Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Since Dr. Watson will soon be accessible through a mobile device, and that mobile device has a GPS, the computer can both diagnose your infection and detect an unusually high incidence of, say, flu symptoms in Nairobi—thus alerting WHo to a possible pandemic. Better yet, because the incremental cost of Watson’s diagnosis is simply the expense of computing power (which is really just the cost of electricity), the price comes to pennies. To help accelerate this process, on May 10, 2011, the wireless provider Qualcomm teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation and announced plans to develop the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE—named after Star Trek’s medical scanning technology. This competition will offer $10 million to the first team able to demonstrate a consumer-friendly low-cost mobile device able to diagnose a patient better than a group of board-certified doctors. But even this much MacGyver thinking still falls short of our ultimate health care goals, since knowing what’s wrong with a patient is only half the battle. We still need to be able to treat and cure that patient. We’ve already addressed many of the “preventable” ailments, which are obviated through clean water, clean energy, basic nutrition, and indoor plumbing, but there’s also another category to consider: easily treatable and/or curable diseases. Many of these are managed with simple medicines, but others require surgical intervention. In the same way that technology has revolutionized diagnostics, what if it were p...