| A New Paradigm Underway The new paradigm follows the priorities of Nick Tredennick's "leading-edge wedge"— seeking to reconcile three incompatible goals: - Zero delay or latency (fast hot chips for supercomputer processing)
- Zero power (cool low energy devices with unending battery life)
- Zero cost (free transistors and bandwidth).
Tredennick ordains: Waste bandwidth to conserve power (the relevant power supply is your smartphone battery, not the grid). Waste bandwidth to save silicon area (the relevant space is the constricted smartphone cavity, not the giant datacenter). And waste bandwidth to minimize cost by putting nearly all the functionality in a one-chip-system manufactured by the billions and interlinked around the globe (rather than buying billions of chips and jamming them together on those datacenter racks). This trend can be summed up as moving computation from the datacenter to the "edge." This advances the goals of zero delay, zero power, and zero cost. From steam engines and coal providing power and replacing human muscle, to transistors replacing human rote calculations, to lasers and fiber optic lines multiplying bandwidth, technology continually supplies new abundances for entrepreneurs to exploit. But the political world prefers to obsess about possible scarcities. Reflecting this deceptive salience of scarcities, materialist superstitions such as Marxism and environmentalism lead to zero-sum assumptions of economic reality. A gain by one party is always assumed to mean a loss by another; gains and losses always add up to zero. Larger populations always burden the planet rather than increase the abundance of creative minds to enhance it. The economists' stress on scarcity also springs from professional biases. Shortages are measurable and end at zero. They constrain an economic model to produce a calculable and deterministic result. Abundances, by contrast, are difficult to calculate and have no obvious cap. They tend to end in a near-zero price and thus escape economics altogether. As they become more vast and vital — like air and human creativity — they become invisible economically. Economists relegate them to the category of "externalities," which are not their department. Socialists move in eagerly to take them over for governments. My critic from Purdue, Habi Zhang, points out that the entire field of economics seeks this predictability and determinism. Thus, economists will reject my information theory of economics with its stress on unpredictable abundances. Information theory, after all, defines information as surprising or unexpected knowledge. Therefore, deterministic sequences bear no information. Today's Prophecy To the extent that economics is deterministic — it can surely predict the future from the past — it cannot anticipate the most important economic events as defined by their information content or entropy. These events are entrepreneurial inventions springing from human creativity, which always come as a surprise to us. So, paradigms cannot determine the future. The future will nearly always surprise us. But paradigms can point us where to look. As Japanese futurist Taichi Sakaiya wrote, echoing Carver Mead: "Survival dictates that human beings develop ethics and aesthetics that favors exploiting fully those resources that are abundant and economizing on what is scarce." A good way to tell the difference is to recognize that the ultimate scarcity is time and that real money is tokenized time. The goal of economic activity is to waste resources, which are always abundant, to save time, which is inexorably scarce. Ultimately, limiting time are the speed of light and the span of life. Today, with "sustainability" cults and notions of "peak" physical resources (name your favorite exhaustion theory) we are in danger of doing the opposite. We are pursuing a fools' errand, wasting our precious minds and minutes in order to conserve infinitely abundant and eternal atoms and frequencies. Investors should always seek entrepreneurs who are tapping new abundances of technology, rather than nursing old scarcities and materialist superstitions. Regards, 
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy P.S. Please take a second and watch this interview between my publisher and the man who called the market crash of 2008 to a "T" — fellow Laissez Faire editor Graham Summers. History seems to be repeating itself, and Graham has a profit system that is thriving with an outstanding 81%-win rate. The details behind his success are in this brief video interview. Click here to watch it. | 
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