The Next Tidal Wave in Advances

I was reading Business Week Online, and came across an interesting article...and excerpt is below;

Today, the signs around us are just as difficult to read, but, as Yogi Berra once remarked, "You can see a lot just by looking." What will be the next half-century's all-transforming technology? And who will reap the riches to become the next Bill Gates?

SIGNS OF CHANGE. I believe the answer lays in the confluence of three heretofore largely separate trends:

• The evolution of semiconductor-manufacturing capabilities and products into nanoscale dimensions.
• The increasing ability of biochemists to engineer genetic material at the molecular (nano) level.
• The exponential growth of computer simulations permitting the design of clusters of atoms at the nano dimension.

For decades, each trend evolved separately. But today, these trends have come together, amplifying each other's capabilities and forming the nucleus of what I call the 3N revolution.

SIZZLING SYNERGIES. Why these three trends?
First, they are each attracting huge numbers of very smart scientists and engineers from around the world -- and one should never underestimate the potential of combined intellectual horsepower.
Second, all three trends are already beginning to overlap in highly productive ways. The gene chips from a company like Affymetrix rely on semiconductor processing in their manufacture, new materials are now made directly in the computer rather than empirically on the lab bench, and the Human Genome Project depended as much on high-speed numerical analysis as on wet chemistry.