Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Solving Sanitation It’s an open debate: Who invented the modern toilet? Apocrypha holds that it was Thomas Crapper, a nineteenth-century English plumber, but the real story actually begins much earlier. In the West, while his technology was never commercialized, credit is now given to Sir John Harington, who invented a water closet in 1596 for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I. In the East, innovation stretches back much further. Archaeologists recently unearthed a Han dynasty latrine dating to 206 BC. Complete with a running water supply, stone bowl, and an armrest, this 2,400-year-old Chinese technology looks downright modern. And that’s the problem: when it comes to our indoor plumbing, not much has changed in a very long time. But imagine the potential upgrades. Imagine toilets that require no infrastructure. No pipes under the floor, no leach field under the lawn, no sewer systems running down the block. These high-tech outhouses powder and burn the feces and flash evaporate the urine, rendering everything sterile along the way. Rather than wasting anything, these toilets give back: packets of urea (for fertilizer), table salt, volumes of freshwater, and enough power that yo...

The Pale Blue Dot In 1990, in one of the most celebrated acts of an extremely illustrious career, astronomer Carl Sagan decided it might be interesting to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft, after completing its mission at Saturn, spin around and take a snapshot of the Earth. Viewed across this vast distance, the Earth is inconsequential, a nondescript speck among specks—or, as Sagan says, “a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam.” But it’s a blue mote; thus the photograph’s famous name: “the pale blue dot.” Our planet is a pale blue dot because it’s an aqueous world, two-thirds of its surface covered by oceans. Those oceans are our backbone and our lifeblood. There is no question that a billion people now lack access to safe drinking water, but our oceans hold the secret to a better future. To return to an earlier theme: abundance is not a cornucopian vision. While the innovations just explored share the potential to tap these oceans—recycle their contents and change their chemistry, providing us with all the water we need and then some—it will not happen automatically. We have much work ahead. Yet because these waterwise technologies are all on exponential growth curves, they represe...

And this is where we are today, right now, before the world’s population balloons by billions, before global warming reduces arable land, before—that is to say—an already unfathomable problem becomes downright ineffable. That said, the situation brings to mind the story of two shoe salesmen from Britain circa 1900. Both go to Africa to explore new markets. After a week, each writes a letter home. The first salesman reports: “Prospects are terrible, no one here wears shoes, I’m on the next boat out.” But the second sees things differently: “This place is amazing. Market potential is almost unlimited. I may never leave.” In other words, when it comes to food, there’s ample opportunity for improvement.

Over the past one hundred years, agriculture has mainly been a brute force equation. First we industrialized our farms, next we industrialized our food. We backboned our food production and distribution systems with petroleum products. These days, it takes 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food. In a world facing energy shortages, this alone makes the process untenable. Irrigation systems have pumped our reservoirs dry. Major aquifers in both China and India are almost gone, resulting in dust bowls far worse than the American Midwest suffered in the 1930s. Toxic herbicides and pesticides have destroyed our waterways. Runoff from nitrogen-laden fertilizer has turned our coastal waters into dead zones so severe that the United States, a nation surrounded by oceans, must now import 80 percent of its seafood from abroad. But even that bizarre practice can’t last. Modern fishing practices are another part of this brute force equation. Bottom trawling destroys about six million square miles of that sea floor every year—that’s an area the size of Russia. So forget about importation. A 2006 report in the journal Science, written by an international group of ecologists and environmentalists, showed that at our current pace of exploitation, the world will run out of seafood by 2048.

Yet, despite all of this devastation, the past century has also seen a miraculous change in our ability to produce food. We’ve managed to feed more people using less space than ever before. Currently we farm 38 percent of all the land in the world. If production rates had remained as they were in 1961, we would have needed 82 percent to produce the same amount of food. This is what petrochemical-backed agricultural intensification has made possible. The challenge going forward is to replace this unsustainable brute force with a considerably more nuanced approach. If we can learn to work with our ecosystems rather than run roughshod over them, while simultaneously optimizing our food crops and food systems, we could easily find ourselves in the place of that second shoe salesman: with a wide-open market and an infinite potential.

This is not to say there aren’t interesting non-GE techniques of seed optimization in development. The Kansas-based Land Institute is attempting to turn annual food crops like wheat and corn into perennials. The results could be fantastic. Natural ecosystems are far better than human-managed agricultural systems at converting sunlight into living tissue. Perennials— and mainly polyculture perennials (meaning a mixture of perennials growing side by side)—anchor those ecosystems. These plants have long roots and diverse architectures, making them weather tolerant, pest resistant, disease resistant, and able to produce more biomass per acre than human agriculture without requiring any fossil fuel inputs or degrading the soil and water. The issue is one of time. The Land Institute expects it to take another twenty-five years until these perennials are profitable and productive. Biocrops, meanwhile, are here today.

This is a present-tense progress report. The agricultural portion of the biotech industry is growing at 10 percent a year; the technology itself, on a faster curve. In 2000, when the first plant genome was sequenced, it took seven years, $70 million, and five hundred people. The same project today takes about three minutes and costs about $100. This is good news. More information means better targeted approaches. Right now we’re enjoying first generation GE crops; soon we’ll have versions that can grow in drought conditions, in saline conditions, crops that are nutritionally fortified, that act as medicines, that increase yields and lower the use for pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels. The best designs will do many of these things at once. The Gates Foundation–led effort BioCassava Plus aims to take cassava, one of the world’s largest staple crops, fortify it with protein, vitamins A and E, iron, and zinc; lower its natural cyanide content, make it virus resistant, and storable for two weeks (instead of one day). By 2020, this one genetically modified crop could radically improve the health of the 250 million people for whom it is a daily meal.

Traditional agriculture uses 70 percent of the water on the planet. Hydroponics is 70 percent more efficient than traditional agriculture. Aeroponics, meanwhile, is 70 percent more efficient than hydroponics. Thus, if we used aeroponics for agriculture, we could drop water use from 70 percent to 6 percent—quite the savings. With the threat of water scarcity getting more serious every day, it’s hard to believe these technologies haven’t been widely adopted.

“It’s a PR problem,” says Dickson Despommier. “When people hear hydroponics, they don’t think NASA, they think pot grower. Hell, until about ten years ago, I thought pot grower.”

“One thirty-story building,” says Despommier, “One square New York block in footprint, could feed fifty thousand people a year. One hundred fifty vertical farms could feed everyone in New York City.” And they have astounding advantages. Vertical farms are immune to weather, so crops can be grown year-round under optimal conditions. One acre of skyscraper floor produces the equivalent of ten to twenty traditional soil-based acres. Employing clean-room technologies means no pesticides or herbicides, so there’s no agricultural runoff. The fossil fuels now used for plowing, fertilizing, seeding, weeding, harvesting, and delivery are gone as well. On top of all that, we could reforest the old farmland as parkland and slow the devastating loss of biodiversity. So how does this all work? Nutrition, obviously, is hydroponically or aeroponically delivered. Plants also need sunlight, so vertical farms are designed for maximum shine. Parabolic mirrors bounce light around the building’s interior, while the exterior is skinned in ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a revolutionary polymer that is extremely light, nearly bulletproof, self-cleaning, and as transparent as water. Grow lights are also used, both at night and during cloudy conditions, and the electricity needed to run them will be generated by capturing the energy we now flush down our toilets. That’s right: we will recycle our own dung. “New York City alone,” says Despommier, “is shitting away nine hundred million kilowatts of el...

On a smaller scale, Asian rice farmers use fish to fight rice pests such as the golden snail, both boosting rice yields and protein consumption (as they also get to harvest the fish). In Africa, farmers are installing fish ponds in home gardens, as the mud from the bottom of the pond makes a great mineral-rich fertilizer. On a larger scale, the most exciting innovation may belong to Will Allen, the MacArthur Genius Award–winning force behind Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based organization building one of the United States’s first vertical farms. Allen, a pioneer in urban aquaculture, aims to devote the first floor of his vertical farm to the process. Some 110,000 gallons of water will produce 100,000 tilapia, lake perch, and, possibly, bluegill a year. The fish feces will be recycled to fertilize plants on higher levels of the greenhouse. But this is just a starting point. If we’re really serious about protecting our oceans and preserving seafood as a source of protein, integrated aqua-culture needs to be a significant part of our entire food chain. “If we value the ocean and the ocean’s health at all,” continues Earle, “we have to understand that fish are critical to maintaining the integrity of ocean systems, which in turn make the planet work. We have been so single-minded about fish, thinking that the only good fish is a cooked fish, rather than recognizing their importance to the ecosystem that also has a great value to us.”

Providing people with protein is not all that will drive this change. “Cattle ranching is always going to be an environmental disaster, and ground beef is always going to be bad for you,” says Jason Matheny, director of New Harvest, a nonprofit that funds research into cultured meat. “On reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone, switching to cultured meat is the equivalent of everyone in America suddenly driving hybrids. And, healthwise, real beef is always going to have fatty acids that contribute to heart disease. You just can’t turn a cow into a salmon, but cultured meat allows us to do just that. With in vitro meat, we can create a hamburger that prevents heart attacks, rather than one that causes them.”

Beyond the increased health benefits, both from nutritionally fortified meat and from the reduced chance of pandemic, the 30 percent of the world’s surface that is currently used for livestock can be reforested. The Belgium-sized chunk of Amazonian rain forest razed annually for cattle production can now be kept intact, the 40 percent of the world’s cereal grains now devoured by livestock can be repurposed for human consumption, and the forty billion animals killed each year (in the United States alone) no longer have to suffer for our benefit. As PETA president Ingrid Newkirk told the New Yorker: “If people are unwilling to stop eating animals by the billions, then what a joy to be able to give them animal flesh that comes without the horror of the slaughterhouse, the transport truck, and the mutilations, pain, and suffering of factory farming.”

While no blanket technology fits this bill, there’s now an emerging set of agricultural practices that blends the best of agronomy, forestry, ecology, hydrology, and a number of other sciences. Known as agroecology, the basic idea is to design food systems that mimic the natural world. Instead of striving for zero-environmental impacts, agroecologists want systems that produce more food on less land while simultaneously enhancing ecosystems and promoting biodiversity. And they’re getting them. A recent UN survey found that agroecology projects in fifty-seven countries have increased crop yields an average of 80 percent, with some being pushed up to 116 percent. One of the most successful of those is the push-pull system, developed to help Kenyan maize farmers deal with pestilence, invasive parasitic weeds, and poor soil conditions. Without getting too technical, push-pull is an intercropping system in which farmers plant specific plants between rows of corn. Some plants release odors that insects find unpleasant. (They “push” insects away.) others, like sticky molasses grass, “pull” the insects in, acting as a kind of natural flypaper. Using this simple process, farmers have increased crop yields by 100 to 400 percent. More importantly, while these agroecological techniques are widely available today (three hundred thousand African farmers have already adopted push-pull), we are only beginning to understand their real potential. Although the practices themselves look decid...

A Tough Row to Hoe So there you have it: a long chain of sustainable intensification backed up by agroecological principles, GE crops, synthetic biology, perennial polycultures, vertical farms, robotics and AI, integrated agriculture, upgraded aquaculture, and a booming business in cultured meat. This is what it’s going to take to feed a world of nine billion. It won’t be easy. All these technologies will need to be scaled up simultaneously, and the sooner the better. This last point is key.

there’s no use trying to change human nature. It’s been the same for a very long time. Instead, go after the tools. New tools make new practices. Better tools make better practices.”

With his championing of the DIY innovator, Stewart Brand had sparked a match, and the Homebrew Computer Club was part of the resulting conflagration. But it was not the only part. As we shall see in the next section, because I came of age at a time when DIY innovators had already transformed big business and big science, the idea of taking the space race out of the hands of government didn’t seem entirely impossible. “The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life,” Kevin Kelly once said, “it gave you the excuses and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it.” So while making off-world travel a DIY enterprise might not be easy, the reverberations of the WEC gave me exactly what they gave so many other people: the courage to try.

And the physical has never been more hackable. Think of it this way: less than five years after Burt Rutan spent $26 million beating the aerospace giants at their own game, DIY Drones took them down with volunteer labor, a few toys, and a couple hundred dollars’ worth of spare parts. “It’s radical demonetization,” says Anderson, “a true DIY story about using open-source design to reduce costs a hundredfold while keeping ninety percent functionality.” The aerospace industry, Anderson feels, is ripe for such demonetization, and his vision should make some of the stodgier companies very nervous. “Two orders of magnitude in cost reduction was easy,” he says. “We’re now going for three.” For exactly these reasons, the Maker Movement has serious abundance potential. Cheap drones can ferry supplies to places such as Bangladesh, where monsoons wash out roads, or to Botswana, where roads don’t exist. Matternet, a Singularity University (SU) 10^9+ company, is planning an AI-enabled network of UAVs and recharging stations housed in shipping containers scattered throughout Africa. Orders are placed via smart phone. For villages disconnected from the global transportation network, this means that everything from replacement parts for farm machinery to medical supplies can now be shipped in via an autonomous QuadCopter—for less than six cents per kilogram-kilometer. Conservation is another possible use for low-cost autonomous platforms. Knowing how many tigers are left in Siberia is cri...

Whether the issue is disease and hunger in Africa; or poverty in the Middle East; or lack of education across the developing world—we all know the problems. But social entrepreneurs, I believe, have a genetic deficiency. Somehow, the gene that helps them look past the impossible is missing . . . By nature, entrepreneurs aren’t satisfied until they do change the world, and let nothing get in their way. Charities may give people food. But social entrepreneurs don’t just teach people to grow food—they’re not happy until they’ve taught a farmer how to grow food, make money, pour the profits back into the business, hire ten other people, and in the process, transform the entire industry.

Backing social entrepreneurs is only one example of the new direction taken by today’s technophilanthropists. Investing in triple-bottom-line companies, as the Rockefeller-backed Acumen Fund does, is another. Acumen is an entirely for-profit company, but it makes those profits investing in businesses that manufacture goods and services urgently needed in the developing world—reading glasses, hearing aids, mosquito nets—and selling them at very affordable prices. Then there’s eBay founder Pierre omidyar’s omidyar Network, an organization that makes for-profit investments to pursue its mission of “individual self-improvement” in key areas such as microfinance, transparency, and—of course—social entrepreneur-ship. “If they [the technophilanthropists] can use their donations to create a profitable solution to a social problem,” writes Economist New York bureau chief Matthew Bishop in his book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (coauthored with Michael Green), “it will attract more capital, far faster, and thus have a far bigger impact, far sooner, than would a solution based entirely on giving the money away.” In choosing to blur the border between nonprofit and for-profit, they are also attempting to redefine charity. “The new philanthropists,” continues Bishop, “believe they are improving philanthropy, equipping it to tackle the new set of problems facing today’s changing world; and to be blunt, it needs improvement—much philanthropy over the centuries has...

One concept lately gaining momentum is “impact investing” or “triple-bottom-line investing,” whereby investors back businesses that generate financial returns and meet measurable social or environmental goals. The practice often gives investors a further reach than traditional philanthropy— and this practice is growing. According to the research firm the Monitor Group, what was $50 billion in impact investments in 2009 is on pace to reach $500 billion within the decade. Another of those secrets is a hands-on approach. “It’s no longer ‘I write the check and I’m done,’ ” says Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Ventures Partners Seattle. “Now it’s ‘I write the check and that’s the start.’ ” And when they start, the technophilanthropists do much more than just bring financial capital to the table; they bring their human capital as well. “They bring networks, connections, and the ability to get high-level meetings,” says Shoemaker. “When Gates decided to fight for vaccines, he built a team and led that team into meetings with world leaders and the World Health Organization. Most organizations can’t get into those rooms, but Gates could, and it made a huge difference.” There’s one last distinction between the new-breed philanthropists and the older generations, and it may be the one that has the biggest impact. The majority of the robber barons got generous in their august years, but many of the technophilanthropists were billionaires before the age of thirty-five, and...

“Technology allowed me to create the capital I now use for philanthropy,” he says, “and I can think of no better use of these resources than to focus on eradicating illiteracy and disease around the world. What is truly amazing is that today we actually have the tools to make this happen.”

“As some of the smartest people look at where to focus their energies next,” says PayPal cofounder Elon Musk, “they are now attracted to the biggest problems facing humanity, particularly in areas such as education, health care, and sustainable energy. Without suggesting complacency, I believe it is very likely that they will solve the many challenges in those areas, and the result will be the creation of new technologies, companies, and jobs that will bring prosperity to billions on Earth.”

The result was another article, this one just sixteen pages long, that was destined to change the world—although, as Hart points out, that didn’t happen overnight. “It took us four years before anyone would publish it. The paper went through literally dozens of revisions before coming out in 2002 as ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’ [in the journal Strategy + Business]. That paper became an underground hit before it was ever published and spawned a whole new field: BOP business. For me, this was a life-changing experience. For C.K., it was another day at the office.” Their article made a simple point: the four billion people occupying the lowest strata of the economic pyramid, the so-called bottom billion, had lately become a viable economic market. They didn’t claim that the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) was an ordinary market, rather that it was extraordinary. While the majority of BOP consumers lived on less than $2 a day, it was their aggregate purchasing power that made for extremely profitable possibilities. Of course, this radically different business environment demanded radically different strategies, but for those companies that could adapt to business unusual, both Hart and Prahalad felt that the opportunities were immense. Backing up this claim was a quick survey of a dozen big-name companies that had all enjoyed considerable success in BOP markets after adopting business practices that were a little outside their comfort zone. Arvind Mills, for example,...

One of the best examples is the telecom Grameenphone, which started in Bangladesh in 1997, and, as of February 2011, had thirty million subscribers in that country. Along the way, Grameenphone invested $1.6 billion in network infrastructure—which means that money made in Bangladesh actually stayed in Bangladesh. But the even bigger impact has been on poverty reduction. Economists at the London School of Business and Finance figured out that adding ten phones per one hundred people adds 0.6 percent to the GDP of a developing country. Nicholas Sullivan, in his book about the rise of microloans and cellular technology, You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy, explains what this really means: “Extrapolating from UN figures on poverty reduction (1 percent of GDP growth results in a 2 percent poverty reduction), that 0.6 percent growth would cut poverty by roughly 1.2 percent. Given 4 billion people in poverty, that means that with every 10 new phones per 100 people, 48 million graduate from poverty, to borrow a phrase from Mohammad Yunus.” Critics have pointed out that this approach can take us only so far, but they fail to mention that may actually be far enough. Hart and Prahalad’s BOP argument is essentially one of commodification: take existing goods and services and make them orders of magnitude cheaper, then sell them on a massive scale. But there are two additional features. First, the methodology required...

Choice was the missing ingredient. Suddenly the rising billion—all four billion of them—have a way and a reason to participate in the global conversation. “This new generation growing up with freedom of communication,” says Tata, “are plugged into an information and entertainment world that didn’t exist before. They have needs and wants that exceed those of the older generation. And they’re going to be demanding in terms of the quality of their life.” For the first time, not only are their voices being heard, their ideas— ideas that we’ve never had access to before—are joining the global conversation. And if for no other reason than the law of large numbers and the po...

Enter mobile banking. Allowing the world’s poor to set up digital bank accounts accessible via cell phones has a significant impact on quality of life and poverty reduction. M-banking allows people to check their balances, pay bills, receive payments, and send money home without giant transfer fees, as well as avoid the increased personal security risks that come from carrying cash. In Kenya, where many poor people work very far away from home, workers would frequently disappear for three to four days after getting paid—the amount of time it took to get that money to their families— so being able to transfer cash wirelessly saves them incredible amounts of time.

Beyond banking, cell phones are now enabling improvement at every level of our abundance pyramid. For water, there’s already SMS-delivered information available on everything from hand washing to conservation techniques and technology is now being pioneered that turns a smart phone into a testing device for water quality. In food, fishermen can check in advance which ports are paying top dollar before hauling their catch into shore, and farmers can do the same before bringing fruits and vegetables to market, in both cases maximizing their time and revenue. The impacts of mobile telephony on health stretch from being able to quickly locate the nearest doctor to a smart phone app invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London, that turns an iPhone into a stethoscope and has since been downloaded by over 3 million doctors. And it is only one of 6,000 health care apps now available through Apple. These examples go on and on, but what they all have in common is that they empower the individual like never before. Most of these services used to require tremendous amounts of infrastructure, resources, and well-trained professionals, making them accessible primarily in the developed world. If one of the definitions of abundance is the widespread availability of goods and services—such as stethoscopes and water-quality testing— then the now-networked rising billion are rapidly gaining access to many of the fundamental mechanisms of first world prosperity.

The London coffee-houses provided a gathering place where, for a penny admission charge, any man who was reasonably dressed could smoke his long, clay pipe, sip a dish of coffee, read the newsletters of the day, or enter into conversation with other patrons. At the period when journalism was in its infancy and the postal system was unorganized and irregular, the coffee-house provided a centre of communication for news and information . . . Naturally, this dissemination of news led to the dissemination of ideas, and the coffee-house served as a forum for their discussion.

But researchers in recent years have recognized that the coffee-shop phenomenon is actually just a mirror of what occurs within cities. Two thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs. The modern metropolis is jam-packed. People are living atop one another; their ideas are as well. So notions bump into hunches bump into offhanded comments bump into concrete theories bump into absolute madness, and the results pave the way forward. And the more complicated, multilingual, multicultural, wildly diverse the city, the greater its output of new ideas. “What drives a city’s innovation engine, then—and thus its wealth engine—is its multitude of differences,” says Stewart Brand. In fact, Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West found that when a city’s population doubles, there is a 15 percent increase in income, wealth, and innovation. (He measured innovation by counting the number of new patents.) But just as the coffeehouse is a pale comparison to the city, the city is a pale comparison to the World Wide Web. The net is allowing us to turn ourselves into a giant, collective meta-intelligence. And this meta-intelligence continues to grow as more and more people come online. Think about this for a moment: by 2020, nearly 3 billion people will be added to the Internet’s community. That’s 3 billion new minds about to join the global brain. The world is going to gain access to intelligence, w...

Bio- and nanotechnology create products and services at the molecular level, holding the potential to completely eliminate waste and pollution. Biomimicry emulates nature’s processes to create novel products and services without relying on brute force to hammer goods from large stocks of virgin raw materials. Wireless information technology and renewable energy are distributed in character, meaning they can be applied in the most remote and small-scale settings imaginable, eliminating the need for centralized infrastructure and wire-line distribution, both of which are environmentally destructive. Such technologies thus hold the potential to meet the needs of the billions of rural poor (who have thus far been largely ignored by global business) in a way that dramatically reduces environmental impact. Alongside dematerialization, there’s also the demonetization exemplified by Chris Anderson’s drones to consider. In the past decade, this force has been steadily reshaping markets across the globe. eBay demonetized transactions, putting local stores out of business, yet increasing the availability of goods while simultaneously reducing their cost. Then there’s Craigslist, which demonetized advertising, taking 99 percent of the profits out of the newspaper industry and putting them back into the pockets of the consumer. Or iTunes, which tanked the record store and liberated audiophiles. And the list of similar examples runs long. While short-term job loss is the inevitable and ...

Imagine being forced to rely on burning poor-grade wood, dung, or crop waste to cook, suffering the effects of the potentially fatal toxic fumes given off by this fuel. Imagine being desperately ill and turned away from a clinic because it has no electricity and can’t offer even the simplest treatment. Imagine your friends living under the shadow of life-threatening disease because there’s no vital vaccine, due to a lack of refrigeration. Imagine if you or your partner were pregnant and went into labor at night and had no light, no pain relief and no way of saving you or the baby if there were complications. Mercy describes herself as part of the new-breed “cheetah generation” of Africans who are fast-moving, entrepreneurial leaders working to snatch back the continent from the jaws of poverty, corruption, and poor governance—three issues she believes could be changed significantly with more access to energy. “Consider the women and children who spend hours every day searching for increasingly scarce energy resources. They are at risk from wild animals and sometimes rape. And once they start burning biomass, the acrid smoke causes serious lung disease and turns kitchens into death traps. Children and their mothers are most at risk, choking, retching, and gasping. More people die from smoke inhalation than from malaria. Indoor air pollution is linked to respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis, and lung cancer. Women and children who spend long periods every day a...

“There’s a clear line of sight to get there, and no miraculous breakthroughs needed.” Of course, when we do solve the storage problem, this would give solar and wind a major boost, so what to do with those dirty coal plants becomes a real question. Here too, Bill Joy has an idea. “It’s hard to believe power companies would shut down a completely amortized asset that’s still cranking out money every day. What we ought to do is flip the model and make coal plants into emergency backup plants. We can employ one hundred percent renewables for our baseload, and only turn on the coal plants when the weather forecast says we’re going to have a real problem. We just pay the utilities to maintain them and run them occasionally, like you would run your emergency generator.”

“We could power the world for the next one thousand years just burning and disposing of the depleted uranium and spent fuel rods in today’s stockpiles.”

Where we source our power is only one part of this issue; how we distribute it is equally important. Imagine an intelligent network of power lines, switches, and sensors able to monitor and control energy down to the level of a single lightbulb. This is the dream of today’s smart grid engineers.

Another Brick in the Wall Our current education system was forged in the heat of the industrial revolution, a fact that not only influenced what subjects were taught but also how they were taught. Standardization was the rule, conformity the desired outcome. Students of the same age were presented with the same material and assessed against the same scales of achievement. Schools were organized like factories: the day broken into evenly marked periods, bells signaling the beginning and the end of each period. Even teaching, as Sir Ken Robinson put it in his excellent book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, was subject to the division of labor: “Like an assembly line, students progressed from room to room to be taught by different teachers specializing in separate disciplines.” In their defense, the transition from education as a rare treat reserved for the clergy and aristocracy to one where everyone was entitled to free schooling was nothing if not radical. But it has been over 150 years since then, and our education system has not kept up. Robinson himself has become one of the loudest voices calling for reform, arguing that today’s schools—with their emphasis on extreme conformity—are killing creativity and squelching talent. “As humans, we all have immense potential,” he says, “but most people pass through their entire lives with that potential untapped. Human culture, and school is a fundamental component of how we pass along that culture, is really a set of p...

When I talk to my clients, the challenge is this: How do you do things that haven’t been done before, where you have to rethink or think anew, or break set in a fundamental way. It’s not incremental improvement anymore. That just won’t cut it. The markets are changing too fast, the environments are changing too fast . . . You have to spend the time to ask the next question. There is something about understanding what the right questions are, and there is something about asking the nonlinear, counterintuitive question. These are the ones that take you to the next level.

If educational abundance is our goal, these facts leave us with serious quality and quantity concerns. For quality, what kind of learning system teaches kids to ask the right questions? That system needs to be able to teach the three R’s (because, yes, even in this digital age, these basics are still critical) and the twenty-first-century skills kids need to succeed. The quantity issue is equally important. We’re already short millions of teachers. Forget about infrastructure. Schools in America are falling apart; schools in Africa don’t even exist. So even if we do figure out what to teach our children, how to do this at scale remains equally perplexing. But overshadowing both of these is a third problem. The twenty-first century is a media-rich environment. Between the Internet, video games, and those five hundred channels of cable, the competition for our children’s attention has become ruthless. If boredom is the number one cause of truancy, then our new education system needs to be effective, scalable, and wildly entertaining. In fact, wildly entertaining might not be enough. If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.

James Gee Meets Pajama Sam About ten years ago, Dr. James Gee sat down to play Pajama Sam for the first time. Gee is a linguist at Arizona State University. His early work examined syntactic theory, his more recent research delves into discursive analysis. Pajama Sam falls into neither of those categories. It’s a problem-solving video game aimed at young children. But Gee had a six-year-old son, and he wanted to help him develop better problem-solving skills. The game surprised Gee. The problems, as it turned out, were a little harder than expected. More stunning was how well the game held his son’s attention. This piqued Gee’s curiosity. He started to wonder about adult video games, so he picked up a copy of The New Adventures of the Time Machine—mostly because he liked the H. G. Wells reference in the title. “When I sat down to play, it wasn’t anything like I expected,” he recalls. “I had this idea that video games were relaxing, like television is relaxing. Time Machine was hard, long, and complex. All of my normal ways of thinking didn’t apply. I had to relearn how to learn. I couldn’t believe people would pay fifty bucks to be this frustrated.” But then it clicked: lots of ...

This Time It’s Personal Gates is partially right. For some, the Khan Academy really is the future of education, but it’s not the only future available. Of the lessons to be learned from industrial education, foremost among them is the fact that not every student is the same. There are those who enjoy the head-on collision with knowledge that is a Khan video; others prefer it presented tangentially, which is how information usually arrives in video games. Whatever the case, digitally delivered content means that it’s no longer one size fits all. Students are now able to learn what they want, how they want, and when they want. And with the exponential expansion of IT technologies such as Negroponte’s tablets and Nokia’s smart phones, personalized learning will soon be available to just about anyone who wants it, no matter where in the world he or she lives. But for digitally delivered universal education to be truly effective, we also need to change the way progress is measured. “We can’t get deeper learning until we change the tests,” says Gee, “because the tests drive the system.” Here too video games offer a solution. “A video game is just an assessment,” continues Gee. “All you do is get assessed, every moment, as you try to solve problems. And if you don’t solve a problem, the game says you failed, try again. And you do. Why? Because games take testing, the most ludicrous, painful part of school, and make it fun.” Even better is the data-capturing ability of video games...

“Watson has the potential to help doctors reduce the time needed to evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient,” says Dr. Herbert Chase, professor of clinical medicine at Columbia. He also has the ability to develop personalized treatment options for every patient, a capability that Dr. Eliot Siegel, professor and vice chair at Maryland’s Department of Diagnostic Radiology, explains this way: “Imagine a supercomputer that can not only store and collate patient data but also interpret records in a matter of seconds, analyze additional information and research from medical journals, and deliver possible diagnoses and treatments, with the probability of each outcome precisely calculated.” But delivering correct diagnoses depends on having accurate data, which sometimes don’t come from a conversation with the patient. Even the most brilliant diagnostician needs X-rays, CT scans, and blood chemistries to make the right call. But most of today’s high-tech hospital equipment is large, expensive, and power hungry—unfit for the cost-conscious consumer, let alone the developing world. But now ask yourself that fabled DIY question: What would MacGyver do? Well, MacGyver would empty his pockets and get the job done with a roll of Scotch tape, a piece of paper napkin, and a ball of spit—which, as it turns out, is exactly the solution we need.

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...

Today’s technology doesn’t completely replace surgeons; instead it enhances their abilities and allows them to operate remotely. “By fully digitizing an image of the injured site being repaired,” explains Mohr, “you put a digital layer between the tissue and the surgeon’s eyes, which can then be augmented with overlaid information or magnification. Also, by digitizing hand movements and placing a digital layer between the surgeon and the robotic instruments, you can take out jitter, make motions more precise, and even transmit the surgical incisions over a long distance, allowing an expert in Los Angeles to conduct surgery in Algiers during their free time without spending twenty hours on airplanes.” Over the next five to ten years, Mohr predicts a proliferation of smaller, special purpose robots, extending far beyond cataract removal. One might handle glaucoma surgery, another a gastric bypass, while a third performs dental repairs. Mohr thinks the fifteen- to twenty-year horizon is even more exciting. “In the future, we’ll be able detect cancers by monitoring blood, urine, or breath and, once detected, remove them robotically. The robot will find the tiny cancerous lesion, insert a needle, and obliterate it, just like you do a cancerous mole today.”

“The biggest contribution that robots will make to health care is taking care of an aging population: people who have lost spouses or lost the ability to take care of themselves,” he says. “These robots will extend the time they are able to live independently by providing emotional support, social interaction, and assisting them with the basic functional tasks like answering the door, helping them if they fall, or assisting them in the bathroom. They will be willing to listen to the same story twenty-five times and respond appropriately every time. And for some with sexual dysfunction or need, these robots will also play a huge role.” When will these robots become available, and what will they cost? “Within five years,” continues Barry, “robots will hit the market that can recognize you uniquely, react to your movements and facial expressions with recognizable emotive responses, and perform useful tasks around the home, like clean up while you sleep. Fast-forward fifteen to twenty years, and we’ll be delivering robotic companions that will have real, nuanced conversations, making them able to serve as your friend, your nurse, perhaps even your psychologist.”

Participatory medicine is the fourth category of our health care future. Powered by technology, each of us is becoming the CEO of our own health. The mobile phone is being transformed into a mission control center where our body’s real-time data can be captured, displayed, and analyzed, empowering each of us to make important health decisions day by day, moment by moment. Personal genomics companies such as 23andMe and Navigenics, meanwhile, allow users to gain a deeper understanding of their genetic makeup and its health implications. But equally important is the effect of our environment and daily choices—which is where a new generation of sensing technology comes into play. “Sensors have plummeted in cost, size, and power consumption,” explains Thomas Goetz, executive editor of Wired and author of The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. “An ICBM guidance sensor from the 1960s used to cost one hundred thousand dollars and weigh many kilograms. Now that same capability fits on a chip and costs less than a dollar.” Taking advantage of these breakthroughs, members of movements such as Quantified Self are increasing self-knowledge through self-tracking. Today they’re tracking everything from sleep cycles, to calories burned, to real-time electrocardiogram signals. Very soon, should one choose to go this route, we’ll have the ability to measure, record, and evaluate every aspect of our lives: from our blood chemistries, to our...

In many cases, we know where we want to go but not how to get there. In others, we know how to get there but want to get there faster. This chapter focuses on how we can steer innovation and step on the gas. When bottlenecks arise, when breakthroughs are needed, when acceleration is the core commandment, how can we win this race? There are four major motivators that drive innovation. The first, and weakest of the bunch, is curiosity: the desire to find out why, to open the black box, to see around the next bend. Curiosity is a powerful jones. It fuels much of science, but it’s nothing compared to fear, our next motivator. Extraordinary fear enables extraordinary risk-taking. John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program was executed at significant peril and tremendous expense in response to the early Soviet space successes. (You can ballpark the ratio of fear to curiosity as a driver for human innovation: it’s the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget, which in 2011 was roughly $700 billion compared to $30 billion.) The desire to create wealth is the next major motivator, best exemplified by the venture capital industry’s backing of ten ideas, expecting nine to fail and hoping for one grand-slam winner. The fourth and final motivator is the desire for significance: the need for one’s life to matter, the need to make a difference in the world. One tool that harnesses all four of these motivators is called the incentive prize. If you need to accelerate change in specific area...

“Prizes can be the spur that produces a revolutionary solution . . . For centuries, they were a core instrument of sovereigns, royal societies and private benefactors alike who sought to solve pressing societal problems and idiosyncratic technical challenges.”

The benefits of incentive prizes don’t stop here. Because of the competitive framework, people’s appetite for risk increases, which—as we’ll explore in depth a little later—further drives innovation. Since many of these competitions require significant capital to field a team (in other words: no bucks, no Buck Rogers), it’s fortunate that the sporting atmosphere lures legacy-craving wealthy benefactors and corporations looking to distinguish themselves in a media-cluttered environment. Finally, competitions inspire hundreds of different technical approaches, which means that they don’t just give birth to a single-point solution but rather to an entire industry.

The Power of Small Groups (Part II) The American anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” There are, as it turns out, pretty good reasons for this. Large or even medium-sized groups—corporations, movements, whatever—aren’t built to be nimble; nor are they willing to take large risks. Such organizations are designed to make steady progress and have considerably too much to lose to place the big bets that certain breakthroughs require. Fortunately, this is not the case with small groups. With no bureaucracy, little to lose, and a passion to prove themselves, small teams consistently outperform larger organizations when it comes to innovation.

Engineer John Carmack, creator of the video games Quake and Doom, who founded and funded Armadillo Aerospace (which placed second in the competition), summed up this point nicely: “I think the biggest benefit that NASA can possibly get out of this is to witness an operation like ours go from concept to (almost) successful flight in under six months with a team of eight parttime people for a total cost of only $200,000. That should shame some of their current contractors who are going to be spending tens of billions of dollars doing different things.”