From Steam to Silicon: Patterns of Technological Revolutions

From agriculture to AI, each major economic revolution is driven by a new kind of value conversion: a way of transforming one type of value into another. These revolutions are not defined by a single invention, but by a sequence of innovations: a core conversion, the infrastructure to scale and distribute various innovations, and the technologies that reduce the cost of distance and delays. We shall analyse six major revolutions through this lens and show how each laid the groundwork for the next. Technological revolutions There are seven key components to each technological revolution: Core conversion: a new capability that transforms one form of value into another. Value can be either tangible (e.g. natural resources and goods) or intangible (e.g. trust, information, and actions). Scaling infrastructure: physical systems that make the conversion repeatable and cost-efficient at scale. Spatiotemporal compression: tools that shrink the cost of distance or time in the economy by i) ... Read full article.