Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Also, technologically driven productivity growth has a way of sneaking up on the world.¹⁴ People take a while to figure out how to put new technologies to their best use, and industries need time to retool their plants and practices around them. Electrification, to take a prominent example, started in the 1890s, but it took forty years before economists saw the boost in productivity that everyone was waiting for. The personal computer revolution also had a sleeper effect before unleashing productivity growth in the 1990s (which is not surprising to early adopters like me, who lost many an afternoon in the 1980s to installing a mouse or getting a dot matrix printer to do italics). Knowledge about how to get the most out of 21st-century technologies may be building up behind dams that will soon burst.

Unlike practitioners of the dismal science, technology watchers are adamant that we are entering an age of abundance.¹⁵ Bill Gates has compared the forecast of technological stagnation to the (apocryphal) prediction in 1913 that war was obsolete.¹⁶ “Imagine a world of nine billion people,” write the tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and the journalist Steven Kotler, “with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy.”¹⁷ Their vision comes not from fantasies out of The Jetsons but from technologies that are already working, or are very close.

Start with the resource that, together with information, is the only way to stave off entropy, and which literally powers everything else in the economy: energy. As we saw in chapter 10, fourth-generation nuclear power in the form of small modular reactors can be passively safe, proliferation-proof, waste-free, mass-produced, low-maintenance, indefinitely fueled, and cheaper than coal. Solar panels made with carbon nanotubes can be a hundred times as efficient as current photovoltaics, continuing Moore’s Law for solar energy. Their energy can be stored in liquid metal batteries: in theory, a battery the size of a shipping container could power a neighborhood; one the size of a Walmart could power a small city. A smart grid could collect the energy where and when it’s generated and distribute it where and when it’s needed. Technology could even breathe new life into fossil fuels: a new design for a zero-emissions gas-fired plant uses the exhaust to drive a turbine directly, rather than wastefully boiling water, and then sequesters the CO2 underground.¹⁸

Digital manufacturing, combining nanotechnology, 3-D printing, and rapid prototyping, can produce composites that are stronger and cheaper than steel and concrete and that can be printed on site for construction of houses and factories in the developing world. Nanofiltration can purify water of pathogens, metals, even salt. High-tech outhouses require no hookups and turn human waste into fertilizer, drinking water, and energy. Precision irrigation and smart grids for water, using cheap sensors and AI in chips, could reduce water usage by a third to a half. Rice that is genetically modified to replace its inefficient C3 photosynthesis pathway with the C4 pathway of corn and sugarcane has a 50 percent greater yield, uses half the water and far less fertilizer, and tolerates warmer temperatures.¹⁹ Genetically modified algae can pull carbon out of the air and secrete biofuels. Drones can monitor miles of remote pipelines and railways, and can deliver medical supplies and spare parts to isolated communities. Robots can take over jobs that humans hate, like mining coal, stocking shelves, and making beds.

In the medical realm, a lab-on-a-chip could perform a liquid biopsy and detect any of hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood or saliva. Artificial intelligence, crunching big data on genomes, symptoms, and histories, will diagnose ailments more accurately than the sixth sense of doctors, and will prescribe drugs that mesh with our unique biochemistries. Stem cells could correct autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, and could populate cadaver organs, organs grown in animals, or 3D-printed models with our own tissue. RNA interference could silence pesky genes like the one that regulates the fat insulin receptor. Cancer therapies can be narrowcasted to the unique genetic signature of a tumor instead of poisoning every dividing cell in the body.

Global education could be transformed. The world’s knowledge has already been made available in encyclopedias, lectures, exercises, and datasets to the billions of people with a smartphone. Individualized instruction can be provided over the Web to children in the developing world by volunteers (the “Granny Cloud”) and to learners anywhere by artificially intelligent tutors.