Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Equally important is the entrepreneurial possibility hidden amongst these challenges. One idea that will become clearer as we go along is the notion that the world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities. Along exactly these lines, at Singularity University—the Silicon Valley–based university Peter co-founded with inventor, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil—students study the use of exponential technology to address the world’s grandest challenges. At SU, we believe that the best way to create billions of dollars’ worth of value is to positively impact the lives of billions of people, thus our students are asked to create what are called 109+ (ten to the ninth-plus) companies—that is, companies that can have exactly this kind of billion-person impact.

However bright the vision of abundance, technology alone cannot get this job done. Instead, this vision will require the largest cooperative effort in history. It will require all of us. So let’s get busy.

History’s littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward: scarcity is often contextual. Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit. If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

The point is this: When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.

One in four mammals now faces extinction, while 90 percent of the large fish are already gone. Our aquifers are starting to dry up, our soil growing too salty for crop production. We’re running out of oil, running low on uranium. Even phosphorus—one of the principal ingredients in fertilizer—is in short supply. In the time it takes to read this sentence, one child will die of hunger. By the time you’ve made it through this paragraph, another will be dead from thirst (or from drinking dirty water to quench that thirst).

for the first time in history, our capabilities have begun to catch up to our ambitions. Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.

acting together, amplified by exponentially growing technologies, the once-unimaginable becomes the now actually possible. So what is possible? Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity’s grandest challenge. What follows is the story of how we can rise to meet it.

Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.

By solving our water worries, we’re also alleviating world hunger, relieving poverty, lowering the global disease burden, slowing rampant population growth, and preserving the biosphere. Children will no longer be yanked out of school to gather water and the firewood needed to boil water, so education levels will begin to rise. Since women also waste hours a day running these same errands, providing clean water also betters everything from quality of family life to quantity of family income (because mom now has time to get a job). But the best news is that water is merely one example of this interdependent phenomenon. The solutions to all of our grand challenges are similarly stacked and toppling any of these dominoes sets off a positive chain reaction—which is yet another reason why abundance for all is closer than many suspect.

the two-burner electric cookstove is a simple device, but it would bring magnificent change to the 3.5 billion people who now cook food and get light and heat by burning biomass: wood, dung, and crop residue. According to a 2002 WHO report, 36 percent of acute upper respiratory infections, 22 percent of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and 1.5 percent of all cancers are all caused by indoor air pollution resulting from this practice. Thus an electric cookstove relieves 4 percent of the global disease burden. Ever better—and just like water—the electric cookstove is another example of an interconnected solution. A 2007 UN report found that 90 percent of all wood removals in Africa are used for energy. Thus providing the power to run a cookstove will also help preserve endangered forests and the entire litany of ecosystem services those forests provide. Ecosystem services are things like crop pollination, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water purification, air purification, nutrient dispersal, nutrient recycling, waste processing, flood control, pest control, disease control, and so forth, that the environment provides for us free of charge. This is a big deal for two reasons. The first is that the value of the ecosystems services our environment now provides (for free) has been calculated at $36 trillion a year—a figure roughly equal to the entire annual global economy. The second reason is that—as the $200 million experiment that was Biosphere 2 so clearly ...

The problem is both that there are many places in the world without any education infrastructure and, in those places where it does exist, they rely on a pedagogical framework that is seriously outdated. Most of today’s educational systems are built upon the same learning hierarchy: math and science at the top, humanities in the middle, art on the bottom. The reason for this is because these systems were developed in the nineteenth century, in the midst of the industrial revolution, when this hierarchy provided the best foundation for success. This is no longer the case. In a rapidly changing technological culture and an ever-growing information-based economy, creative ideas are the ultimate resource. Yet our current educational system does little to nourish this resource. Moreover, our current system is built around fact-based learning, but the Internet makes almost every fact desirable instantly available. This means we’re training our children in skills they rarely need, while ignoring those they absolutely do. Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.

A technology now under development, known as Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC), has the potential to solve these problems. Packaged into a portable, cell-phone-sized device, LOC will allow doctors, nurses, and even patients themselves to take a sample of bodily fluid (such as urine, sputum, or a single drop of blood) and run dozens, if not hundreds, of diagnostics on the spot and in a matter of minutes. “It’s a game-changing technology,” says John T. McDevitt, a Rice University professor of bioengineering and chemistry and an early pioneer in the field. “In the developing world, it will bring reliable health care to billions who don’t currently have it. In the developed world, like here in the US—where medical costs go up another 8 percent every year and 16.5 percent of the economy goes to health care—if personalized medical technologies like the lab-on-a-chip aren’t brought to bear on the situation, we’re going to bankrupt the country.” Another upside to LOC technologies is their ability to gather data. Because these chips are online, the information they collect—like, say, an outbreak of swine flu—can be immediately uploaded to a cloud, where it can be analyzed for deeper patterns. “For the first time,” says McDevitt, “we’ll have access to large quantities of global medical data. This will be crucial in halting the spread of new, emerging diseases and pandemics.” Moreover, LOCs are but one such technology currently in development. According to a 2010 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, ...

Kahneman describes the illusion of validity as “the sense that you understand somebody and can predict how they will behave,” but it’s since been expanded to “a tendency for people to view their own beliefs as reality.”

confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions—but it can often limit our ability to take in new data and change old opinions.

And confirmation bias is but only one of a litany of biases impacting abundance. The negativity bias—the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones—sure isn’t helping matters. Then there’s anchoring: the predilection for relying too heavily on one piece of information when making decisions. “When people believe the world’s falling apart,” says Kahneman, “it’s often an anchoring problem. At the end of the nineteenth century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure. People were absolutely panicked. Because of anchoring, they couldn’t imagine any other possible solutions. No one had any idea the car was coming and soon they’d be worrying about dirty skies, not dirty streets.”

Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists and this is an even bigger problem for abundance.

“First, as anchoring shows, there’s a direct link between imagination and perception. Second, we’re control fiends and are significantly more optimistic about things we believe we can control. If I ask you what you can do to get a better grade in math—well, you can imagine studying harder, partying less, maybe hiring a tutor. You have control here. And because of this, your psychological immune system makes you feel overconfident. But if I ask what you can do to solve world hunger, all you can imagine is hordes of starving children. There’s no sense of control, no overconfidence, and those starving children instead become your anchor— and crowd out all other possibilities.” And one of those other possibilities is that we really do have some control over world hunger. As we shall see in future chapters, because of the growth of exponential technologies, small groups are now being empowered to do what only governments once could—including fighting famine. But before we get there, to really understand all the psychological impediments to such progress, we first have to explore how our brain’s architectural design and evolutionary history conspire to keep us pessimistic.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

A desire to better the world is predicated partially on empathy and compassion. The good news is that we now know that these prosocial behaviors are hardwired into the brain. The bad news is that these behaviors are wired into the slower-moving, recently evolved prefrontal cortex. But the amygdala evolved long ago, in an era of immediacy, when reaction time was critical for survival. When there’s a tiger in the bush, there isn’t much time to think, so the brain takes a shortcut: it doesn’t. In dangerous situations, the amygdala directs information around the prefrontal cortex. This is why you jump backward when you see a squiggly shape on the ground before you have time to deduce stick, not snake. But because of the difference in neuronal processing speeds, once our primitive survival instincts take over, our newer, prosocial instincts stay sidelined. Compassion, empathy, altruism—even indignation—become nonfactors. Once the media has us on high alert, for example, the chasm between rich and poor looks too big to bridge because the very emotions that would make us want to close that gap are currently locked out of the system.

“It’s No Wonder We’re Exhausted” Over the past 150,000 years, Homo sapiens evolved in a world that was “local and linear,” but today’s environment is “global and exponential.” In our ancestor’s local environment, most everything that happened in their day happened within a day’s walk. In their linear environment, change was excruciatingly slow—life from one generation to the next was effectively the same—and what change did arrive always followed a linear progression. To give you a sense of the difference, if I take thirty linear steps (calling one step a meter) from the front door of my Santa Monica home, I end up thirty meters away. However, if I take thirty exponential steps (one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on), I end up a billion meters away, or, effectively lapping the globe twenty-six times. Today’s global and exponential world is very different from the one that our brain evolved to comprehend. Consider the sheer scope of data we now encounter. A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than the average seventeenth-century citizen encountered in a lifetime. And the volume is growing exponentially. “From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By...

The disconnect between the local and linear wiring of our brain and the global and exponential reality of our world is creating what I call a “disruptive convergence.” Technologies are exploding and conjoining like never before, and our brains can’t easily anticipate such rapid transformation. Our current means of governance and its supporting regulatory structures aren’t designed for this pace.

Abundance is a global vision built on the backbone of exponential change, but our local and linear brains are blind to the possibility, the opportunities it may present, and the speed at which it will arrive. Instead we fall prey to what’s become known as the “hype cycle.” We have inflated expectations when a novel technology is first introduced, followed by short-term disappointment when it doesn’t live up to the hype. But this is the important part: we also consistently fail to recognize the post-hype, massively transformative nature of exponential technologies—meaning that we literally have a blind spot for the technological possibilities underlying our vision of abundance.

“The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”

Some of the billions alive today still live in misery and want even worse than the worst experienced in the Stone Age. Some are worse off than they were a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been. The availability of almost everything a person could want has been going rapidly upward for two hundred years and erratically upward for ten thousand years before that: years of life span, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of traveling faster than you can run, ways of communicating farther than you can shout. Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square-feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometers, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and, of course, dollars than any that went before.

Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas. This vast cooperative system has always been one of abundance’s largest engines.

But the very best news in all of this is that we have lately become specialized enough that we now trade in an entirely different kind of good. When people say we have an information-based economy, what they really mean is that what we have figured out is how to exchange information. Information is our latest, our brightest, commodity. “In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”

Today’s average low-end computer calculates at roughly 10 to the 11th (1011) or a hundred billion calculations per second. Scientists approximate that the level of pattern recognition necessary to tell Grandfather from Grandmother or distinguish the sound of hoofbeats from the sound of falling rain requires the brain to calculate at speeds of roughly 10 to the 16th (1016) cycles per second, or 10 million billion calculations per second. Using these figures as a baseline and projecting forward using Moore’s law, the average $1,000 laptop should be computing at the rate of the human brain in roughly fifteen years. Fast-forward another thirty years, and the average $1,000 laptop is performing 100 million billion billion calculations (1026) per second—which would be equivalent to all the brains of the entire human race.

Here’s the controversial part: as our faster computers help us design better technologies, humans will begin incorporating these technologies into our bodies: neuroprosthetics to augment cognition; nanobots to repair the ravages of disease; bionic hearts to stave off decrepitude. In Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Google cofounder Larry Page describes the future of search in similar terms: “It [Google] will be included in people’s brains. When you think about something you don’t know much about, you will automatically get the information.” Kurzweil celebrates this coming possibility. Others are uneasy with the transition, believing it’s the moment we stop being “us” and start becoming “them”— though this may be a little beside the point.

What’s important here is the unbelievable pervasiveness of exponentially growing technologies and the staggering potential these technologies have for improving global standards of living. Sure, a long-term future where we have an AI in our brains sounds neat (at least to me), but what about a nearterm future where AIs could be used to diagnose diseases, help educate ...

But how well suited are today’s academic institutions to addressing the world’s grand challenges? The modern graduate degree has become the realm of the ultraspecialized. A typical doctoral thesis focuses on a topic so insanely obscure that few can decipher its title, forget about content. While such extreme narrowness is important to specialization—which, as Ridley pointed out, has a huge upside—it has also created a world where the best universities rarely produce integrative, macroscopic thinkers.

But the real objective was neither secret messages nor synthetic life. This project was merely the first step. Venter’s actual goal is the creation of a very specific new kind of synthetic life—the kind that can manufacture ultra-low-cost fuels. Rather than drilling into the Earth to extract oil, Venter is working on a novel algae, whose molecular machinery can take carbon dioxide and water and create oil or any other kind of fuel. Interested in pure octane? Aviation gasoline? Diesel? No problem. Give your designer algae the proper DNA instructions and let biology do the rest.

Low-cost fuels, high-performing vaccines, and ultrayield agriculture are just three of the reasons that the exponential growth of biotechnology is critical to creating a world of abundance.

“Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself—natural systems, human systems, physical objects—has always generated an enormous amount of data, but we weren’t able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And it’s all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.”

This nervous system is the backbone of the Internet of things. Now imagine its future: trillions of devices—thermometers, cars, light switches, whatever—all connected through a gargantuan network of sensors, each with its own IP addresses, each accessible through the Internet. Suddenly Google can help you find your car keys. Stolen property becomes a thing of the past. When your house is running out of toilet paper or cleaning products or espresso beans, it can automatically reorder supplies. If prosperity is really saved time, then the Internet of things is a big pot of gold.

As powerful as it will be, the impact the Internet of things will have on our personal lives is dwarfed by its business potential. Soon, companies will be able to perfectly match product demand to raw materials orders, streamlining supply chains and minimizing waste to an extraordinary degree. Efficiency goes through the roof. With critical appliances activated only when needed (lights that flick on as so...

And autonomous cars are but a small slice of a much larger picture. Diagnosing patients, teaching our children, serving as the backbone for a new energy paradigm—the list of ways that AI will reshape our lives in the years ahead goes on and on. The best proof of this, by the way, is the list of ways that AI has already reshaped our lives. Whether it’s the lightning-fast response of the Google search engine or the speech recognition used for directory information calls, we are already AI codependent. While some ignore these “weak AI” applications, waiting instead for the “strong AI” of Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s not like we haven’t made progress.

So when will we have true HAL-esque AI? It’s hard to say. But IBM recently unveiled two new chip technologies that move us in this direction. The first integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon. These chips communicate with light. Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second)—or one hundred times faster than the human brain. The second is SyNAPSE, Big Blue’s brain-mimicking silicon chip. Each chip has a grid of 256 parallel wires representing dendrites and a perpendicular set of wires for axons. Where these wires intersect are the synapses and one chip has 262,144 of them. In preliminary tests, the chips were able to play a game of Pong, control a virtual car on a racecourse, and identify an image drawn on a screen. These are all tasks that computers have accomplished before, but these new chips don’t need specialized programs to complete each task; instead they respond to real-world circumstances and learn from their experience. Certainly there’s no guarantee that these things will be enough to create HAL—strong AI may require more than just a brute force so...

“We want the best minds around the world working on this problem. Our goal is not to control or own this technology but to accelerate it; put the pedal to the metal to make this happen as soon as possible.”

“We are making materials within materials, and embedding and weaving multiple materials into complex patterns. We can print hard and soft materials in patterns that create bizarre and new structural behaviors.”

At first glance, this seems a bit like science fiction, but almost everything we’re asking nanobots to do has already been mastered by the simplest life-forms. Duplicate itself a billion times? No problem, the bacteria in your gut will do that in just ten hours. Extract carbon and oxygen out of the air and turn it into a sugar? The scum on top of any pond has been at it for a billion years. And if Kurzweil’s exponential charts are even close to accurate, then it won’t be long now before our technology surpasses this biology.

Because of the exponential growth rate of technology, this progress will continue at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before. What all this means is that if the hole we’re in isn’t even a hole, the gap between rich and poor is not much of a gap, and the current rate of technological progress is moving more than fast enough to meet the challenges we now face, then the three most common criticisms against abundance should trouble us no more.

Certainly all three of these forces—the coming of age of the DIY innovator; a new breed of technophilanthropist; the expanding creative/market power of the rising billion—are augmented by exponential technology. In fact, exponential technology could be viewed as their growth medium, a substrate both anchoring and nurturing the emergence of these forces. Yet exponentially growing technologies are just one part of a larger cooperative process—a process that began a very long time ago. On our planet, the earliest single-cell life forms were called prokaryotes. No more than a sack of cytoplasm with their DNA free floating in the middle, these cells came into existence roughly three and a half billion years ago. The eukaryotes emerged one and a half billion years later. These cells are more powerful than their prokaryote ancestors because they’re more capable and cooperative, employing what we might call biological technology: “devices” such as nuclei, mitochondria, and Golgi apparatus that make the cell more powerful and efficient. There is a tendency to think of these biological technologies as smaller parts in a larger machine—not unlike the engine, chassis, and transmission that combine to form a car—but scientists believe that some of these parts began as separate life forms, individual entities that “decided” to work together toward a greater cause. This decision is not unusual. We see this same chain of effect in our lives today: new technology creates greater opportunit...

The first of these tools was the transportation revolution that brought us from beasts of burden to planes, trains, and automobiles in less than two hundred years. In that time, we built highways and skyways and, to borrow Thomas Friedman’s phrase, “flattened the world.” When famine struck the Sudan, Americans didn’t hear about it years later. They got real-time reports and immediately decided to lend a hand. And because that hand could be lent via a C-130 Hercules transport plane rather than a guy on a horse, a whole lot of people went a lot less hungry in a hurry. If you want to measure the change in cooperative capabilities illustrated here, you can start with the 18,800-fold increase in horsepower between a horse and a Hercules. Total carrying capacity over time is perhaps a better metric, and there the gains are larger. A horse can lug two hundred pounds more than thirty miles in a day, but a C-130 carries forty-two thousand pounds over eight thousand miles during those same twenty-four hours. This makes for a 56,000-fold improvement in our ability to cooperate with one another. The second cooperative tool is the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution we’ve already documented. This has produced even larger gains during this same two-hundred-year period. In his book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Columbia University economist Jeffery Sachs counts eight distinct contributions ICT has made to sustainable development—all of them cooperat...

he was suffering from “knowledge scarcity.” This is not an uncommon problem in our modern world. Yet the tools of cooperation have become so powerful that once properly incentivized, it’s possible to bring the brightest minds to bear on the hardest problems. This is critical, as Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

Our new cooperative capabilities have given individuals the ability to understand and affect global issues as never before, changing both their sphere of caring and their sphere of influence by orders of magnitude. We can now work all day with our hands in California, yet spend our evenings lending our brains to Mongolia. NYU professor of communication Clay Shirky uses the term “cognitive surplus” to describe this process. He defines it as “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.”

“Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,” says Shirky. “How do we measure this relative to other uses of time? Well, TV watching, which is the largest use of time, takes two hundred billion hours every year—in the US alone. To put this in perspective, we spend a Wikipedia worth of time every weekend in the US watching advertisements alone. If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus t...

The issue isn’t just the amount of water required for hydration and sanitation, it’s that water is thoroughly embedded in our lives, woven through most everything we manufacture or consume. The reason that 70 percent of the world’s water is used for agriculture is because one egg requires 120 gallons to produce. There are 100 gallons in a watermelon. Meat is among our thirstiest commodities, requiring 2,500 gallons per pound or, as Newsweek once explained, “the water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer.” And sustenance is just the beginning. In fact, everything in our abundance pyramid is affected by issues of hydrology. Beyond food, education takes a hit, as 443 million school days a year are lost to water-related disease. Thirty-five gallons of water are used to make one microchip—and a single Intel plant produces millions of chips each month—so information abundance suffers too. Then there’s energy, where every step in the power production chain makes the world a dryer place. In the United States, for example, energy requires 20 percent of our nonagricultural water. At the pyramid’s peak, threats to freedom have also been correlated to scarcity. In 2007 UC Berkeley professor of economics Edward Miguel found “strong evidence that better rainfall makes conflict less likely in Africa.” So far, these conflicts have remained civil wars played out within countries, but some two hundred rivers and three hundred lakes share international boundaries, and n...

Kamen’s first idea was to recycle the sterile water, but after consulting with biologists, he realized that there was no way to filter out mechanically what the kidney takes out naturally. “There’s ammonia, urea, all these middle molecules. What the kidney takes out, you just can’t filter.” So if he couldn’t recycle the water, perhaps there was a way to make tap water clean enough for injection. That adventure took a few more years. “Turns out going from potable water to sterile water using filters was impossible,” he explains. “Osmosis membranes don’t work. The gold standard was pure, distilled deionized water, but there were no miniature distillers that could meet that standard.” So Kamen decided to build one. Unfortunately, after doing the calculations, he realized that the amount of electrical power needed to run even a small unit would require rewiring most homes. Next came a crazier idea: build a distiller capable of recycling its own energy. “A couple of years later, we finally got this little box that had 98 percent energy recovery and produced a reasonable amount of sterile water. We tested it with all these different tap waters, and it worked perfectly. It was so good that we didn’t need to use tap water: we could use gray water instead. Then it hit me: if I can make gray water sterile enough for injection with 98 percent energy recovery, why am I trying to optimize a device to produce five to ten gallons a day? That machine could help a few tens of thousands of ...

“in a crisis, what do we do? We ship water. After a few weeks, we set up camps, and people are forced to come into these camps to get their safe drinking water. What happens when twenty thousand people congregate in a camp? Diseases spread, more resources are required, the problem just becomes self-perpetuating.” So Pritchard decided to do something. A few years later, in 2009, he’d completed the Lifesaver bottle. With a hand pump on one end and a filter on the other, the bottle doesn’t look especially high tech, but that filter is unlike any other. Researchers in nanotechnology work at miniscule scales, where distances are measured in atoms. One billionth of a meter—a nanometer, in technical parlance—is their baseline. Before Pritchard came along, the best hand-pumped water filters on the market worked down to the level of 200 nanometers. That’s small enough to capture most bacteria, but viruses, which are considerably more microscopic, still slipped through. So Pritchard designed a membrane with pores 15 nanometers wide. In seconds, it removes everything there is to remove: bacteria, viruses, cysts, parasites, fungi, and other waterborne pathogens. One filter lasts long enough to produce six thousand liters of water, and the system automatically shuts off when the cartridge is expired, preventing the user from drinking contaminated water. Lifesaver was designed for disaster relief, but why wait? A jerry can version of the system produces twenty-five thousand liters of wa...

The Smart Grid for Water When IBM “Distinguished Scientist” and chief technology officer for Big Green Innovations Peter Williams says, “The biggest opportunity in water, isn’t in water: it’s in information,” what he’s talking about is waste. Right now, in America, 70 percent of our water is used for agriculture, yet 50 percent of the food produced gets thrown away. Five percent of our energy goes to pump water, but 20 percent of that water streams out holes in leaky pipes. “The examples are endless,” says Williams, “the bottom line is the same: Show me a water problem and I’ll show you an information problem.” The solution to this information problem is to create intelligent networks for all of our waterworks, what’s being called the “Smart Grid for Water.” The plan is to embed all sorts of sensors, smart meters, and AI-driven automation into our pipes, sewers, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, harbors, and, eventually, our oceans. Mark Modzelewski, executive director of the Water Innovations Alliance, believes a smart grid could save the United States 30 percent to 50 percent of its total water use. IBM believes that the smart grid for water will be worth over $20 billion in the next five years, and the company is determined to get in on the ground floor. In the Amazon basin, it has partnered with the Nature Conservancy to build a new computer-modeling framework that allows users to simulate the behaviors of river basins and make significantly better decisions about currently u...