ABOUT
About TechnologyCycles.org
Understanding the Past, Recognizing the Present, and Preparing for the Next Technological Revolution
TechnologyCycles.org was created to explore one of the most consequential forces shaping human civilization: the recurring technological revolutions that transform how societies produce wealth, organize work, build industries, and develop their economies.
For more than four decades, I worked in the technology industry, much of that time developing business strategies and bringing new technology offerings to market. Throughout that career, I became increasingly interested in a question that conventional business strategy often failed to address: where are we in the larger evolution of technology, and how does that position determine which investments, industries, and business opportunities will succeed?
The answers led me to the research of economists Nikolai Kondratiev, Joseph Schumpeter, and, most importantly, Carlota Perez. Their work provided a historical framework for understanding why technological progress occurs through extraordinary surges of innovation, investment, and economic transformation.
I began using technology-cycle theory in my business strategies more than 25 years ago. Eventually, that experience led me to create this website as a repository of historical research, economic models, innovations, and reference materials explaining the great technological revolutions.
Over time, the project has grown into something considerably larger.
From Five Technological Revolutions to Six Supercycles
Carlota Perez identified five great technological revolutions beginning with the Industrial Revolution in 1771. Her model explains how each revolution progresses through successive phases of technological development, speculative investment, financial adjustment, and eventual economic deployment.
Her research remains foundational to this website. Yet as I examined the historical development of each revolution, particularly while researching and writing my book about the middle-class ecosystem and the creation of wealth, I began recognizing another recurring pattern.
Each technological revolution appeared to develop through five overlapping waves of innovation and industrial expansion. The capabilities established by one wave enabled subsequent waves to develop, gradually transforming revolutionary inventions into comprehensive systems of production, infrastructure, commerce, and economic activity.
This led me to develop a new five-wave model of technology supercycles that complements Perez’s economic and institutional framework.
It also led to an important disagreement with her interpretation of artificial intelligence. While Perez regards AI as part of the fifth technological revolution, I believe it represents the beginning of a sixth.
The fifth supercycle transformed the processing, storage, and global transmission of information. The sixth is beginning to transform how intelligence itself is applied to productive work, scientific discovery, and increasingly autonomous economic activity.
The five-wave model provides a way to examine how this emerging revolution may develop, from foundation models and autonomous agents to the enormous computing and energy infrastructure required to support AI, AI-driven scientific advances, and ultimately new systems of economic production.
The historical evidence and projected development of these six supercycles are presented in The Six Technology Supercycles: A New Model of How Technological Revolutions Transform Civilization.
Why Understanding Technology Supercycles Matters
Technological revolutions have generated extraordinary increases in productive capacity and human prosperity. They have also repeatedly disrupted established industries, displaced workers, redirected investment, and placed enormous pressure upon economic and political institutions.
The transition between technological eras is particularly difficult because societies have invested so heavily in the infrastructure, institutions, and economic arrangements created during the preceding revolution. Those established systems are often poorly equipped to accommodate the technologies and industrial structures replacing them.
History reveals recurring periods when technological capabilities advance much faster than society’s ability to absorb them.
These difficulties become especially consequential during the turning points between the installation and deployment of a new technological system. Investment patterns change, established industries lose their competitive advantages, financial markets struggle to distinguish productive opportunities from speculation, and institutions face mounting pressure to adapt.
The fifth supercycle has demonstrated how disruptive these transitions can become. Digital technologies enabled the globalization of production, the reorganization of labor markets, and the emergence of enormous platform businesses. While creating unprecedented productive capabilities and wealth, they also contributed to industrial displacement, greater concentrations of economic power, and major changes in the distribution of economic opportunity.
Understanding these developments requires looking beyond individual technologies, companies, and business cycles. The larger technological transformation provides essential context for understanding why changes are occurring and where new opportunities and risks may emerge.
This is why I believe the study of technology supercycles has become more important than ever.
The Middle-Class Ecosystem and the Creation of Wealth
My research has increasingly focused on the relationship between technological revolutions and the middle-class ecosystem that developed alongside them.
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly 800 million people inhabited the Earth, and only a small fraction enjoyed anything resembling a modern middle-class standard of living. By 2025, the global middle class had grown to more than four billion people.
This remarkable expansion represents one of the greatest economic and social transformations in human history.
More importantly, the expanding middle class became a productive force in its own right. Through education, scientific research, skilled labor, public infrastructure, institutional development, entrepreneurship, and expanding markets, successive generations accumulated the capabilities that made each new technological revolution possible.
Every supercycle inherited the productive achievements of the previous ones. Modern technological wealth rests upon centuries of accumulated human knowledge, investment, cooperation, and institutional development.
This raises a question that has become central to my work: if the broad middle-class ecosystem contributes so much to creating the productive foundations of modern wealth, how can that ecosystem continue to prosper as technology and ownership become increasingly concentrated?
Artificial intelligence makes this question particularly urgent. The sixth supercycle promises extraordinary increases in productive capacity, but its benefits will depend upon how societies organize ownership, investment, employment, education, and access to the capabilities being developed.
Understanding technology supercycles may help us recognize these challenges earlier and develop more effective responses.
Building a Knowledge Base for Future AI Modeling
One of the original ambitions behind TechnologyCycles.org was to assemble a historical and analytical knowledge base that could eventually be used to train artificial intelligence systems to recognize, analyze, and model technology supercycles.
That ambition remains central to the project.
The complexity of technological revolutions makes them exceptionally difficult to model using conventional economic methods. Their development involves interacting technological, financial, industrial, political, and social systems, each operating at different speeds and often influencing the others in unexpected ways.
Artificial intelligence may eventually provide new capabilities for studying these relationships across enormous collections of historical and contemporary information.
Imagine AI systems capable of examining the historical development of technological waves, identifying emerging industrial clusters, comparing investment patterns across supercycles, and evaluating how technological change may affect industries, employment, financial stability, and economic opportunity.
Such systems might help businesses recognize emerging opportunities before markets become saturated. Governments could better anticipate infrastructure and educational requirements. Communities could identify potential employment disruptions and prepare for the industries likely to emerge. Researchers could examine why similar economic policies produce very different outcomes depending upon the technological conditions in which they are applied.
The objective extends beyond forecasting which technology will become popular next. It is to develop a better understanding of the interconnected systems driving economic transformation and to use that knowledge to examine alternative paths into the future.
Reliable predictive systems of this kind do not yet exist. Developing them would require extensive historical data, consistent classification methods, rigorous testing, and an understanding of the many forces influencing economic outcomes.
TechnologyCycles.org is an effort to help establish some of those foundations.
Its growing research library includes histories of technological innovations, economic theories, industrial developments, financial transitions, and the social consequences of technological change. Much of the research has been assembled with assistance from AI systems, alongside my own analysis and interpretation. The collection remains an evolving research resource, with further verification and refinement necessary for future quantitative modeling.
The newly developed five-wave framework adds another potential dimension to this work by organizing technological change into successive, interacting clusters of industrial development.
The long-term ambition is to make technological supercycles more understandable, more measurable, and eventually more useful in anticipating economic transformation.
The Economic and Social Value of Better Foresight
What might society gain if it could better anticipate the development of technological supercycles?
For businesses and investors, understanding the progression of technological waves could improve decisions about research, infrastructure, industrial capacity, market entry, and long-term investment. Opportunities that appear promising during the installation of a technology may have very different economic characteristics when that technology approaches maturity.
For governments, improved understanding could support more effective investment in education, infrastructure, scientific research, and workforce development. It could also help policymakers recognize when existing economic arrangements are poorly suited to the productive capabilities emerging around them.
For the vast majority of people, who are the middle class communities, the potential benefits may be even greater.