Five drivers of change

Human history is accelerating. In the four billion years of our planet's existence, all known species date back less than a hundred million years, man less than a million years, the oldest drawing on a cave wall 30,000 years. Just 500 years ago, the invention of the printing press accelerated the spread of knowledge; 200 years separate us from the steam engine that sparked off the Industrial Revolution. At 50 years old, the computer seems like a youngster. And yet, how can we compare the first computer (50 tons, 25 kilowatts, a few thousand memory locations, a hundred instructions per second) with the Pentium microprocessor in 1995 (a few grams, 25 watts, 32 megabytes of memory, 100 million instructions per second)? Ten years later, in 2015, a cell phone weighing less than 200 grams that fits in your pocket integrates 4 to 8 processors 20 times faster than the Pentium with 150 times more...