The Future (69 page)
Authors: Al Gore
123
different kind of material can be used
Ibid.
124
Model T, manufacturing has been dominated by mass production
“The Third Industrial Revolution,”
Economist
, April 21, 2012; Peter Day, “Will 3D Printing Revolutionise Manufacturing?,” BBC, July 27, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14282091
.
125
manufacturing as profoundly as mass production did
“The Third Industrial Revolution,”
Economist;
Day, “Will 3D Printing Revolutionise Manufacturing?”
126
later produce en masse in more traditional processes
Day, “Will 3D Printing Revolutionise Manufacturing?”; Neil Gershenfeld, “How to Make Almost Anything,”
Foreign Affairs
, September 27, 2012.
127
prototyped as 3D models for wind tunnel testing
“The Printed World,”
Economist
.
128
builds $2,000 models and completes them overnight
Ashlee Vance, “3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution,”
New York Times
, September 14, 2010.
129
the expense of employing large numbers of people
Day, “Will 3D Printing Revolutionise Manufacturing?”; “The Third Industrial Revolution,”
Economist
.
130
material that is used in the mass production process
“The Printed World,”
Economist;
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Third Industrial Revolution: How the Internet, Green Electricity, and 3-D Printing Are Ushering in a Sustainable Era of Distributed Capitalism,”
Huffington Post
, March 28, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-third-industrial-revo_1_b_1386430.html
.
131
not to mention a small fraction of the energy costs
“The Printed World,”
Economist;
Rifkin, “The Third Industrial Revolution.”
132
even as their value has increased more than threefold
Diane Coyle, introduction to
The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
(Oxford: Capstone, 1997).
133
unsatisfactory for many kinds of specialized products
“The Printed World,”
Economist
.
134
delivery of parts to the factory and finished products to distant markets
Day, “Will 3D Printing Revolutionise Manufacturing?”
135
each product to widely dispersed 3D printers
“The Third Industrial Revolution,”
Economist;
Gershenfeld, “How to Make Almost Anything.”
136
“warehouses waiting to be printed locally when required”
Day, “Will 3D Printing Revolutionise Manufacturing?”
137
prints an entire house in only twenty hours
Vance, “3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution”; Behrokh Khoshnevis, TEDx Conference presentation, February 2012.
138
in some cases, 1,000 items
“The Printed World,”
Economist
.
139
turning out hundreds of thousands of identical parts and products
Ibid.
140
do not have protection against replication under “useful” copyright laws
Michael Weinberg, “The DIY Copyright Revolution,”
Slate
, February 23, 2012,
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/02/_3_d_printing_copyright_and_intellectual_property_.html
; “The Third Industrial Revolution,”
Economist;
Peter Marsh, “Made to Measure,”
Financial Times
, September 7, 2012.
141
United States, China, and Europe are working hard to exploit its potential
“The Printed World,”
Economist
.
142
printing prosthetics and other devices with medical applications
Vance, “3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution”; “Transplant Jaw Made by 3D Printer Claimed as First,” BBC News, February 6, 2012,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16907104
; “Engineers Pioneer Use of 3D Printer to Create New Bones,” BBC News, November 30, 2011,
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15963467
; Joann Pan, “3D Printer Creates ‘Magic Arms’ for Two-Year-Old Girl,” Mashable, August 3, 2012,
http://mashable.com/2012/08/03/3d-printed-magic-arms/
; “Artificial Blood Vessels Created on a 3D Printer,” BBC News, September 16, 2011,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14946808
.
143
Inexpensive 3D printers have already found their way
Vance, “3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution.”
144
“Something seismic is going on.”
Bob Parks, “Creation Engine: Autodesk Wants to Help Anyone, Anywhere, Make Anything,”
Wired
, September 21, 2012.
145
advocates of more widespread gun ownership
“3D Printers Could ‘Print Ammunition for an Army,’ ”
Dezeen Magazine
, October 3, 2012,
http://www.dezeen.com/2012/10/03/3d-printers-could-print-ammunition-for-an-army/
.
146
guns used in crimes could be easily melted down
Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun with the Push of a Button,”
New York Times
, October 7, 2012.
147
some of the jobs they had originally outsourced to low-wage countries
“The Third Industrial Revolution,”
Economist
.
148
less willing than their global counterparts to endorse either conclusion
Boston Consulting Group, press release, “Nearly a Third of Companies Say Sustainability Is Contributing to Their Profits, Says MIT Sloan Management
Review–Boston Consulting Group Report,” January 24, 2012,
http://www.bcg.com/media/PressReleaseDetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-96246
.
149
“higher-income individuals consume, as a fraction of their income”
Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The 1 Percent’s Problem,”
Vanity Fair
, May 31, 2012.
150
in “extreme poverty”—defined as having an income less than $1.25 per day
World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2010 annual report,
http://data.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/wdi-final.pdf
.
151
every twenty-four hours into the planet’s atmosphere
Drew Shindell, phone interview with author, September 1, 2009.
152
average holding period for stocks
James Montier,
Behavioural Investing: A Practitioner’s Guide to Applying Behavioural Finance
(Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2007), p. 277.
153
over a business cycle and a half, roughly seven years
Richard Dobbs, Keith Leslie, and Lenny T. Mendonca, “Building the Healthy Corporation,”
McKinsey Quarterly
, August 2005; Roger A. Morin and Sherry L. Jarrell,
Driving Shareholder Value: Value-Building Techniques for Creating Shareholder Wealth
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), p. 56; Roland J. Burgman, David J. Adams, David A. Light, and Joshua B. Bellin, “The Future Is Now,”
MIT Sloan Management Review
, October 26, 2007.
154
holding period for stocks is less than seven months
Henry Blodget, “You’re an Investor? How Quaint,”
Business Insider
, August 8, 2009,
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-youre-an-investor-how-quaint-2009-8
.
155
“is expensive and painstaking and offers far less potential for speedy returns”
Jon Gertner, “Does America Need Manufacturing?,”
New York Times Magazine
, August 28, 2011.
156
Eighty percent said no
Tilde Herrera, “BSR 2011: Al Gore Says Short-Term Thinking Is ‘Functionally Insane,’ ” GreenBiz, November 2, 2011,
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/11/02/bsr-2011-al-gore-says-short-term-thinking-functionally-insane
.
157
almost 200 millennia
Sileshi Semaw et al., “2.6-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools and Associated Bones from OGS-6 and OGS-7, Gona, Afar, Ethiopia,”
Journal of Human Evolution
45 (2003): 169–77.
158
took less than eight millennia
Graeme Barker,
The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why Did Foragers Become Farmers?
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. v (“Ten thousand years ago there were few if any societies which can properly be described as agricultural. Five thousand years ago large numbers of the world’s population were farmers.…”).
159
from 90 to 2 percent of the workforce
Ibid.; Claude Fischer, “Can You Compete with A.I. for the Next Job?,”
Fiscal Times
, April 14, 2011; Carolyn Dimitri, Anne Effland, and Neilson Conklin, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, “The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy,” June 2005,
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/eib3/eib3.htm
; United Nations Social Policy and Development Division,
Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative
,
2007,
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2007/chapter1.pdf
(“Agriculture still accounts for about 45 per cent of the world’s labour force, or about 1.3 billion people”).
160
less than half of all jobs worldwide are now on farms
United Nations Social Policy and Development Division,
Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative
.
161
the Industrial Revolution took only 150 years
Barker,
The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory
, p. v.
162
“indistinguishable from magic”
“Clarke’s Third Law,” in
Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction
, edited by Jeff Prucher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 22.
163
different from that of our ancestors 200,000 years ago
“Human Brains Enjoy Ongoing Evolution,”
New Scientist
, September 9, 2005.
164
in the world thirty years ago, the Cray-2
John Markoff, “The iPad in Your Hand: As Fast as a Supercomputer of Yore,”
New York Times
, May 9, 2011.
165
jobs of weavers obsolete
Steven E. Jones,
Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism
(New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 54–55.
166
“Luddite fallacy”
Ford,
Lights in the Tunnel
, pp. 95–100.
167
technologies as “extensions” of basic human capacities
Marshall McLuhan,
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
1
to serve primarily as a distribution service for advertisements and junk mail
Steven Greenhouse, “Postal Service Is Nearing Default as Losses Mount,”
New York Times
, September 5, 2011.
2
phenomena-driven by the connection of two billion people (thus far) to the Internet
International Telecommunication Union, “The World in 2011: ICT Facts and Figures,” 2011,
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/facts/2011/material/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf
.
3
with no human being involved—already exceeds the population of the Earth
Dave Evans, “The Internet of Things,” Cisco Blog, July 15, 2011,
http://blogs.cisco.com/news/the-internet-of-things-infographic/
.
4
connected to the Internet and exchanging information on a continuous basis
Jessi Hempel, “The Hot Tech Gig of 2022: Data Scientist,”
Fortune
, January 6, 2012; Evans, “The Internet of Things.”
5
the number of “connected things” is already much larger
Maisie Ramsay, “Cisco: 1 Trillion Connected Devices by 2013,”
Wireless Week
, March 25, 2010.
6
RFID tags in an effort to combat truancy
David Rosen, “Big Brother Invades Our Classrooms,”
Salon
, October 8, 2012,
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/big_brother_invades_our_classrooms/
.
7
“The round globe is a vast brain, instinct with intelligence”
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The House of the Seven Gables
(Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851), p. 283.
8
“where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted”
H. G. Wells,
World Brain
(London: Ayer, 1938).
9
World Wide Web on Google for some of the estimated one trillion web pages
Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, “We Knew the Web Was Big…,” Google Official Blog, July 25, 2008,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html
.
10
network of human thoughts that he termed the “Global Mind”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
The Future of Man
(1964), chap. 7, “The Planetisation of Man.”
11
“We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us”
McLuhan,
Understanding Media
.
12
“a very complex organism that often follows its own urges”
Kevin Kelly,
What Technology Wants
(New York: Penguin, 2010).
13
we are spending more and more time “alone together”
Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(New York: Basic Books, 2011); Robert Kraut et al., “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?,”
American Psychologist
53, no. 9 (September 1998): 1017–31; Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,”
Atlantic
, May 2012.
14
“Internet Use Disorder” in its appendix for the first time
Tony Dokupil, “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?,”
Daily Beast
, July 8, 2012.
15
estimated 500 million people
Jane McGonigal, “Video Games: An Hour a Day Is Key to Success in Life,”
Huffington Post
, February 15, 2012,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html
.
16
as much time playing online games as they spend in classrooms
Ibid.
17
the average online social games player
Mathew Ingram, “Average Social Gamer Is a 43-Year-Old Woman,” GigaOM, February 17, 2010,
http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/
.
18
55 percent of those playing social games
Ibid.
19
generate 60 percent of the comments and post 70 percent of the pictures on Facebook
Robert Lane Greene, “Facebook: Like?,” Intelligent Life, May/June 2012,
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-lane-greene/facebook?page=full
.
20
to the amount of time we are spending online
Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: Norton, 2010).
21
control group not informed that the facts could be found online
John Bohannon, “Searching for the Google Effect on People’s Memory,”
Science
, July 15, 2011.
22
began to lose some of their innate sense of direction
Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems,”
Walrus
, November 2009.
23
studies indicate that it is a literal reallocation of mental energy
Carr,
The Shallows
.
24
“Never memorize what you can look up in books”
Library of Congress, World Treasures of the Library of Congress, July 29, 2010,
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/world-record.html
.
25
the disuse of neuron “trees” leads to their shrinkage
Walter J. Freeman,
How Brains Make Up Their Minds
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 37–43, 81–82; Society for Neuroscience, “Brain Plasticity and Alzheimer’s Disease,” 2010,
http://web.archive.org/web/20101225174414/
http://sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=publications_rd_alzheimers.j
.
26
connecting our brains seamlessly to the enhanced capacity
McLuhan,
Understanding Media
.
27
“calling things to remembrance”
Plato,
Plato’s Phaedrus
, translated by Reginald Hackforth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 157.
28
TCP/IP protocol
Kleinrock Internet History Center at UCLA, “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970,” September 21, 2011,
http://internethistory.ucla.edu/2011/09/imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970.html
; Jim Horne, “What Hath God Wrought,”
New York Times
, Wordplay blog, September 8, 2009,
http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/wrought/
; George P. Oslin,
The Story of Telecommunications
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), pp. 2, 219.
29
and the less one relies on memories stored in the brain itself
Carr,
The Shallows
, pp. 191–97.
30
life-forms on Earth is our capacity for complex and abstract thought
Michael S. Gazzaniga,
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 199.
31
neocortex in roughly its modern form around 200,000 years ago
R.I.M. Dunbar, “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language in Humans,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
16, no. 4 (1993): 681–735.
32
with a genetic mutation or whether it developed more gradually
Constance Holden, “The Origin of Speech,”
Science
303, no. 5662 (February 27, 2004): 1316–19.
33
to communicate more intricate thoughts from one person to others
John Noble Wilford, “Who Began Writing? Many Theories, Few Answers,”
New York Times
, April 6, 1999.
34
hunter-gatherer period is associated with oral communication
Nicholas Wade, “Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born,”
New York Times
, April 14, 2011.
35
language is associated with the early stages of the Agricultural Revolution
Wilford, “Who Began Writing?”
36
Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India, the Mediterranean, and Central America
William J. Duiker and Jackson J. Spielvogel,
World History
, 6th ed., vol. 1 (Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 43.
37
the emergence of sophisticated concepts like democracy
Carr,
The Shallows
, pp. 50–57.
38
Their relative powerlessness was driven by their ignorance
Marshall McLuhan,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
39
written in a language that for the most part only the monks could understand
Burnett Hillman Streeter,
The Chained Library: A Survey of Four Centuries in the Evolution of the English Library
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
40
eleven print editions of the account of his journey captivated Europe
“The Diffusion of Columbus’s Letter through Europe, 1493–1497,” University of Southern Maine, Osher Map Library,
http://usm.maine.edu/maps/web-document/1/5/sub-/5-the-diffusion-of-columbuss-letter-through-europe-1493-1497
.
41
bringing artifacts and knowledge
Laurence Bergreen,
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
(New York: William Morrow, 2004).
42
including the exciting new derivatives product: indulgences
Hans J. Hillerbrand,
The Protestant Reformation
, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. ix–xiii, 66–67.
43
but thousands of copies distributed to the public were printed in German
“How Luther Went Viral,”
Economist
, December 17, 2011.
44
more than a quarter of them written by Luther himself
Ibid.
45
beginning a wave of literacy that began in Northern Europe and moved southward
Tom Head,
It’s Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create Social Change
(Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2010), p. 115.
46
the printing press was denounced as “the work of the Devil”
Charles Coffin,
The Story of Liberty
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1879), p. 77.
47
with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s
Revolution of the Spheres
William T. Vollmann,
Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
(New York: Norton, 2006).
48
At the beginning of January 1776
“Jan 9, 1776: Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense,”
History.com
,
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/thomas-paine-publishes-common-sense
.
49
ignite the American War of Independence that July
David McCullough,
1776
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p. 112.
50
codified by Adam Smith in the same year
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(London, 1776).
51
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
was also published in the same year
Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London, 1776).
52
a counterpoint to the prevailing exhilaration about the future
T. H. Breen, “Making History,”
New York Times Book Review
, May 7, 2000.
53
quantum computing
Michio Kaku,
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
(New York: Doubleday, 2011), Chapter 1.
54
digital data by companies and individuals
McKinsey Global Institute,
Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity
, May 2011.
55
grown by a factor of nine in just five years
“The 2011 Digital Universe Study: Extracting Value from Chaos,” IDC, June 2011,
http://idcdocserv.com/1142
.
56
telephone call grew shorter by almost half
Tom Vanderbilt, “The Call of the Future,”
Wilson Quarterly
, Spring 2012.
57
double between 2005 and 2010
International Telecommunications Union, “The World in 2010: ICT Facts and Figures,”
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/material/FactsFigures2010.pdf
.
58
in 2012 reached 2.4 billion users globally
Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, “2012 Internet Trends (Update),” December 3, 2012,
http://kpcb.com/insights/2012-internet-trends-update
.
59
as many mobile devices as there are people
Cisco Systems, Inc., Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010–2015, February 1, 2011,
http://newsroom.cisco.com/ekits/Cisco_VNI_Global_Mobile_Data_Traffic_Forecast_2010_2015.pdf
.
60
Internet users is expected to increase 56-fold over the next five years
Ibid.
61
smartphones is projected to increase 47-fold over the same period
Ibid.
62
half of the mobile phone market in the United States
Aaron Smith, Pew Internet & American Life Project, “Nearly Half of American Adults Are Smartphone Owners,” March 1, 2012,
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012.aspx
.