TechnologyCycles.org explores how technological revolutions transform industries, economies, and societies, and how their productive capabilities become the foundations for new wealth. Building on the work of Nikolai Kondratiev, Joseph Schumpeter, Christopher Freeman, Carlota Perez, and W. Brian Arthur, the site traces the history of technology-cycle thinking and examines the innovations, infrastructure, investments, institutions, and people behind successive revolutions. My own framework identifies six technology supercycles, each developing through five overlapping waves of innovation. The sixth, Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, began in 2022 and remains in its early development. A central purpose of this research is to understand the middle-class ecosystem that made these advances possible and the economic conditions that determine how their benefits are shared. The longer-term ambition is to organize the historical evidence into a connected knowledge foundation for AI-assisted economic analysis, testing, and scenario research. The sections below provide the starting points.
Five great technological revolutions have transformed the productive capabilities of modern societies since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Drawing on Carlota Perez’s historical framework, TechnologyCycles.org now examines a sixth supercycle: Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, beginning in 2022.
Our five-wave model explores how successive innovations, infrastructure, industrial capabilities, and institutional changes combine within each supercycle. Understanding these relationships can help us examine how new wealth is created, why its benefits are unevenly distributed, and what may emerge next.
New to technology cycles? This primer explains the ideas behind long waves, the five historical technological revolutions studied by Carlota Perez, and the larger six-supercycle framework developed here. It introduces Installation, Turning Point, and Deployment without assuming that each revolution follows an exact calendar.
Long-wave theories have accumulated competing chronologies, simplified diagrams, and sometimes misleading descriptions. The historical distinction matters: Carlota Perez documented five completed or ongoing great surges beginning in 1771. TechnologyCycles.org builds upon that foundation and identifies generative AI in 2022 as the beginning of a proposed sixth supercycle.
Our four-part history follows the contributions of Nikolai Kondratiev, Joseph Schumpeter, Christopher Freeman, and Carlota Perez, showing how the focus moved from recurring economic fluctuations to the technologies, financial systems, and institutions that transform economies.
The research draws on four major contributors to the history of technology-cycle thinking: Nikolai Kondratiev, Joseph Schumpeter, Christopher Freeman, and Carlota Perez. Their different approaches help explain how long economic movements, innovation clusters, productive systems, and financial and institutional change became parts of a wider historical interpretation.
Can the relationships among innovation, capital, infrastructure, adoption, and economic change be represented mathematically? This section explores proposed equations and model structures inspired by technology-cycle theory. They offer ways to organize the underlying relationships and questions. Their usefulness as predictive tools must be tested against historical evidence rather than assumed from mathematical form alone.
My interest in technological supercycles grew out of more than four decades working in technology, including 27 years at IBM. In strategy and solution development, I used the changing capabilities of computing, networks, software, and global production to understand where businesses and industries were heading. This personal history explains why I found Perez’s framework so useful in practical business strategy.
Keynesian, Monetarist, Austrian, and Marxist approaches ask different questions about growth, money, markets, crises, and economic power. Evolutionary economics and technology-cycle theory add another dimension by examining how innovations reorganize productive capabilities over time. Comparing these approaches helps clarify both the contributions and the limits of each when explaining industrial transformation.
The Singularity Stacks assemble historical innovations, improvements, and research references across Perez’s five historical technological revolutions. Readers can explore the material chronologically, within each revolution, or structurally, comparing recurring dynamics such as infrastructure, market formation, standardization, and institutional change.
This growing, AI-assisted and curated library is a foundation for future research into technology dependencies and economic development. Source coverage varies, and individual references should be checked before scholarly use. Research on the sixth AI supercycle will be added as it develops.
