March 10, 2004
Gary Chapman directs the 21st Century Project, which sponsors public interest research and education programs on science and technology policy.
Technology as a tool for real global change
The following op-ed appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on February 27, 2004
Saul Griffith seems like someone I'd like to meet, and I hope to one day because I think we'll all be hearing his name for many years to come.
Griffith is a 30-year-old doctoral student at MIT, originally from Sydney, Australia, and he's an inventor. Last week, he won the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Inventiveness, which comes with a $30,000 check. The award was for a portable device that can make eyeglass lenses cheaply and in about 10 minutes. He has also made a prototype of another portable machine, called an auto-retinoscope, which is a low-cost method of accurately measuring the lens prescription needed by a patient.
The lens-making device is an example of a new breed of "table-top" manufacturing that is tailored for places like the developing world. Griffith's invention is cheap, portable and it uses baby oil and auto window tinting film to produce its lens molds. Griffith and some of his friends from Cambridge have started a company based on his patent—the company is called Low Cost Eyeglasses, naturally enough—and they won a business school prize for that idea, too. They've started trials making very inexpensive glasses for people in some of the poorest and remotest villages of Nicaragua.
It turns out that more than 1 billion people in the world need eyeglasses and can't afford them, and most of them are children. Griffith's invention could change their lives.
Last summer, I did get to meet Dean Kamen, who was briefly and intensely in the spotlight because of his invention, the Segway scooter. The Segway, which is not selling as well as Kamen hoped, did seem like a yuppie toy when it was introduced, especially with its $5,000 price tag.
But Kamen has another invention that has far greater potential and is less well-known. He's developed a water purification system that runs on a unique and adaptable power generator called a Stirling engine. The Stirling engine was invented in 1816, but it has been difficult to make one that's reliable because its design generates a good deal of friction and heat. Its chief benefit is that it can run on anything, including cow dung, solar energy, hot spring water, diesel, kerosene or ordinary automobile gas.
Using novel high-tech materials, Kamen has apparently solved the Stirling engine's heat problems and has used his engine to power a system that can provide clean water to an entire village, day after day. Kamen also built a model that is attached to a satellite dish for receiving television and Internet signals.
More than 2.5 billion people need clean water and live in places where they can't find it. Kamen's invention could revolutionize life in vast areas of the world.
Griffith and Kamen are examples of engineers who are starting to use high technology to build solutions for people who have little money. The twist is that a lot of people in the world don't have much money. A little bit of money from a lot of people may be enough for some companies, and there are opportunities to change the world in dramatic and historic ways.
In May 2006, Austin will host the World Congress on Information Technology, which will bring to our city about 2,000 delegates from a majority of countries in the world. Tuesday night [February 24], city leaders and Gov. Rick Perry kicked off a fund-raising drive to finance this weeklong event. Hector Ruiz, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, used his time at the podium to observe that only 10 percent of the world is now connected with telecommunications and computers, so we have a big challenge ahead of us. The theme of the Austin conference will be "Serving All of Humanity with Information Technology."
At such an event there is likely to be a natural pull toward showcasing the technologies familiar to affluent Americans, and the economic models of enterprise that we understand. The conditions of most of the rest of the world, as Ruiz noted, are very different from those here. We have an unfortunate tendency to neglect the needs and contexts of the majority of the world's population, and there are few Americans who even understand how to bring appropriate technologies to the rest of the world.
People like Saul Griffith, Dean Kamen, the evangelists of free and open source software and other visionary but practical engineers and scientists are the most interesting people in the world today. They're the people who will really change things. Austin needs to be thinking like this, nurturing and celebrating its own practical visionaries, and at the World Congress in 2006 we need to show the rest of the world how much we care.
Related Links:
Community
Networking.org
Low-cost computer networking to build and strengthen
communities
Lonestar
Broadband
Connectivity toolkit for underserved Texas communities
The 21st Century Project
A nonprofit research and education program on
science and technology policy
Measuring the impact of the Internet: Ph.D. grad John Horrigan analyzes technology’s role in society (February 3, 2004)
Joining the global telecom community: Students represent U.S. at International Telecom Youth Forum (November 19, 2003)
2003 Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs
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10 March 2004
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