THE THIRD WAVE
Trade and Industry — are studying new technologies to support the service industries of the future. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his advisers speak of struk-turpolitik and look to the European Investment Bank to facilitate the move out of traditional mass production industries.
Today, fgiir r1notmrfi of rnlatriTjndustries are_j3oised for major growth and^jaEe^ikt^^ tries of the TbinrTW0^ tra. bringing with them, once more, major shifts in economic power and in social and political alignments.
Electronic^ imd r”ini”Tl”i’i 1r-u*1y fojT” one such interrelated cluster. The electronics industry, a relative newcomer” on the world scene, now accounts for more than $100 billion in sales per year and is expected to hit $325 billion or even $400 billion by the late 1980’s. This would make it the world’s fourth largest industry, after steel, auto, and chemicals. The speed’ with which computers have spread is so well known it hardly needs elaboration. Costs have dropped so sharply and capacity has risen so spectacularly that, according to Computer-world magazine, “If the auto industry had done what the computer industry has done in the last 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would cost $2.50 and get 2,000,000 miles to the gallon.”
Today, cheap mini-computers are about to invade the American home. By June 1979 some one hundred companies were already manufacturing home computers. Giants like Texas Instruments were in the field, and chains like Sears and Montgomery Ward were on the edge of adding computers to their household wares. “Some day soon,” chirruped a Dallas microcomputer retailer, “every home will have a computer. It will be as standard as a toilet.”
Linked to banks, stores, government offices, to neighbors’ homes and to the workplace, such computers are destined to reshape not only business, from production to retailing, but the very nature of work and, indeed, even the structure of the family.
Like the computer industry to which it is umbilically tied, the electronics industry has also been exploding, and consumers have been deluged with hand-held calculators, diode watches, and TV-screen games.These, however, provide only the palest hint of what lies in store: tiny, cheap climate and soil sensors in agriculture; infinitesimal medical devices built into ordinary clothing to monitor heartbeat or stress levels of the wearer—these and a multitude of other applications of electronics lurk just beyond the present.
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