Talking about the future is always a very complex subject, but no less exciting, so to determine what the next trend or "Wave of the Future" as Alvin Toffler (a famous writer who used to write a lot about future) called it, is a controversial subject. However, we can do a small retrospective study of how we have evolved as a society to try to somehow describe some future trends.
Alvin Toffler divides this social evolution into three waves or fundamental stages, he defines them as the great tendencies that have characterized humanity, so 10,000 years ago, the man was of course, a primitive being who lived from hunting, fishing and harvesting, so begins this first stage called contact with our environment and the land was our sustenance when we began to cultivate it and make the most of this fundamental fact, defining what we could call the first revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, in this form man basically maintained his way of living around agriculture and its derivatives, he continued to improve his methods of cultivation and with it he created a way of life and society.
There is a change, a turning point in the eighteenth century, around the year 1760 are events that we can describe as the beginning of what would be the second revolution for humanity or second wave, we are talking about the Industrial Revolution, and this had its epicenter in Great Britain, but it spread to the more advanced countries, and in this point I would like to emphasize that the key element was technology, the steam engine appears, the spinning and weaving machines; which changed all the ties that kept society in harmony, which lived under the sign of the agricultural revolution, because the irruption of machines, prompted the creation of industries, of course this transformed the economic relations maintained by the men of that time and the society.
In this way new forms of thinking and behavior emerged, which would revolve on the basis of prevailing technology, the era of large factories with their chimneys, the appearance of the locomotive as a way of transport, which shortened the great distances and create a whole new way of life and interaction between men, who although they felt they were part of a more advanced society, produced two world wars, in which all the devastating power of this wave of humanity was demonstrated. We can say that the domain of this stage lasted until the beginning of the decade of the 50's of the twentieth century.
The Third wave is characterized as its predecessors with the irruption of a new technology and We can say that this one was represented by the invention of the Transistor, key element for the development of electronics, and all the power that it represented, its appearance on the electronic computer, and with the famous empirical law of Moore, which has been keeping its prediction since the begging, this law basically says: that the speed of computers will always grow and the number of transistors that can be integrated into a single chip will double every 18 months, this statement was originally given by Gordon E. Moore, in 1965, Moore was founder of the company INTEL, a leading company in the manufacture of microprocessors for computers.
But it is interesting that although we have marked the beginning of the third wave in the 50's of the twentieth century, its influence and penetration began to feel, or was already indecisive at the beginning of the 1980's, and this is very interesting, because we have a lapse where humanity was under the influence of a trend that was coming to an end, but that refuses to die and the consolidation of a revolution that is gradually gaining strength and gaining control, in this case the third wave.
Every new wave presents its technology and the product that it can get, so We can see desktop computers appearing late in the 80's, and the company Apple is a pioneer in that sense, surprising giants like IBM who, although they made computers, they did not think about the evolution that these could have as teams of desks, were under inertia and felt safe. Here it is important to note that the revolution that represents each step of the future may be under a new technology but this can take many forms of exploitation and use and this defines the maturity that is achieved by the changes involved in the use of technology, in order to these IBM had taken the step to be a company of the third wave in the 80's of the twentieth century, but had not exhausted all the benefit that this stage represented, that is, made mainframe computers, but did not think of desktop computers until it was surprised by Apple, this serves as an example to comment on how the future, despite being defined by a technology, it can have many ways to shape it.
For many connoisseurs what we have just defined as the third wave, they also classify it as the information and bits age, this is more visible with the appearance of the World Wide Web, or the Internet graphic, from 1990, we remember that the Internet of only text existed in the middle of 1960.
It is important to mention that the development of systems that manage information has been developed in such a way that they have given way to a number of techniques and advances around it, so we have unprecedented advances in: genetics, neuroscience, telecommunications, computing , medicine, aeronautics, astronomy, computer data management, etc. This indicates that the next wave will be marked by multidisciplinary advances, which will radically change our thinking, ways of interacting, working and having fun. It is an exciting subject and we will cover it in an upcoming writing.