But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.
THE humbling fall to earth of the high-technology industry the last 18 months has brought a series of changes, from the reduced value that the stock market places on many companies to a more sober view of information technology's power to transform the economy and the culture.
His colleague at the Kennedy School at Harvard, Joseph Nye, said, "The fact that information technology decentralizes power and puts it in the hands of individuals scattered around the world means you are going to need a lot of people who will cooperate with you".
This counterintuitive effect shows that the full impact of information technology on power markets can be significant and difficult to anticipate.
Reason: not some feel-good carbon-gas-concerned greenness, but, for businesses like the energy-hogging information technology and power generation industries, billions of dollars of potential cost savings.
Ken Cornelius, president and chief executive of Siemens One, an Atlanta-based subsidiary of the German parent company, says Siemens can provide up to 40percentt of the goods and services needed to build a new hospital, for example, ranging from medical imaging equipment and information technology systems to power systems and building automation equipment.
Tweaking heating, cooling and pumping systems to shave even a few percentage points off peak consumption can save a lot of money, which utility firms can then pass on to their customers.EnerNOC's shopping spree also reflects the growing importance of information technology in the power industry.
Companies such as Cisco and Siemens are adding robust information technology infrastructure to power these emerging feedback systems.
If you generalise Moore's Law from chips to simply thinking about information technology and processing power in general, Moore's Law becomes the latest in a long line of technical rules of thumb that explain extremely regular changes in technology over the last few centuries.
President Barack Obama and the Democrats are betting a $4.5 billion slice of their economic stimulus package on the development of the smart grid, a futuristic mix of information technology and traditional power lines that would cut electricity demand, manage the energy produced by vast wind farms and give utilities the capacity to someday recharge millions of electric vehicles.
