Tapping technology will create bounty for all

Jeff Hecht, consultant

In Abundance: The future is better than you think, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis creates an optimistic vision - but does it square with reality?

Technological optimism is a stepping stone to finding solutions for world problems, from poverty and disease to climate change and pollution. In Abundance, Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, and journalist Steven Kotler argue that innovation can provide 9 billion people with a world of plenty.

That sounds good in principle. Yet as a veteran technology writer, I found the book's cheerleading tone rose rapidly to a crescendo of irrational exuberance.

Abundance is right in pointing out that small groups who challenge conventional wisdom can be vital fonts of ideas. But successful innovation requires more. New concepts must be scrutinised critically, tailored to meet users' needs, adapted to work with available technology, and scaled up to production. Two guys in a garage can't do it all.

Some schemes described in the book, like Lowell Wood's redesign of third-world toilets, are woefully in need of a reality check. Before going on to invent devices such as a mosquito-zapping laser, Wood worked for decades on "Star Wars" weapons at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Now he envisions a New Age toilet that would burn faeces to evaporate urine, thus preventing water pollution while generating surplus energy that could power cellphones and lights. Curious how big this surplus would be left given that a person's daily output of faeces generates "over a megajoule" of energy, I checked several references. It turns out that to vaporise a litre of water - on the low end of the 1 to 2 litres of urine the average adult produces each day - it takes about 2.3 megajoules. Somebody missed something here.

Even ideas that do pass a reality check need support to go forward. Charles Kao, the fibre-optics pioneer, started a revolution in telecommunications by suggesting that silica glass would be ideal for optical communication. But it required high-tech equipment and specialist skills to make glass fibres with the necessary transparency. Many more years of work went into building the fibre-optic infrastructure that is now the backbone of the global telecommunications network. The impressive innovations in computing and robotics featured in Abundance are no different. They need sophisticated semiconductor chips - and a state-of-the-art chip-making system costs over a billion dollars.

Moreover, no idea will go far without public acceptance. Abundance extols the potential of 3D printers to make almost any kind of product at home. It's a captivating idea, and a few years back I wrote about a 3D printer that could even make the parts needed to replicate itself (New Scientist, 7 June 2008, p 28). Recently I was on a panel at a science-fiction convention discussing 3D printing. Enthusiasm was high, but a reality check came when a woman in the audience predicted that 3D printers would soon be in every home - just like sewing machines. Silence followed as the implications of her remark set in. Sewing machines were common in the 1950s, but since then Americans have preferred cheap ready-made clothes. Only hobbyists and professionals sew today. The same may hold for 3D printing - most of us may leave it to shops that do the job for us.

By establishing the Ansari X Prize, Diamandis stimulated a key innovation in private space flight - construction of a reusable craft that could take people to the edge of space twice within two weeks. That's important, but by itself it's not enough to carry people back to the moon or on to Mars, or to make private space flight a reality for any but the very, very rich. Those goals will take much more money and hard work.

After touring through many such examples, I was left wondering if this quest for "abundance" for all makes sense at a time when Americans already have such an overflow of stuff. Shouldn't the quest really be for quality of life for all?

Book Information
Abundance: The future is better than you think
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published by: Free Press
$26.99

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