Even as the personal computer industry matured, it remained remarkably open to innovation. No one had the authority to tell Steve Jobs or Bill Gates the one way he had to make his computers. The technology could advance just as fast as engineers could build faster computers and software developers could come up with new ideas to program. Everyone else quickly imitated the good ones.
Need proof that no one, no matter how rich or powerful, had a veto over progress in computers? In 1998 the U.S. government brought an antitrust case against Microsoft because it so thoroughly dominated the industry. Apple’s market share was just 4 percent at that time. Today, Microsoft’s entries in the smartphone and tablet markets are on the verge of irrelevance, in a distant third place behind Apple and a company that was still operating out of a garage in 1998—Google. In the wide-open world of consumer electronics, no one’s dominance is secure for long. Challengers can emerge on the stage before the leaders know what hit them.
The internet has thrived on the same radical openness to innovation. Anyone—Microsoft or a kid in Bangalore—can plug in and offer ideas, tools, services, or musings to everyone else. The barriers to entry couldn’t be lower. Have some interesting photos? Millions of people want to stop by and see them. Have a better web browser? Overnight, it has a hundred million users. Have an idea to revolutionize the way friends connect? No one has the power to stop you.
It is because these systems are so open that improvements spread rapidly. Consumer electronics companies, web startups, and individual programmers all over the world actually compete to keep you ever more pleased with your digital experience. They’re in a race to see who can make the next big thing better, cheaper, faster, smarter, and cooler. And they’re in that race because nobody—no matter how big—has the power to push “Stop” on the race and say, “I’ve won. I think we’ll just keep things as they are for a while.” Some would like to. But no one has the authority to preserve the status quo.
This openness to innovation is what’s so amazing about the internet. It’s why we have iPhones and iPads and Google and Twitter and YouTube and everything else we love to spend hours poking away at.
And it’s what is missing in the other areas of our lives where we have seen no such improvement. In education, in health, in transportation, and in government, the old order has a veto. There are people empowered to protect the past, to say, “This is the best things are going to get for a while.” You probably know who some of them are. The others, you’re about to meet.
We are on the edge of an era of change the likes of which we have not seen since the period between 1870 and 1930. This astounding breakout could transform our lives in ways we can only begin to imagine today. It could all happen within our lifetimes—or not. The breakout first has to make it past the guardians of the old order, who will be only too happy to smother it.
It will take all of us—and some very big fights—to make sure that does not happen.
The next breakout could transform education, manufacturing, medicine, energy production, transportation, and government as thoroughly as the internet has transformed communication. Of course, we cannot know exactly what this new world would look like, but we can already begin to see its outline taking shape.
Education
Education pioneers are using the information revolution to develop new ways of teaching that will tailor lessons to each individual student. We could abandon the old “butts in seats” system, which measures progress by the number of hours students sit in chairs listening to teachers. The one-size-fits-all system is failing because it educates the “average student.” Instruction is too slow for one half of the class and too fast for the other.
In higher education, despite the outrageous prices, the model is even more hostile to students. Too often, it goes something like this: “I am the professor and I already know the material, so you will listen to my lecture and then figure it out for yourself if you don’t understand.”
Only the most unusually motivated students thrive throughout seventeen years of this experience.
The explosion in computing and networking technology, however, allows us to replace this failing system with one that can adapt to every student. An achievement model powered by computers and informed by brain science and psychology can teach students exactly what they need, as they need it, in the way that is optimal for each unique, individual learner.
Almost as important as the improvements in quality will be the sharp cuts in cost. The new system should cost only a fraction of what we spend on today’s dysfunctional education bureaucracy. Imagine a high-quality basic education that is free to everyone in the world. Imagine ten-thousand-dollar bachelor’s degrees from America’s best universities. We are talking about a big leap in opportunity for millions of people whom the current system serves so poorly.
Materials and Manufacturing
Only a few years ago, three-dimensional printers sounded like something out of science fiction. Now, these devices are sold at Staples. Like inkjet printers, 3-D printers allow consumers to “print” designs they’ve created on or downloaded to their desktop computers. Instead of laying ink on a sheet of paper, however, 3-D printers lay down thin layers of plastic (or some other material), one on top of the other, in order to build an object.
Because the technology is still in its primitive stage, early adopters are figuring out new uses for it all the time. Entrepreneurs who once sent designs to China and waited for models to arrive by mail are using 3-D printers to prototype their products quickly and inexpensively. Schools and universities are uploading digital models of fossils and bone specimens to the internet so amateur paleontologists anywhere in the world can print out a copy of a mosasaur tooth at scale. Children are using them to print new tokens for their board games and figures for their dollhouses. Second Amendment proponents are using them to create firearms that can be transmitted over the internet. And doctors are using advanced 3-D printers filled with an “ink” of living cells to print new human organs.
Soon you should be able to “print” in your home almost any physical object you can imagine. The possibilities for manufacturing, health, education, and other endeavors are amazing.
Other discoveries in materials science, like nanocarbon tubes, could change the world just as much as plastics did in the second half of the twentieth century.
Health
As the prospect of printing new human organs suggests, we are on the cusp of a transformation in healthcare. Now that consumer computers can process such massive amounts of data as the human genome, genetics is finally becoming a practical tool in medicine.
The implications are enormous. Just as we can replace teaching the “average student” with personalized learning, with the advances in genetics, we can replace treating the “average patient” with personalized medicine. Healthcare should be better, with fewer unintended side effects, and could cost less.
The most revolutionary effect of these breakthroughs could be the replacement, in many cases, of disease management with cures. In the United States, people no longer show up at the doctor with polio. We no longer treat tuberculosis or malaria. We’ve cured them. They’re non-problems.
Imagine a world where diabetes is cured, where Alzheimer’s doesn’t occur, where a cancer diagnosis means a night in the hospital while doctors install a new organ grown from your own cells. We could reach that world in the foreseeable future.
Energy
A decade ago, the airwaves were full of people who were certain the world was running out of oil. Americans must face rationing or punitive gasoline taxes, they said, to slow the oncoming crisis of “peak oil.” National leaders cried hysterically for an energy policy to force the transition from this old, dirty, and dwindling sludge to solar, wind, and other underdeveloped technologies that would impose atrocious costs on the American people but would at least avert disaster.
No one thought of so-called “fossil” fuels as the future.
Then came what
history will remember as one of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the twenty-first century: the union of “hydraulic fracturing”—“fracking” for short—and “horizontal drilling.”
Like 3-D printing, fracking sounds like science fiction. Energy developers drill a well bore as deep as ten thousand feet. Then, incredibly, they force a ninety-degree turn in the steel pipe and drill horizontally for up to two miles. Next, they pump a mixture of water and sand at high pressure into the well, producing small fractures in the rock far underground. When they withdraw the water, the sand remains and keeps those fractures propped open, allowing individual molecules of trapped oil and natural gas to migrate up the well.
It would be an understatement to say this engineering marvel has caused a revolution in American energy. Because of fracking, the United States will soon be the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas.
Fracking has killed the peak oil myth we were fed for decades and with it, the crisis rationale for inflicting on Americans the pain of higher taxes or rationing. But more importantly, it could be a game changer for the American economy and national security.
Transportation
The cars we drive today are safer, more comfortable, and more efficient than the cars our parents and grandparents drove—but they are fundamentally the same. That could soon change. After decades with no groundbreaking innovation in automobiles, Google has developed genuinely self-driving cars that have traveled more than six hundred thousand miles on California roads virtually without incident.
After being beaten to the automotive future by an internet search company, most of the major carmakers are now racing to design self-driving cars of their own. Sometime in the third decade of the twenty-first century, cars requiring little if any human intervention could become commercially available. Already today, companies like Caterpillar are operating giant self-driving trucks in industrial settings.
Because roughly 80 percent of car accidents are the result of driver error,3 there is good reason to think this breakthrough could save tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet improved safety will be only one consequence of the second great automotive revolution. Cars and trucks that drive themselves from place to place, ferrying passengers and cargo, would transform the way we live.
Government
All over the world, governments are having to adapt to the internet. In China, Egypt, Turkey, and countries throughout the Middle East, old regimes are faced with powerful new social forces they cannot control. The internet exposes the weakness of these regimes.
In the United States as well, the internet has begun to reveal the corruption of the bureaucratic state. Virtually all business is conducted through email, providing the American people with a detailed record of their public servants’ conduct. The picture has not always been flattering (and in a number of cases, we have seen bureaucrats conspiring to break the law by using their personal email addresses to avoid leaving a trail).
New technologies have the potential not just to expose bad government but to improve it as well. Yet with so many astonishing changes happening all around us, the pace of innovation in government seems glacial. Our government and our politics are trapped in the past. But there are hints of the future we could achieve using technology to empower citizens to reclaim the functions of government from the bureaucratic state.
California’s lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, has argued that citizens can use technology “to bypass government, … to take matters into their own hands, to look to themselves for solving problems rather than asking the government to do things for them.”4
Across the country we will see that there are fascinating experiments taking place at the local level to do just that. We have not even begun to understand how the information revolution we have just lived through—and the breakthroughs yet to come—could transform government and enhance freedom and prosperity for the next generation of Americans.
Enemies of the Future
These revolutionary breakthroughs in information, transportation, education, energy, materials and manufacturing, healthcare, and government are no longer mere daydreams. They’re all beginning to happen right now.
Even those changes that seem like science fiction, however, are just the earliest stages of the world we could one day know. In many areas we have only vague but exciting indications of what is yet to come. We know as little about the future as someone living in the world of candles and horses knew about the age of television and passenger planes.
The change that is coming won’t be simply more of the change we have seen in the last generation. It will be something else entirely—a change of kind, not just a change of degree.
We are talking about a fundamental transformation of what is possible, what we can accomplish, and what it will cost.
The scale of this transformation makes it a watershed. For it to happen, we must reorganize how we think and act, how we structure organizations, how we organize activities, the very questions we ask, and the metrics we establish.
Many of the problems we spend so much time and effort trying to solve today can be cured out of existence tomorrow. No tinkering around the edges compares with the breakout ahead.
If we achieve breakout, it will be one of the most momentous events in our history. It will bring more people out of poverty (several billion) than ever before. It will create more opportunities and more new products and services than we can count. It will solve budget issues that currently appear unsolvable. Smaller breakouts in healthcare and education will improve quality of life by an order of magnitude.
We are talking about a completely different world—like a jump to another century. It can all happen, and it can all happen soon. America can break out. But the prison guards of the past, the guardians of the old order on both the Left and the Right, will not go quietly into the night.
Think back to the shift from the candle to the electric light.
Candles had been around for about five thousand years. They provided some light, but for most of that time, people ended their days when nighttime began. Candles didn’t offer enough light to do much of anything, and they were expensive. When you were paying to burn candles, even activities like reading were economic decisions. Young Abraham Lincoln’s family was too poor to burn candles for something as frivolous as reading, so he learned to read by the light of the fireplace.
In 1870, gas lamps were available in some places, but they were basically candles with more fuel. The night was dark, the stars were bright, and no one could imagine things any other way.
Then in 1879, Thomas Edison introduced the first reliable electric light, made from carbonized bamboo thread. It would burn for 1,300 hours.
Edison himself understood the revolution that his invention represented. “After the electric light goes into general use,” he said, “none but the extravagant will burn tallow candles.” The poor—along with the rest of America—would be illuminated through technological change. The inexpensive light would improve reading and literacy, add more useful time to the day, and brighten homes and street corners.
The electric light is not simply a cheaper or better candle, however. It is a different thing entirely, and it opened up completely new possibilities over the next half century. Think of Times Square in New York or the Las Vegas Strip at night. Think of an airport runway. Think of theater lighting or a searchlight or a camera flash.
These things were new. Much like the transformational breakthroughs we are approaching in the twenty-first century, the change from the candle to the electric light was a change of kind, not a change of degree. And it happened suddenly, in a few decades.
Electric lights make life better, happier, and more prosperous, and yet because they are so cheap, even the poorest among us take them for granted.
Today we even have people who worry about “light pollution,” a term that in 1870 might have conjured images of smoke and soot from a lone candle but that in fact
represents the phenomenon of having so much artificial light that you cannot see the stars.
Light pollution activists want people to use dimmer bulbs, to turn off extra lights, and to stop using bulbs of certain hues.
Can you imagine explaining to someone in 1870 that in the next century, there would be groups organized to fight “light pollution”?
Now try to imagine that today’s environmentalists were around when electric lighting was coming into general use. They would have declared the light bulb hazardous to nocturnal animals and a grave threat to the night sky.
Cynical columnists would have announced that electricity can kill and that the entire idea was an effort by profit-seeking corporations to exploit the poor and make them want something they didn’t need.
If some of today’s famous economists had been around, they would have joined forces with the candlestick makers’ union and called for the protection of thousands of candlestick-making jobs by banning this dangerous new product, which was destroying American jobs by creating free light.5
If today’s bureaucrats had been around, they would have established an agency to plan the distribution of electric lights and to set fixed standards for their design, since Edison and other inventors couldn’t be trusted to promote the public interest.
Politicians would have announced there was an electric light shortage and that we needed a redistribution program so the poor would get their fair share of candles.
Fortunately, for most of America’s history, such opposition to the emerging future was weak and lacking authority. Before World War II, there was no army of lobbyists, unions, bureaucrats, and litigators seeking to cancel the future and protect their own privileges.
Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate Page 2
