Programmable World #TechVision THE BIG PICTURE We’re building the next version of the physical world. Twelve thousand years ago, new farming techniques and technologies started the Agricultural Revolution. People left hunter-gatherer societies to maintain crops and raise livestock on farms, and they began to command their physical environments to a degree that had never been done before. Deforestation, permanent settlements, This pattern has happened time and again In this world control, customization, and and eventually systems for irrigation all across human history. Major revolutions automation – things taken for granted started to change the face of the world. occur when technology fills the world and in software – will be enmeshed into the transforms our relationship with it, giving environment around us. People will have Millennia later in the 1700s, mass-production us more command and control over our unprecedented ability to command the world machinery, the construction of factories, environment. And just as our physical to meet their own individual needs, deciding and inventions like the steam engine sparked world changes, so does what we do in it. what they see, interact with, and experience the first Industrial Revolution. These new We go from gatherers to farmers; from with greater ease and fidelity than ever before. technologies further transformed our stable hands to machinists; from country- And enterprises will build and deliver these relationship to the physical world. They led dwellers to urbanites. experiences, as well as reinvent their own to the buildup of cities, long-distance operations for a new kind of world. Simply transportation networks, and tunnels and Now, as the real-world impact of the current put, the world is becoming a place that can bridges, turning impassable geological digital revolution begins to hit critical mass, be shaped as broadly, as personally, and as features into main thoroughfares. we are embarking on the next major often as our experiences on the internet – transformation: the programmable world. fundamentally changing the way we live. Introduction // WebMe // Programmable World // The Unreal // Computing the Impossible 42