In the tradition of two now classic international bestsellers: Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends (1982), Saylor’s The Fifth Wave aims to distill a variety of changes in the global marketplace that we can all see and feel into a coherent framework for understanding the future that is about to unfold.The Fifth Wave argues that mobile intelligence is the fifth great computer wave, and that the implications of the mobile devices we so commonly carry, whether Blackberry, iPhone, or Droid are just beginning to evolve. For instance, after Guglielmo Marconi invented radio, people viewed it as a new kind of telegraph, communicating from point to point. Broadcasting didn’t come to mind. Today, we tend to see mobile the same way, as the desktop Internet transferred to your hand. But mobile intelligence will be far more transformational than any of the four computing waves that preceded it — mainframe, mini, PC, and PC with Internet — and it will create tremendous disruption for those who fail to grasp its significance and tremendous opportunities for those who do.Soon it will be cheaper to learn to read with a tablet computer than paper. That means every literate person on the planet will have a mobile device from age three or four, will use one all their lives, and will carry it everywhere. Over five billion people will always be on the network. Mobile will turn retail into theater, make a Harvard-level education accessible to everyone, and bring the global information flow to the most backward village in Africa. Ultimately, we’ll live amid so much information we’ll need a new Google to search our surroundings.The Fifth Wave will show — as its subtitle suggests — “how mobile intelligence will change everything.”
