Go back to the typical household in 1950, and you would see much that you would recognize: washing machines, vacuum cleaners, cars, TVs. But go back 50 years earlier, to 1900, and most of us would find a world that was utterly foreign, and exhausting. Daily chores like cooking and washing took hours of backbreaking labor. That’s because in the early 20th century, electricity and internal combustion completely changed how we live, transforming our cities, our homes, how we shop, eat, work, and just about every other facet of daily existence.

We’re on the cusp of a similar point today, except it is not just two technologies that are poised to change the world, but three of them: gene editing, new computing architectures, and materials science are just beginning to make the leap from lab to market. Taken together, these could be as transformative as electricity and internal combustion, which kicked off a 50-year productivity boom.