First day of G/B20 in Los Cabos , Mexico, there were two
very interesting speeches on technology and its applications. One at a fifty
thousand feet level with biomedical changes and genome and how it will change
us humans; the other on real life applications to problems for other 4 billion
people; power and electricity.
Dean Kamen is president of DEKA company. He worked on
stairs climbing wheelchairs; prosthetic arms; pap smear test machines
prior. In his opening line he mentioned
all the CEOs who are coming to G20 represented business who operated mostly in
the 60 countries in the world and had no interest to go beyond that for
economic reasons and he made a call to the room for everyone to focus and help
to find a way to fix two very fundamental issues that people in remaining of
the world faced today. Water and electricity. He talked about two billion
people on earth with no access to electricity and over one billion people with
no clean water access; and the other two billion scrambling to get it.
He mentioned there was one technology that everyone in
the world had access and that was cellphones; and he asked if people can get
that--why can't they get clean water and electricity too?
Along the way he offered his own solution (yes--very rich
potential customers sitting in the audience!); a water purifier machine that
turns any contaminated liquid to clean drinking water; and another machine that
utilizes any type or form of energy including methane; and yes, cow dong-into
electricity. He tested it in Bangladesh, and now he is rolling them out in Ghana,
Africa to test them. You can debate whether this could be the real fix to
existing monumental issues; or this would ever work. Important point is the
issues do exist and do we have enough people on earth worried about them.
I been pondering during his speech that there is one more
thing missing in this formula from my own world view: fast, reliable,
affordable internet connections. When someone goes out there and decides to do
something as simple as this, providing a machine that can purify water for
hundred people at a time; isn’t there so many other simple things that we can
do within our reach, within our knowledge that we are not SHARING?
I believe it is testing, piloting, finding simple little
solutions and rolling them out tirelessly. It is the only way.