- The next revolution will be physical - Five discoveries could invert the course of civilization - The greatest scientists may not yet be born The technology industry has spent the past three years obsessing over what AI might do to jobs, search engines, software development and customer service. Those are important questions, but they may ultimately prove mundane compared to the far greater opportunities beginning to appear over the computational horizon. The real story may not be what AI does to information. The real story may be what AI and quantum computing do to physics. For decades, scientists have understood the broad outlines of many world-changing technologies. The problem has never been imagination. The problem has been complexity. Materials science, chemistry, molecular biology and fundamental physics involve search spaces so vast that even the world's largest classical computers — including today's AI supercomputers — struggle to explore them effectively. AI changes that equation by helping researchers identify promising pathways. Quantum computing, if it achieves its potential, could help model nature itself at a level of precision that conventional computers simply cannot match. The distinction is important. Classical computers, including the vast GPU clusters powering today's AI revolution, simulate reality through approximation. Quantum computers operate according to many of the same quantum principles that govern the molecules, atoms and materials they are attempting to model. Put simply, AI may help us decide where to look. Quantum computing may help us understand what we find. The result could be the greatest acceleration in scientific discovery since the Industrial Revolution. I'm particularly interested in this because of my work around the emerging Integrated Infrastructure Era and its corresponding six-layer model. We can already see parts of that future emerging today. Energy, connectivity, compute, AI and sovereignty are increasingly converging into a single