Swarna Srinivasan's List: Business

• This fall, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology announced that it had created the world's fastest supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, which clocks in at 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second
• 2.5 petaflops (or 2,500 trillion operations) per second
• For centuries, the military has driven technology forward, fostering new waves of industrialization and corporate use. James Watt's steam engine was perfected with the help of a cannon-boring tool. Computers were created during World War II to calculate artillery firing and to break codes. The military bought half of all semiconductors until the late 1960s. Even the first global-positioning systems (GPS) were funded by Congress, not for navigation but as a nuclear detonation detection system. Add microwave ovens from radar, Blu-ray discs from lasers, or Velcro and Tang from NASA, and there's no doubt how much government acquisition programs have shaped our lives.
• No need to worry anymore. That game (pardon the pun) is over: Welcome to the entertainment-industrial complex.
• Videogames will influence how next-gen workers interact with each other. Call of Duty, a military simulation game, has a mode that allows players to cooperate from remote locations. In World of Warcraft, players form guilds to collaborate, using real-time texting and talking, to navigate worlds presented in high-resolution graphics. Sure, they have funky weapons and are killing Orcs and Trolls and Dwarves, but you don't have to be a gamer to see how this technology is going to find its way into corporate America. Within the next few years, this is how traders or marketers or DNA hunters will work together. No more meetings!
• So why has the military been displaced? For one, capital formation. Governments had the unique capacity to raise (read: tax) the enormous capital needed to fund state-of-the-art projects. But a fully functioning stock market can raise billions for productive commercial applications, bypassing the military connection. Hate Wall Street all you want, but it's now better than wars at driving progress.
• The economy is not going to create wealth just because we print dollars, build fast trains, put up windmills, or even assemble military supercomputers. (For the record, Google has the largest and fastest supercomputer, spread over dozens of data centers.) Even China will someday learn that wealth only comes from productivity. That's found in a different place every cycle—and the stock market will find it first and fund its expansion. So where is it now? It's staring us in the face and amusing us to a better life.

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