Carpenter’s Symphony
26 minutes ago
Exponential Innovations Everywhere
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Joost Bonsen's Opinions on How Money, Ideas, and Talent can
Enable Health, Wealth, and Happyness for Each plus Achieve Liberty, Prosperity, and Vitality for All and Ultimately Help Us Spread Beyond Our Cradle Planet Earth
"Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the world's farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one that's not going away anytime soon."Bourne then raises the spectre of a "hot, crowded, and hungry world" with a "perpetual food crisis." Faced with this predicament before, he notes that agricultural innovators...
"...helped more than double the world's average yields of corn, rice, and wheat between the mid-1950s and the mid-1990s, an achievement so staggering it was dubbed the green revolution. Yet with world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030. In other words, we need another green revolution. And we need it in half the time."But with each new invention boosting capacity or supply, the Malthusian condition is for people to breed -- or grow older -- thus pushing demand even higher. Bourne's story spotlights examples of this from several emerging markets. In the end, however, the challenge remains feeding 9 or 10 Billion people by 2050. What truly transformative technologies will make this possible?
"The rich world's population is ageing fast, and the poor world is only a few decades behind. According to the UN’s latest biennial population forecast, the median age for all countries is due to rise from 29 now to 38 by 2050. [...by 2050] in the rich world one person in three will be a pensioner; nearly one in ten will be over 80. This is a slow-moving but relentless development that in time will have vast economic, social and political consequences. As yet, only a few countries with already-old populations are starting to notice the effects..."There are several key infographics in the article, including this one showing the trendscape of aging over the past 60 and upcoming 40 years...
"I set out to develop software that was extremely simple to use; taking the skills, expertise and capacity that previously came with hiring a consultant and instead, put the necessary tools into the hands of the actual public health officer, nurse or physician. I was determined to make the software both free and open source, as not to raise barriers to data collection."
"The government is starting to plan a completely new rail system, with a further 5,000 km (3,100 miles) of lines. It is early days yet [but] this would be a standard gauge railway, electrified to take advantage of the abundant, cheap electricity expected to be produced by ambitious new hydro-electric schemes soon to come into operation. It would be primarily designed to carry freight, and although the proposed routes are still confidential, it might -- for instance -- serve the coffee-producing areas of western Ethiopia, the light industries of the north, the commercial food producing areas south of Addis Ababa, and the fertile, but as yet undeveloped farmlands near the Sudan border."
"If you could travel back in time and intervene at one moment in history what would you do? Assassinate Hitler? Stop Lenin getting on that train to the Finland Station? Slip something in Mao's rice wine before he got the idea of the Cultural Revolution?"Great question! My own top answers would be:
"[Get] between Gavrilo Princip's bullet and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Almost all the miseries of the last century can be traced to the greatest civilisational catastrophe of all time -- the First World War. There was a madness abroad in Europe in 1914, as the new Tate Modern exhibition of the war-worshipping Italian Futurists reminds us. Prewar Europe was a uniquely liberal and civilised place. And it was all swept away, in a ceremony of blood that ushered in eight decades of oppression."See Daniel Finkelstein's Comment Central for more ideas.
We are all watching you and will not forget your dastardly deeds. We will never surrender to you and your wretched religious tyranny. Your actions -- your crimes against humanity -- are worse than the worst behavior of the Shah. What little legitimacy you once might have had has now more than disappeared. You are evil incarnate and must go. We The People and our universal rights -- including especially freedoms of thought, belief, speech, exchange, attire, and action -- will ultimately prevail.The protests will continue -- overtly or covertly if necessary -- until those swine, these mad mullahs -- are vanquished.
"...double the number of STEM bachelor degrees, with a special focus on currently underrepresented groups, and double the number of STEM teachers, grade 7 through 12, by 2020."The recommendations include:
"Mobile financial services in the developing world could be worth $5bn by 2012... [...] More than one billion people in the developing world have access to a mobile phone, but no bank account. [...] The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) said it thought the number of people with access to a mobile phone, but no bank account, would to rise to 1.7 billion in 2012. It also expected more than one in five to use their mobile to access banking services, creating a market worth up to $5bn (£3.05bn)."That's real money! And our MIT Development Ventures such as Dinube, MobilBanco/WAY Systems, Assured Labor, WiderReach/CellBazaar, Remesatel, and others are going to help lead the way!
"A new type of nuclear reactor that is designed to be manufactured in a factory rather than built at a power plant could cut construction times for nuclear power plants almost in half and make them cheaper to build. That, in turn, could make it possible for more utilities to build nuclear power plants, especially those in poor countries. [...] The reactors are much smaller, designed to generate 150 megawatts each, but could also be strung together to generate as much as a conventional nuclear power plant. They also integrate two separate components of a conventional power plant in a single package: the reactor itself and the equipment used to generate steam from the heat that the reactor produces. As a result, the entire system is small enough to be shipped on a railcar. And because the system can be shipped, it can be manufactured at a central facility and then delivered to the site of a future power plant."This cuts costs, boosts quality, lowers time-to-build, reduces risk, and opens markets. Great!
"India’s cities need at least 25m more homes, according to report from McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce. In Mumbai, the commercial capital, more than 8m people now live in shantytowns, often paying substantial rent for the privilege. But buying a home of their own is way out of reach for most of them: a 70-square-metre flat in the centre of the city costs $500,000 or so. Matheran Realty is one of several firms that think they have a solution: ultra-low-cost housing. In Karjat, 90km east of Mumbai, Matheran Realty is in the process of building 15,000 flats with prices starting at just 210,000 rupees ($4,500) for 19-square-metre units. Tata, the firm that makes the $2,500 “Nano” car, is building 1,300 basic units at Boisar, about 100km north of the city, and may add more. Priced at 390,000-670,000 rupees each, they are already oversubscribed. Other firms are planning similar developments elsewhere in India."The article goes on to quote Monitor's Ashish Karamchandani who has been a driving force articulating novel financing and business models for these developments, many of which are described in his Emerging Markets, Emerging Models report. I was delighted to meet him in person when he visited MIT earlier this year in an event organized by TiE-Boston's Raj Melville and Ranjani Saigal. Financial service innovations for the base of pyramid market are a trillion dollar global opportunity area!
"If we have proven anything in the last 10,000 years of advancing civilization, and especially in the last 300 years of the scientific era, we have shown an ability -- indeed a compulsion -- to kick against the pricks, no matter how painful that might be, until we break free from whatever bonds held us down. We will not be satisfied with the status quo. Life can be better, and we can make it so. We can have more freedom, more equality, more solidarity. We can do more to reduce suffering, increase education, and provide abundant opportunities for all. We can use our intelligence, our creativity, our learning, and our technology to improve on things as they are. We can, we must, and we will. Today we are finally approaching the very real potential of overcoming the greatest limitations that existence has placed upon us. We are beginning to see the glimmers of significant life extension, of healthspans that could cover centuries, if not eons. Our rapidly accelerating technological prowess may soon enable substantial reengineering of the human condition and such radical augmentation of our bodies and ourselves that we may no longer be recognizably human, but will have attained a state of transhumanity or even posthumanity."Yes.