
The future home comes equipped with solar panels that charge home batteries and an electric car. My grandfather loved new technologies. He bought a handheld calculator in the early 1970s for over $50. Over the 30 years that followed, calculators became much more complex, and much, much less expensive. The first calculators had no advantages over the mechanical adding machines of the time, but as prices fell and capabilities improved, the technology became widely adopted and the old adding machine technology largely disappeared. More recently this same phenomenon occurred with cell-phone cameras displacing snapshot cameras. It isn't only individual products that see advances and displacements. In oil production, the cost of oil fracking was so high that it was rarely used,…[READ MORE]