The world has many problems to solve. Billions live without reliable energy and lack adequate access to water, health care, and education. More people die from lack of clean water than war. Our food system, which is the primary source of income for billions, must grow to meet the needs of another two billion people. Poverty is endemic on the planet. These are some of humanity’s grand challenges—and they’re not just in the developing world. Many parts of the developed world also suffer from these ills, particularly in health care, education, and poverty.
The good news is that solutions to these grand challenges are at hand. Several technologies are now advancing exponentially. They enable entrepreneurs to do what only governments and large research labs could do before in solving big problems. Yet Silicon Valley, which could be taking the lead in ridding humanity of its ills, is focused on scoring big hits by solving small problems. The venture capital system, which fuels the technology industry’s growth, is geared toward rolling the dice in the hope of receiving returns of five to ten times the invested capital within five to seven years. Such home runs are rare, so the system is in decline. For the last fifteen years, most venture capital firms have produced lower returns than the stock markets.
For these investors, the quickest hits usually come from building apps or games that go viral or websites that automate business processes. Writing software isn’t hard—even those who not have completed their college education can do this. They, too, think small and dream of big financial returns. That is why the emphasis is on youth, and Silicon Valley moguls pay teens to drop out of college.
This creates a big opportunity for women who want to solve big problems. Women are beginning to dominate many fields in education and gain an increasing share of the degrees. They now earn 61.6 percent of all associate’s degrees, 56.7 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, and 58.5 percent of graduate degrees in the United States. More women than men graduate in fields such as biology, education, health sciences, social/behavioral studies, and arts and humanities. In the OECD countries, women constitute 58 percent of all graduates, and more girls than boys now complete their secondary education in thirty-two of thirty-four of these countries. And, of course, girls match boys in mathematical achievement.
In building an exponential technology, education is important, and knowledge of more than one discipline provides a big advantage. And if you combine a cross-disciplinary education with empathy and a desire to do good, you have a powerful combination. That’s why many female entrepreneurs are best positioned to solve humanity’s grand challenges—and to save the world. And that is why it is important to teach and inspire them.
Not only is the power and capability of certain technologies increasing at an exponential pace, their footprint and costs are declining dramatically. This puts women in the catbird seat. The strong disadvantage they had in not being able to gain venture capital is no longer an inhibitor. World-changing technologies can be built for relatively small amounts of money. Prudent financial management can allow an entrepreneur to bootstrap a startup to the point from which it can gain funding on its own merits.
Let me illustrate some of these technologies. Most people are aware of the advances in computing. They have seen the processing power double every eighteen months—as prices dropped and devices became smaller. A $500 laptop has more computing power today than a Cray 2 supercomputer that cost $17.5 million in 1985. What once required a large building and a water-cooling system now fits in a pocket. In the technology industry, this progression is known as Moore’s Law.
Such advances are happening not only in computing, but also in the fields of medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3-D printing, and medicine. Futurist Ray Kurzweil noted that as any technology becomes an information technology, it starts advancing exponentially. That is what is happening in these fields.
It wasn’t long ago when our only recourse when we doubted our doctor’s prescription was to seek a second opinion. Now, when we need information about an ailment, we search on the Internet. We have access to more medical knowledge than our doctors used to have via their medical books and journals, and our information is more up-to-date than those medical books were. We can read about the latest medical advances anywhere in the world. We can visit online forums to learn from others with the same symptoms, provide each other with support, and discuss the side effects of our medicines. We can download apps that help us manage our health. All of this can be done by anyone with a smartphone.
Our smartphones also contain a wide array of sensors, including an accelerometer that keeps track of our movement, a high-definition camera that can photograph external ailments and transmit them for analysis, and a global positioning system that knows where we have been. Wearable devices such as Fitbit, Nike, and Jawbone are commonly being used to monitor the intensity of our activity; a heart monitor such as one from Alivecor can display our electrocardiogram; several products on the market can monitor our blood pressure, blood glucose, blood oxygen, respiration, and even our sleep. Soon we will have sensors that analyze our bowel and bladder habits and food intake. All of these will feed data into our smartphones and cloud-based personal lockers. Our smartphone will become a medical device akin to the Star Trek tricorder.
We learned how to sequence the genome about a decade ago, and sequencing it cost billions. Today, a full human genome sequence costs as little as $1,000. At the rate at which prices are dropping, it will cost less within five years than a blood test does today. This makes it affordable to compare one person’s DNA with another’s, learn what diseases those with similar genetics have had in common, and discover how effective different medications or other interventions were in treating them.
Robots can now perform surgery, milk cows, do military reconnaissance and combat, and fly fighter jets. The robots of today aren’t the Androids or Cylons that we used to see in science-fiction movies, but specialized electromechanical devices that are controlled by software and remote controls. As computers become more powerful, so do the abilities of these devices. High school children are using robot-development kits with open-source software to create sophisticated robots. Industrial robots that can do manufacturing and automate other routine processes cost as little as $22,000, and prices are dropping while their capabilities advance to human levels. I expect to be ordering a robot like Rosie from The Jetsons sometime in the next decade and to have her delivered to me via an Amazon robotic drone. She will cost less than $22,000 in today’s terms.
3-D printers can transform materials such as plastic, ceramics, glass, and titanium into mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3-D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1,000. Soon we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3-D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. In the next decade, we may be 3-D-printing buildings and electronics. Remember the Star Trek replicator? It may not remain science fiction.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has progressed to the point at which a computer was able to defeat the most capable and knowledgeable humans on the TV show Jeopardy. The technology that enabled this, IBM Watson, is now available to developers everywhere. AI systems are being trained to perform medical diagnosis, drive autonomous cars, and operate call centers. They are finding their way into manufacturing and powering robots that do human chores. A Samantha-like companion from the movie “Her” may not be that far away. I expect her—or “Him”—to have a robotic body, though, which is 3-D printed to order. Imagine the possibilities.
Regenerative medicine has been used to implant lab-grown skin, tracheas, and bladders into humans. Soon, 3-D printing technologies will grow human cells, layer by layer, to make replacement skin, body parts, and eventually organs such as hearts, livers, and kidneys. Kinkos-like production shops are also synthesizing DNA, which researchers can use to create new organisms and synthetic life forms. DNA “printing” is priced by the number of base pairs to be assembled (the chemical “bits” that make up a gene). Today’s cost is about twenty-eight cents per base pair, and prices are falling dramatically. Within a few years, it could cost a hundredth of this amount. Eventually, like laser printers, DNA printers will be inexpensive home devices. I can’t even imagine what we will “print.”
Using nanotechnology, engineers and scientists are developing many new types of materials, such as carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites (and their metal-matrix and polymer-matrix equivalents), and new carbon fibers. These new materials enable designers to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy-efficient and more durable than anything that exists today.
And then there is data—lots of it. Over the centuries, we gathered data on things such as climate, demographics, and business and government transactions. Our farmers kept track of the weather so that they would know when to grow their crops, we had land records so that we could own property, and we developed phone books so that we could find people. Now we also gather data on web browsing—what news we read, where we shop, what sites we surf, what music we listen to, what movies we watch, and where we travel. On social media, we gather data about what we like and dislike and who we know and even our sexual preferences and spiritual values. Today, there are more than 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and far more video is being collected worldwide through the surveillance cameras that you see everywhere. Mobile phone apps are keeping track of our every movement—everywhere we go, how fast we move, what time we wake.
Now combine all of this data with the exponential technologies I detailed earlier, and you have the ability to create world-changing innovations.
Consider what could happen if we correlated information about a person’s genome, lifestyle habits, and locations with their medical history and the medications they take. We would understand the true effectiveness of drugs and their side effects. This would change the way drugs are tested and prescribed. And then, when genome data becomes available for millions, perhaps billions of people, we could discover the correlations between disease and DNA to prescribe personalized medications—tailored to an individual’s DNA. We are talking about a revolution in health and medicine.
In schools, classes are usually so large that the teacher does not get to know the student—particularly the child’s other classes, habits, and progress through the years. What if a digital tutor could keep track of a child’s progress, likes and dislikes, learning preferences, and strengths and weaknesses? Using data gathered by digital learning devices, test scores, attendance, and habits, the teacher could be informed on which students to focus on, what to emphasize, and how best to teach an individual child. This could change the education system itself.
And then combine the data that is available on a person’s shopping habits with their social preferences, health, and location. We could have shopping assistants and personal designers creating new products, including clothing that is 3-D printed or custom manufactured for the individual. An IBM Watson-like assistant could anticipate what a person wants to wear or to eat and have it ready for them.
Data can assist human decision-making in almost every sector. Analyzing large amounts of data from different perspectives can unearth new insights and prevent errors. This data can be used to decide where a new store will be located, when to water a field or spray it for insecticides, or when a police car should patrol a neighborhood. It this exponential era, data is the key to competition and productivity.
As I mentioned earlier, all of these advances require more than software coding skills. They require knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences, and human behavior—all of which are fields that women are dominating. Then there is design—which makes technology elegant, usable, and appealing. The key to good design is empathy combined with knowledge of the arts and humanities. Indeed, as Steve Jobs said when he unveiled the iPad 2: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” Who is better positioned to dominate exponential technology design than women?
The software, hardware, and disk storage needed to start a technology company would have cost millions of dollars a few years ago. Complex computations often required arrays of mini-computers and sometimes supercomputers. Today’s laptops have more processing power than these. For storage, you once needed server farms and racks of hard disks; today, you have cloud computing and cloud storage—and they’re cheap.
You can also bootstrap hardware companies, such as Nest (which Google acquired for $3.2 billion). Sensors such as those in our smartphones would have cost tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago; they now cost practically nothing. Entrepreneurs on shoestring budgets can build smartphone apps that act as medical assistants to detect disease; body sensors that monitor heart, brain, and body activity; and technologies to detect soil humidity and improve agriculture.
Entrepreneurs once had to begin their journey by writing a detailed business plan and pitching it to venture capitalists. But that is no longer the case because the cost of technology has dropped exponentially. They can beg or borrow the relatively small amounts of money they need from their friends and relatives—or they can crowdfund their startup.
Women no longer have a financing disadvantage that they once had. There is nothing holding them back. They are now excelling in the fields that require more compassion, cross-disciplinary knowledge, and vision. They are building world-changing companies. Some women, such as Anousheh Ansari, are literally shooting for the stars as you will read in her essay ahead.
In an email exchange, one of our ambassadors, Phaedra Pardue, wrote some words that really inspired me. She explained better than I can why it is important to inspire women innovators. Here is what she said:
“I am of Klamath Native American decent. My mother is full-blood Native American, and my father is European and came from English/French settlers that made it to the Pacific Northwest. My Native American ancestors believed that women hold the sacred power to bring life to this world, so therefore in Native American society, women were revered and respected, as equal to men in many ways. In many of the Native American cultures, it was the women’s decision whether or not to go to war as a people. Decisions with tribal council included women elders as well as men. There was no fear of their sacred wisdom and power, so there was no need to keep Native American women in a subservient role. They held property and could marry and divorce by choice in most tribes. In fact, often property was passed down along the female line, from mother to daughter. The ancient wisdom of my people that I always try to share when I meet someone who has “never met a real Indian” is that our people made important tribal decisions based on looking forward into the future seven generations. Only once it was deemed to be positive that far into the future was agreement to proceed granted. I always try to share this concept with people; it seems to be hard for many to grasp, but think what an incredible world we would live in if we all tried to think forward in this way, for the good of the ALL. FOR THE GOOD OF THE ALL.”
She is completely right. This is for the good of mankind.