The first two parts of this book explored the promise of abundance and the power of exponentials to further that promise. While there is a breed of techno-utopian who believes that exponentials alone will be enough to bring about this change, that is not the argument being made here. Considering the combinatory power of AI, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing, it does appear that we’re heading in that direction, but (most likely) the timeframe required for these developments extends beyond the scope of this book. Here we are interested in the next two to three decades. And to bring about our global vision in that compacted period, exponentials are going to need some help.
But help is on the way. Later in this book, we’ll examine the three forces speeding that plow. Certainly all three of these forces—the coming of age of the DIY innovator; a new breed of technophilanthropist; the expanding creative/market power of the rising billion—are augmented by exponential technology. In fact, exponential technology could be viewed as their growth medium, a substrate both anchoring and nurturing the emergence of these forces. Yet exponentially growing technologies are just one part of a larger cooperative process—a process that began a very long time ago.
On our planet, the earliest single-cell life forms were called prokaryotes. No more than a sack of cytoplasm with their DNA free floating in the middle, these cells came into existence roughly three and a half billion years ago. The eukaryotes emerged one and a half billion years later. These cells are more powerful than their prokaryote ancestors because they’re more capable and cooperative, employing what we might call biological technology: “devices” such as nuclei, mitochondria, and Golgi apparatus that make the cell more powerful and efficient. There is a tendency to think of these biological technologies as smaller parts in a larger machine—not unlike the engine, chassis, and transmission that combine to form a car—but scientists believe that some of these parts began as separate life forms, individual entities that “decided” to work together toward a greater cause.
This decision is not unusual. We see this same chain of effect in our lives today: new technology creates greater opportunities for specialization, which increases cooperation, which leads to more capability, which generates new technology and starts the whole process over again. We also see it repeated throughout evolution.
One billion years after the emergence of the eukaryotes, the next major technological innovation took place: namely, the creation of multicellular life. In this phase, cells began to specialize, and those specialized cells learned to cooperate in an extraordinary fashion. The results were some very capable life forms. One cell type handled locomotion, while another developed the ability to sense chemical gradients. Pretty soon life forms with individuated tissues and organs began to emerge, among them our own species—whose ten trillion cells and seventy-six organs bespeak a level of complexity almost too great to consider.
“[H]ow do ten trillion cells organize themselves into a human being,” asks Canadian wellness professional Paul Ingraham, “often with scarcely a single foul up for several decades? How do ten trillion cells even stand up? Even a simple thing of rising to a height of five or six feet is a fairly impressive trick for a bunch of cells that are, individually, no taller than a coffee stain.”
The answer, of course, is this same chain of effect: technology (bones, muscles, neurons) leading toward specialization (the femur, biceps, and femoral nerve) leading toward cooperation (all those parts and many more leading to our bipedal verticality) leading toward greater complexity (every novel possibility that sprung from our upright stance). But the story doesn’t end here. In the words of Robert Wright, author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, “Next humans started a completely second kind of evolution: cultural evolution (the evolutions of ideas, memes, and technologies). Amazingly, that evolution has sustained the trajectory that biological evolution had established towards greater complexity and cooperation.”
Nowhere has this causal chain been more evident than in the twentieth century, where, as we shall soon see, cultural evolution yielded the most powerful tools for cooperation the world has ever seen.
In 1861 William Russell, one of the biggest investors in the Pony Express, decided to use the previous year’s presidential election for promotional purposes. His goal was to deliver Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address from the eastern end of the telegraph line, located in Fort Kearny, Nebraska, to the western end of the telegraph line, in Fort Churchill, Nevada, as fast as possible. To pull this off, he spent a small fortune, hired hundreds of extra men, and positioned fresh relay horses every ten miles. As a result, California read Lincoln’s words a blistering seventeen days and seven hours after he spoke them.
By comparison, in 2008 the entire country learned that Barack Obama had become the forty-fourth president of the United States the instant he was declared the winner. When Obama gave his inaugural address, his words traveled from Washington, DC, to Sacramento, California, 14,939,040 seconds faster than Lincoln’s speech. But his words also hit Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and Karachi, Pakistan, less than a second later. In fact, barring some combination of precognition and global telepathy, this is just about the very fastest such information could possibly travel.
Such rapid progress becomes even more impressive when you consider that our species has been sending messages to one another for 150,000 years. While smoke signals were innovative, and air mail even more so, in the last century, we’ve gotten so good at this game that no matter the distances involved, and with little more than a smart phone and a Twitter account, anyone’s words can reach everyone’s screen in an instant. This can happen without additional expenses, extra employees, or a moment of preplanning. It can happen whenever we please and why-ever we please. With an upgrade to a webcam and a laptop, it can happen live and in color. Heck, with the right equipment, it can even happen in 3-D.
This is yet another example of the self-amplifying, positive feedback loop that has been the hallmark of life for billions of years. From the mitochondria-enabled eukaryote to the mobile-phone-enabled Masai warrior, improved technology enables increasing specialization that leads to more opportunities for cooperation. It’s a self-amplifying mechanism. In the same way that Moore’s law is the result of faster computers being used to design the next generation of faster computers, the tools of cooperation always beget the next generation of tools of cooperation. Obama’s speech went instantly global because, during the twentieth century, this same positive feedback loop reached an apex of sorts, producing the two most powerful cooperative tools the world has ever seen.
The first of these tools was the transportation revolution that brought us from beasts of burden to planes, trains, and automobiles in less than two hundred years. In that time, we built highways and skyways and, to borrow Thomas Friedman’s phrase, “flattened the world.” When famine struck the Sudan, Americans didn’t hear about it years later. They got real-time reports and immediately decided to lend a hand. And because that hand could be lent via a C-130 Hercules transport plane rather than a guy on a horse, a whole lot of people went a lot less hungry in a hurry.
If you want to measure the change in cooperative capabilities illustrated here, you can start with the 18,800-fold increase in horsepower between a horse and a Hercules. Total carrying capacity over time is perhaps a better metric, and there the gains are larger. A horse can lug two hundred pounds more than thirty miles in a day, but a C-130 carries forty-two thousand pounds over eight thousand miles during those same twenty-four hours. This makes for a 56,000-fold improvement in our ability to cooperate with one another.
The second cooperative tool is the information and communication technology (ICT) revolution we’ve already documented. This has produced even larger gains during this same two-hundred-year period. In his book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Columbia University economist Jeffery Sachs counts eight distinct contributions ICT has made to sustainable development—all of them cooperative in nature.
The first of those gains is connectivity. These days, there’s no way to avoid the world. We are all part of the process, as we all know one another’s business. “In the world’s most remote villages,” writes Sachs, “the conversation now often turns to the most up-to-date political and cultural events, or to changes in commodity prices, all empowered by cell phones even more than radio and television.” The second contribution is an increased division of labor, as greater connectivity produces greater specialization, which allows all of us to participate in the global supply chain. Next comes scale, wherein messages go out over vast networks, reaching millions of people in almost no time at all. The fourth is replication: “ICT permits standardized processes, for example, online training or production specifications, to reach distant outlets instantaneously.” Fifth is accountability. Today’s new platforms permit increased audits, monitoring, and evaluation, a development that has led to everything from better democracy, to online banking, to telemedicine. The sixth is the Internet’s ability to bring together buyers and sellers—what Sachs calls “matching”—which, among many other things, is the enabling factor behind author and Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson’s “long-tail” economics. Seventh is the use of social networking to build “communities of interest,” a gain that has led to everything from Facebook to SETI@home. In the eighth spot is education and training, as ICT has taken the classroom global while simultaneously updating the curriculum to just about every single bit of information one could ever desire.
Obviously, the world is a significantly better place because of these new tools of cooperation, but ICT’s impact doesn’t end with novel ways to spread information or share material resources. As Rob McEwen discovered when he went looking for gold in the hills of northwestern Ontario, the tools of cooperation can also create new possibilities for sharing mental resources—and this may be a far more significant boost for abundance.
A dapper Canadian in his midfifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he’d unified those companies and was ready for expansion—a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery. To determine exactly what size refinery to build, McEwen took the logical step of asking his geologists and engineers how much gold was hidden in his mine. No one knew. He was employing the very best people he could hire, yet none of them could answer his question.
About the same time, while attending an executive program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, McEwen heard about Linux. This open-source computer operating system got its start in 1991, when Linus Torvalds, then a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, posted a short message on Usenet:
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix …
So many people responded to his post that the first version of that operating system was completed in just three years. Linux 1.0 was made publicly available in March 1994, but this wasn’t the end of the project. Afterward, support kept pouring in. And pouring in. In 2006 a study funded by the European Union put the redevelopment cost of Linux version 2.6.8 at $1.14 billion. By 2008, the revenue of all servers, desktops, and software packages running on Linux was $35.7 billion.
McEwen was astounded by all this. Linux has over ten thousand lines of code. He couldn’t believe that hundreds of programmers could collaborate on a system so complex. He couldn’t believe that most would do it for free. He returned to Goldcorp’s offices with a wild idea: rather than ask his own engineers to estimate the amount of gold he had underground, he would take his company’s most prized asset—the geological data normally locked in the safe—and make it freely available to the public. He also decided to incentivize the effort, trying to see if he could get Torvald’s results in a compressed time period. In March 2000 McEwen announced the Goldcorp Challenge: “Show me where I can find the next six million ounces of gold, and I will pay you five hundred thousand dollars.”
Over the next few months, Goldcorp received over 1,400 requests for its 400 megabytes of geological data. Ultimately, 125 teams entered the competition. A year later, it was over. Three teams were declared winners. Two were from New Zealand, one was from Russia. None had ever visited McEwen’s mine. Yet so good had the tools of cooperation become and so ripe was our willingness to use them that by 2001, the gold pinpointed by these teams (at a cost of $500,000) was worth billions of dollars on the open market.
When McEwen couldn’t determine the amount of ore he had underground, he was suffering from “knowledge scarcity.” This is not an uncommon problem in our modern world. Yet the tools of cooperation have become so powerful that once properly incentivized, it’s possible to bring the brightest minds to bear on the hardest problems. This is critical, as Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy famously pointed out: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
Our new cooperative capabilities have given individuals the ability to understand and affect global issues as never before, changing both their sphere of caring and their sphere of influence by orders of magnitude. We can now work all day with our hands in California, yet spend our evenings lending our brains to Mongolia. NYU professor of communication Clay Shirky uses the term “cognitive surplus” to describe this process. He defines it as “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects.”
“Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create,” says Shirky. “How do we measure this relative to other uses of time? Well, TV watching, which is the largest use of time, takes two hundred billion hours every year—in the US alone. To put this in perspective, we spend a Wikipedia worth of time every weekend in the US watching advertisements alone. If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.” Imagine what we could do for the world’s grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention.
Until now, we’ve kept our examination of the tools of cooperation rooted in the past, but what’s already been is no match for what’s soon to arrive. It can be argued that because of the nonzero nature of information, the healthiest global economy is built upon the exchange of information. But this becomes possible only when our best information-sharing devices—specifically devices that are portable, affordable, and hooked up to the Internet—become globally available.
That problem has now been solved. In early 2011 the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled an affordable $80 Android smart phone through Kenya’s telecom titan Safaricom. In less than six months, sales skyrocketed past 350,000 handsets, an impressive figure for a country where 60 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Even better than the price are the 300,000-plus apps these users can now access. And if that’s not dramatic enough, in the fall of 2011 the Indian government partnered with the Canada-based company Datawind and announced a seven-inch Android tablet with a base cost of $35.
But here’s the bigger kicker. Because information-spreading technology has traditionally been expensive, the ideas that have been quickest to spread have usually emerged from the wealthier, dominant powers—those nations with access to the latest and greatest technology. Yet because of the cost reductions associated with exponential price-performance curves, those rules are changing rapidly. Think about how this shift has impacted Hollywood. For most of the twentieth century, Tinseltown was the nexus of the entertainment world: the best films, the brightest stars, an entertainment hegemony unrivalled in history. But in less than twenty-five years, digital technology has rearranged these facts. On average, Hollywood produces five hundred films per year and reaches a worldwide audience of 2.6 billion. If the average length of those films is two hours, then Hollywood produces one thousand hours of content per year. YouTube users, on the other hand, upload forty-eight hours’ worth of videos every minute. This means, every twenty-one minutes, YouTube provides more novel entertainment than Hollywood does in twelve months. And the YouTube audience? In 2009 it received 129 million views a day, so in twenty-one days, the site reached more people than Hollywood does in a year. Since content creators in the developing world now outnumber content creators in the developed world, it’s safe to say that the tools of cooperation have enabled the world’s real silent majority to finally find its voice.
And that voice is being heard like never before. “The global deployment of ICT has utterly democratized the tools of cooperation,” says Salim Ismail, SU’s founding executive director and now its global ambassador. “We saw this in sharp relief during the Arab Spring. The aggregated self-publishing capabilities of the everyman enabled radical transparency and transformed the political landscape. As more and more people learn how to use these tools, they’ll quickly start applying them to all sorts of grand challenges.” Including, as we shall see in the next chapter, the first stop on our abundance pyramid: the challenge of water.