years. Users began processing numbers, and now process data types ranging from text to video to declarative rules. They went from personal computing at the console to batch processing, time sharing, and back to personal computing. Computers shrunk from rack filled rooms, to cabinets in rooms, to desktops, to briefcases and shirt pockets, and users have increasingly come to view them as communication devices. IT has facilitated such activities as the building of atomic weapons and large bureaucracies, the exploration of outer space and DNA, and the Internet. The author hopes for increased food production through improved weather information and biological research, but social factors like the collectivization of farms in China or Vietnam, shifts from subsistence farming to cash crops, or the accumulation of capital and the political will to create megafarms in the U.S. are much more important than IT.