The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s

by Mark P. Mills

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming.

The 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 an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology 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 all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling 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’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres―information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times.

We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.

Genres: Technology, Nonfiction, Economics, Business, Stem, Science

464 pages, Hardcover

Published November 2, 2021

Reviews

[John A · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Mark Mills first book The Bottomless Well. No less than Bill Gates described it as his favorite book on energy. The Cloud Revolution is just as powerful even without the contribution of his previous co-author Peter Huber.

I have now read the book twice and have taken extensive notes. Some of the most powerful insights are that the Cloud is accelerating Moore’s Law. Another great insight is the power of the Cloud is magnified by information, new materials and machines. An example of the deep structural change enabled by the cloud is scientific instruments infused with software like the cryogenic electron microscope. I was shocked to learn that “Nearly as many papers about AI and biology were published in 2020 as the previous two decades combined.”

I also learned that where Intel makes CPUs valuable for computation that Nvidia makes GPU’s that are valuable for inference and enable AI and machine learning. That insight a decade ago might have prevented me from the genius move of buying the stock at $8 and selling it at $12.

Lastly, for me the most insightful quote from the book is, “The ability to share, store and analyze data in real-time enables the application of machine learning and AI helps researchers find subtle changes or phenomena in natural ways rather than the static environment of a laboratory. It is a distinction with a profound difference.”

You undoubtably will get more germane insights to your field of pursuit but the book is excellent and inspiring.

[Cary Bullock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional perspective on how technology drives our future

As all good prognosticators do, Mills starts with the past and argues a model of episodic leaps in progress as the confluence of disparate developments to synthesize a world of new possibilities. By providing numerous examples he builds a foundation for arguing that the seminal separate trains converging today are the progress in AI development, the interconnectedness afforded by the Cloud and the shared of massive computational resources. In ending he discuss the conflict between mission driven R&D and curiosity driven research, and argues that funding today is skewed towards the former. Mills challenged my thinking in several areas and will lead me to rethink some of my beliefs. I recommend this book highly.

[Ronald J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and host of the new podcast The Last Optimist. He is also author of Digital Cathedrals (2020), and Work in the Age of Robots. Mills earlier coauthored (with Peter Huber) The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a great historical look at new technologies and how they drive economic change. He writes, “Belief is the wellspring of dynamism and innovation.” He adds: “If you believe innovation has slowed, only a handful of winners, the case for managed growth emerges. Both innovators and politicians matter. The former are the creators, the latter either enablers or impediments. Both technology and culture matter” as well. Revolutions happen at the intersection of three spheres: Machines, Materials, and Information, what he labels Rule of Threes. He points out that AI is the most data hungry and power intensive use of silicon yet invented, doubling every several months, outpacing a Moore’s Law. There’s many fascinating facts, such as the ten biggest datacenters contain more square footage than do the ten biggest skyscrapers, and each square foot of datacenters inhales 100 times more electricity than an equivalent foot of a skyscraper. And, “Humanity now fabricates over 10,000 times more transistors annually than the number of grains of wheat and rice, combined, grown by all the world’s farms.” Mills is a realist and debunks many myths about electric vehicles and renewable energy. For example, A 100-times growth in EVs to 400 million would displace about 5% of global oil demand—and we can’t get to 400 million EVs without trillions of investment. Nonetheless, Mills is an optimist and this book is a confirmation of Arthur C. Clarke’s “law” that any sufficiently advanced technology beings to look like magic. Little wonder Mills is predicting another roaring 20s decade in the 21st century.

We had the good fortune of interviewing Mark Mills on The Soul of Enterprise, episode #431. https://www.thesoulofenterprise.com/431

[Wm Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The future is now, it is here, it is digital, revolutionary and built on the platforms of AI and Cloud computing utilizing more bytes (and energy) than nomenclature has established !

It is hailed as the next Industrial Revolution which will facilitate important advancements and fundamentally change the way societies experience health, education, work, science and entertainment. And in Mills’ tour de force, a vast, new digital information highway needs to be built to accommodate transport of this commodity as the robber barons of the earlier 20th century Industrial Revolution previously built.

Mills calls out the current tech barons to participate in this visionary legacy by creating these information highways not for even near term profit but long term public/private investment solely out of curiosity and potential for unrealized future orders of gain for society. After all, historically, the interdependence, interconnectedness and creational eventuality of the ‘law of threes’ is a recognized phenomena that has not easily or with high success, been predictable. Revolutions take time and are stimulated with ideas, discoveries, theorems etc etc often times generations and perhaps hundreds of years later until convergence.

Mill’s thinking and writing as usual is cutting edge, insightful, optimistic, rigorous and predictive of a near and distant future for AI and Cloud computing technology which shifts productivity curves into a renewed US/global order and wealth. Must read for an understanding of where the human and non human bots are headed in the 21st century and how they will be driven !

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent predictive analysis and forecasting on the impact of cloud technology. Lays out how cloud is really the mechanism by which we're getting AI and other innovations as a part of a suite of technologies that enable each other. Very interesting and comprehensive laydown of the impacts and likely results over the next 10-20 years.

[Nicolas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall a disappointing book.

The first half is particularly tough to go through, mostly because of a series of seemingly pointless numbers and discoveries that do not lead anywhere and leave you with a “so what?”.

The second part of the book is a bit better, with more conclusions and a more consistent storyline.

Overall the role of Cloud as an enabler for the next level of tech revolution is somewhat vaguely explained, but not very strongly marked.
The Cloud is a piece of it, definitely not the central piece.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. I picked this up to learn about the cloud and telecoms. Apart from one cloud-computing chapter at the beginning, the rest of the book was too focused on history for my current interests. If you are looking for a tour de tech history (many sorts), like a Sapiens, then I think this is a good book for you. My copy also had a lot of typos.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books was ok. Illuminating on a lot of new tech. There are many grammatical errors probably due to the conversion to Kindle.

[Tirath · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing really in the book. Just a lot of generic information.

[Paul Oh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Non-Fiction: Future Trends 01/06/25 - 01/19/25

[Benjamin Hare · Rating 4 out of 5]

A densely packed, well researched work about the monumental importance that "warehouse scale computing" has already had, and will continue to have in the next twenty years. Mills is a respected and credentialed expert in the field of energy policy with multiple books and articles to his name. He's enthusiastic about microprocessors, energy, physics, materials science, the history of industrial progress in the West, and American excellence, all of which bleed through in his lucid prose. Few people can write so clearly about the importance of energy, be it hydrocarbons, wind, or solar. I read the print version of the book, then listened to the audio version (narrated by Steve Menasche) in the hopes of increasing my understanding of the text. The book is filled with facts and figures that will make you a smash hit at your next cocktail party, particularly if the guests are left-leaning, anti-industrial types.