The author documents how expanding technical, scientific, and medical databases interface and make rapid, ground-breaking forays into new sciences, education, and specialized fields of study. He describes how biology divided into theoretical and applied disciplines driven by applied math, statistics, computer science, and robotics. Two new fields, bioinformatics and biocomputing, emerged. Users of bioinformatics take gigantic amounts (teraflops and exabytes) of data to predict what biologists will find when they carry out future wet-lab experiments. Since the genome is the world's most powerful compact code and information-processing system, biocomputing specialists may grow computers organically to store and process vast amounts of data on a nano scale; that is, in dome-like structures built on a tiny carbon molecule. Such infinitesimal structures may be able to fix (heal?) themselves. Complete robotic machines the size of a speck of dust may some day work efficiently within the human body. The convergence of minute computer chips, inkjet printers, electron microscopes, optical devices, polishing pads and liquids may enable one to maintain seven-stories worth of electronics which in the form of a chemistry lab could cool, distill, and precipitate in a chip the size of a quarter.

As The Future Catches You spells out important consequences for these unprecedented technological, scientific, and medical (cloning, for example) revolutions. It describes how this knowledge economics quickly encourages wealth, power, and influence for a few and leaves behind more impoverished industrial, undeveloped, and natural resources-only based nations. These consequences historically have led to human rights abuses, losses of freedom, civil wars, terrorism, and severe reductions in education and quality-of-life for the masses. Attention to this book's dynamic content, sobering contrasts, challenging trends and forecasts should be addressed by all readers who care about the future today.