digital technology

is technology characterized by a sustained increase in programmability, in a modular way, which enables increased complexity to be aggregated, codified, and eventually integrated into standardized software platforms.

The final force is subtler but augments and adds power to the first two. It is the sustained increase in programmability, in a modular way, which enables increased complexity to be aggregated, codified, and eventually integrated into standardized software platforms. Put another way, digital 'machines' are fundamentally different from all the other machines that preceded them because one can make these 'machines' do entirely new things without rebuilding them physically, simply by sending them a new codified set of instructions. One can add new capabilities to existing digital devices merely with the addition of software. For example, what your smartphone can do is enhanced every time you download a new app, with no physical changes to the device itself. The increased programmability and modularity of hardware computers, smartphones, and tablets is already having powerful transformative effects on business and society. The addition and improvement of modular layers can enable capabilities and business models that would otherwise not exist.

is technology characterized by the fact that it renders things (music, voice, video, money) as information that becomes amenable to a variety of forms of manipulation and transport.

Let's begin with these three fundamental forces that distinguish digital technologies from the other economy-shaping 'general purpose' technologies that preceded them. The first is the rendering of things as information and, in particular, representing that information digitally. A growing number of 'things' of economic and social importance have 'gone digital.' For example, your money is information about wealth stored in a bank computer, a PayPal server, or the Bitcoin blockchain, and occasionally rendered into physical money bank notes and coins. Music, voice, and video are today translated into digitally represented information about frequency, pitch, color, and their rates of change. A trading strategy today is a set of rules and algorithms that act on information. A commercial drug starts its life as information, and is then rendered into chemicals in a capsule. A growing array of physical products begin their lives as digitally represented designs, which are then converted by a manufacturing process into physical form a chair, a telephone, a piece of jewelry, an airplane for human consumption. Each of these kinds of information can be and is digitized today. Once digitized, this information is amenable to a variety of forms of manipulation and transport.

is technology characterized by the sustained and exponential growth of hardware power, bandwidth, storage, and miniaturization of devices.

A second force is the sustained and exponential growth of hardware power, bandwidth, storage, and the accompanying miniaturization of digital devices. In the 1960s, Gordon Moore made a prediction that the number of transistors on a microchip would double roughly every two years. This now-fabled 'Moore's law,' which was often interpreted as a statement that the price performance ratio of computers would halve every two years, is an empirical rendition of this second force. Although there was some evidence of a slowdown in Moore's law on the hardware front a few years ago, massive parallelization and the move of functionality and reliability to software epitomized by the approach pioneered by Google, and adopted widely by companies including Facebook to build large-scale computing using massmarket hardware and software like Hadoop and Hive continue to sustain the trend of exponential growth in raw digital power.

digital technology, n.All

digital technology