From Steam to Silicon: Patterns of Technological Revolutions (opens in new tab)

Is "Cloud -> Edge", important enough to warrant mentioning on such a chart?

Edge makes sense in a few cases. But many services will be fine running in a single cloud region.

Do anyone really see a mass migration here?

I think the writer should have also taken a moment to reflect on the underlying _need_ that led to these revolutions. Each need is implicit to what's discussed in the table, but would be useful to help frame the discussion of the underlying questions that are discussed. For instance, going from IR3 -> IR4 created a _need_ of information management, where Google was the first major player in providing search as that means, now agents are taking the role of search & retrieval as a single action.

An interesting thing to look at is the result of different revolutions on the people that were displaced

Here's an interesting example: https://journals.uwyo.edu/index.php/workingclassstudies/arti...

> In the table below, I have summarized the pattern for the agricultural, financial, and four industrial revolutions

When you zoom out further, you might mark humankind’s progress a little differently like Yuval Harari does in Sapiens:

1. Cognitive Revolution (~70,000 years ago)

  • Rise of abstract thinking and complex language

  • Enabled shared myths and large-scale cooperation

2. Agricultural Revolution (~10,000 years ago)

  • Shift from foraging to farming

  • Led to food surpluses, social hierarchies, and sedentary life

3. Unification of Humankind (last few thousand years)

  • Formation of empires, 

global religions, and trade networks

  • Created large-scale political and cultural systems

4. Scientific Revolution (~500 years ago)

  • Birth of modern science and empirical inquiry

  • Fueled technological progress, capitalism, and global dominance