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Computers and telecommunications are general-purpose tools. That means they’ll continue to grow in importance, because they’ll be put to uses that nobody today can imagine. J. Bradford DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that electric power gave U.S. industry an annual horsepower increase from 1880 to 1930 of less than 10% a year. In contrast, since the late 1950s, the total computational power of the world has risen about 84% a year. Even if you assume that a lot of the computing power wasn’t harnessed, that’s a sonic-boom rate of increase. And performance is continuing to improve even during the slump. A temporary excess of cheap and excellent technology is not the worst kind of problem a society could have.

The main idea of the paragraph

Even in the case of slower growth due to a temporary excess of computing technology, computing power is still booming, suggesting a continual increase in productivity, which will lay foundation for further economic growth.

即使由于计算技术暂时出现过剩而导致经济发展放慢，计算能力仍在继续发展，它预示生产力将继续提高，为经济的进一步发展打下基础。

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