That's what will happen around a quarter-century from now. Next came the industrial ones. The first began in Britain in the 1760s, and the first to finish started unwinding in the U.S. in the early 1950s. We're halfway through the information economy, and from start to finish, it will last 75 to 80 years, ending in the late 2020s. The Internet is the main event of the information economy's mature quarter, the last phase of it being marked by the widespread use of cheap chips and wireless technology that will let everything connect to everything else.
Life cycles overlap.
So the information economy will mature in the years ahead as the bioeconomy completes its gestation and finally takes off into its growth quarter during the 2020s. The bioeconomy opened for business in 1953, when Francis Crick and James Watson identified the double-helix structure of dna. The bioeconomy has been in its first quarter ever since, and completion and publication of the decoded human genome marks the end of this gestation period. We're heading into the second, or growth, quarter, when hot new industries appear, much as semiconductors and software did in the second quarter of the info economy. Thus biotech will pave the way for the bioec era.