2. Back to Basics
• A positive future is possible
• This group exists
– To affirm it
– To track how it can come to be
– To help it where we can
– To watch out for that which may block it
• It is easy to get sidetracked
– Easy to be distracted into fear and apathy
5. The Base of the Pyramid
• Nutrition
• Water
• Energy
• Shelter
• Information and Communication
• Education
• Opportunity
6. The Rising Billion
• The advantage of being late to the party
• How the cell phone is transforming Africa
• Africa, land of abundant energy
• Micro-lending
• The Energy Trap
• The China Miracle
7. Communication magic
• Cellphones will soon be available to nearly
everyone
– Over 4 billion in the world now
• Doing well by doing good
8. Water
• One billion people lack access to safe drinking
water
• 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation
• Half of all serious hospitalizations and disease
are from unsafe drinking water
• What if we solve this problem?
– 135 million people live that wouldn’t otherwise
– Nutrition improves
– Several disease vectors are wiped out
9. Food
• GM food are NOT the problem
– They are a very big and proven part of the solution
• Hydroponics and aeroponics
• Sensors everywhere lead to maximal irrigation
and nutrient feeds
• Protein
– Sane fish farming
– Lab grown meats
10. Energy
• If you have energy you have
– Water access
– Lights
– Clean heating / cooling
– Refrigeration
– Basis for businesses
• Africa is awash in sunlight
11. Health
• Diagnosis
• Impact of communication
• Cancer is on the downtrend
• So is heart attack
• So is infant mortality
• Many cheaply treatable diseases are largely
only a problem due to lack of diagnosis
Editor's Notes
Coping with accelerating change.fundamental psychological problem. Abundance is a global vision built on the backbone of exponential change, but our local and linear brains are blind to the possibility, the opportunities it may present, and the speed at which it will arrive.we fall prey to what’s become known as the “hype cycle.” We have inflated expectations when a novel technology is first introduced, followed by short-term disappointment when it doesn’t live up to the hype.But this is the important part: we also consistently fail to recognize the post-hype, massively transformative nature of exponential technologies—meaning that we literally have a blind spot for the technological underlying our vision of abundance.Once we start believing that the apocalypse is coming, the amygdala goes on high alert, filtering out most anything that says otherwise. Whatever information the amygdala doesn’t catch, our confirmation bias—which is now biased toward confirming our eminent destruction—certainly does. Taken in total, the result is a population convinced that the end is near.incredible,” he says, “this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.”Even we fall for this. Being conscious of it is the first step to transcending it.
This book shows how accelerating technology can be applied to bring Abundance to the entire world. It is not a full roadmap but it is a tremendous start. It is exactly a cornerstone of what this group is about.
In every region of the developing world, the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the number of poor declined between 2005-2008, according to estimates released today by the World Bank. This across-the-board reduction over a three-year monitoring cycle marks a first since the Bank began monitoring extreme poverty.An estimated 1.29 billion people in 2008 lived below $1.25 a day, equivalent to 22 percent of the population of the developing world. By contrast, in 1981, 1.94 billion people were living in extreme poverty. The update draws on over 850 household surveys in nearly 130 countries.REGIONAL HIGHLIGHTSEast Asia and the Pacific: About 14 percent of its population lived below US$1.25 a day in 2008, down from 77 percent in 1981, when it was the region with the highest poverty rate in the world. In China, 13 percent, or 173 million people, lived below $1.25 a day in 2008. East Asia achieved MDG1 about 10 years ago.In the developing world outside China, the extreme-poverty rate was 25 percent in 2008, down from 41 percent in 1981. The number of people living in extreme poverty, however, was about the same in 2008 as 1981 at around 1.1 billion, after rising in the 1980s and 1990s and falling since 1999.South Asia: The $1.25 a day poverty rate fell from 61 percent to 39 percent between 1981 and 2005 and fell a further 3 percentage points between 2005 and 2008. The proportion of the population living in extreme poverty is now the lowest since 1981.Latin America and the Caribbean: From a peak of 14 percent living below $1.25 a day in 1984, the poverty rate reached its lowest value so far of 6.5 percent in 2008. The number of the poor rose until 2002 and has been falling sharply since.Middle East and North Africa: The region had 8.6 million people—or 2.7 percent of the population—living on less than $1.25 a day in 2008, down from 10.5 million in 2005 and 16.5 million in 1981.Eastern Europe and Central Asia: The proportion living on less than $1.25 is now under 0.5 percent, having peaked at 3.8 percent in 1999. 2.2 percent lived on less than $2 a day in 2008, down from a peak of 12 percent in 1999.Sub-Saharan Africa: For the first time since 1981, less than half of its population (47 percent) lived below $1.25 a day. The rate was 51 percent in 1981. The $1.25-a-day poverty rate in SSA has fallen 10 percentage points since 1999. 9 million fewer people living below $1.25 a day in 2008 than 2005.Read more:http://globalworksfoundation.org/Documents/fact511.poverty.pdf
At the base of my pyramid, creating global abundance means taking care of simple physiological needs: providing sufficient water, food, and shelter. Having three to five liters of clean drinking water per person per day and 2,000 calories or more of balanced and nutritious food gives everyone on the planet the necessary water and food requirements for optimal health.On top of these things, an additional twenty-five liters of water is necessary for bathing, cooking, and cleaning, and, considering that 837 million people now live in slums—and the United Nations predicts that this number will rise to 2 billion by 2050—a durable shelter that protects against the elements and further provides adequate reading light, ventilation, and sanitation, is also a must.
Why is it better to be late to the party? Because the latecomers can start with the best and latest technology instead of having a hundred or more years of out-of-date infrastructure to content with. One of the key
Doing well by doing goodIn 2001, 134 million Nigerians were sharing 500,000 landlines. That same year, the government began encouraging market competition in wireless communications and the market responded. By 2007, Nigeria had 30 million cellular subscribers. This obviously produced a big boost in the local economy, but it’s important to remember that it wasn’t just Nigerians who benefited. When Nokia’s profits hit $1 billion in 2009, the company said that market penetration in Africa was largely responsible.
Currently a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation. As a result, half of the world’s hospitalizations are due to people drinking water contaminated with infectious agents, toxic chemicals and radiological hazards. According to the World Health OrganizationKotler, (WHO), just one of those infectious agents—the bacteria that cause diarrhea—accounts for 4.1 percent of the global disease burden, killing 1.8 million children a year. Right now more folks have access to a cell phone than a toilet. In fact, the ancient Romans had better water quality than half the people alive today.what happens if we solve this one problem? According to calculations done by Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute, an estimated 135 million people will die before 2020 because they lack safe drinking water and proper sanitation.. But what of population growth?“The key thing you can do to reduce population growth is actually improve health. … [T]here is a perfect correlation, as you improve health, within half a generation, the population growth rate goes down.” – Bill Gates
energy is clearly the biggest game changer. So how much energy does it take to change the game?In many parts of the world there is no electricity. No light at night except perhaps candles or fires. No electricity for cooking and cleaning. Burning of wood and animal dung inside is an ecological and a health disaster. Tremendous respiratory damage from open in home fires.
These days, to perform a blood test, you need access to sterile equipment and trained personnel. Clearly, it doesn’t take much to take a blood sample, but after being gathered, it has to be sent to appropriate labs and then everyone must wait days, sometimes weeks, for the results. Not only are the tests prohibitively expensive, but in the developing world, where public transportation can be nonexistent, it’s hard enough for most people just to get to the doctor in the first place, let alone return weeks later to learn the results and obtain treatment. A technology now under development, known as Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC), has the potential to solve these problems. Packaged into a portable, cell-phone-sized device, LOC will allow doctors, nurses, and even patients themselves to take a sample of bodily fluids.Remember the Medical TricorderXprize“In the developing world, it will bring reliable health care to billions who don’t currently have it. In the developed world, like here in the US—where medical costs go up another 8 percent every year and 16.5 percent of the economy goes to health care—if personalized medical technologies like the lab-on-a-chip aren’t brought to bear on the situation, we’re going to bankrupt the country.”
