Forget the laws of supply and demand. Stop worrying about the law of diminishing returns, or any of the other iron rules you might find in economic textbooks. In many ways, by far the most important law for the economy over the last 50 years has been a technological one - Moore's Law, the famous prediction by one of the founders of Intel that computing power would double roughly every two years.It has held true for a remarkably long time; the incredible power of cheap micro-chips has underpinned the internet revolution and just about every other form of technology.Chips have continued to get far more powerful, and a lot cheaper, at an incredibly fast rate. That explains why the phone in your pocket packs a lot more punch than a mainframe from the 1980s, and why most people's idea of hell would be to be stuck on a desert island with a machine running Windows 95.We have become used to the idea of rapid advances in technology, and expect it to carry on as it has for the last 50 years. And that has generated vast wealth. On Friday alone, Google added $67-billion (R830-million) to its market capitalisation - the largest one-day gain in history.But nothing lasts forever. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich argued last week that the era of Moore's Law might be coming to an end. In a discussion with analysts, he suggested that, although his firm had "disproved the death" of the law many times, the next generation of microprocessors would take longer to produce. They could no longer double in power every 24 months.Technologists will argue about whether that is actually true - and whether it matters. A new generation of quantum or possibly bio-engineered processors might take over. Or it might well turn out that smarter software, close to artificial intelligence, becomes more important than the chips themselves. We will see what comes out of the labs. Even so, hyper-fast advances in technology have become built into the economy. In reality, the demise of Moore's Law would have a big impact outside computing. But like what? Here are four places to start looking:There will be less innovation.It is not just obviously tech products such as smartphones or internet TVs that will be affected. Ever more powerful computing lay behind the vast expansion of global trade - you can't run "just-in-time" manufacturing systems using dirt-cheap factories in Vietnam, or build ever more efficient robot-dominated factories, or cars that use less fuel, without processors that are continually quicker and cheaper. There won't be as many "new new things".Get ready for higher prices. The great inflation of the 1970s has gradually disappeared. Indeed, these days we worry far more about deflation. Better monetary policy was one reason for that. But the power of computer chips was also part of the story. It drove the relentlessly falling prices of every kind of electronics, so that a new TV ended up costing less than a family meal out. And it lay behind the globalisation of manufacturing, which drove prices down even more. Without that, we might well move back into an economy prone to inflation once again. All it will take is some cheap money to spark those flames.Expect less disruption. The technology industry was very good at creating new companies very quickly - and disrupting established powers. You could see that in retailing, the media, telecoms and, right now, in finance. Old established players suddenly found themselves under siege by brash new companies, and were very quickly fighting for their lives. Even if they survived, they were often much diminished.But if/when technology slows down so will the rate at which old industries get shaken up. The result? The existing global multinationals should be able to increase their lock on the market, with more stable returns and higher profits. And that will make them a better investment.We might well see higher productivity. One of the oddities of the IT revolution was that, contrary to what you might expect, it did not do much to increase output per person. As it has advanced, we have become very bad at producing more. That might be because it generated lots of fairly pointless activity.Or because, while some new industries were created, just as many were destroyed. Whatever the explanation, there is no doubt that it happened. So if technology starts to slow down again, companies might well be able to figure out ways to get productivity rising again. If they can, that will improve living standards.Of course, innovation will always continue. The one thing that entrepreneurs in a free market are very good at is working out new ways of doing things, and figuring out new products for which there will be a demand. But in the next two decades, the economy might not be driven by computing power in the way it was in the past five - and that will change the way it operates far more than most people yet realise. We might even need a law to describe it...