Foresight Institute Announces Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes Sunday, Jan 31 2010
events and manufacturing and technology 8:01 am
From RepRap blog:
The Foresight Institute has announced its Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize to design and build a better RepRap. There is an interim prize of $20,000, and a grand prize of $80,000. They consulted with the core RepRap team before the announcement and we were initially concerned that the prizes might drive developers to secrecy in order to give themselves a competitive edge. As you will see they have addressed those concerns by making it a condition of winning the prize that solutions should be pre-published and made available under a free licence. For ourselves and on your behalf, we would like to thank the Institute for the enthusiasm that these prizes demonstrate for the RepRap project and for their magnificent generosity.
Congrats to Foresight Institute and Kartik Gada for establishing this interesting and substantial prize. There is another prize, too. Besides the Personal Manufacturing Prize, there is a Water Liberation Prize, described here:
The winner of the Water Liberation Prize of up to $50,000 will be the first person to invent a device that is either solar powered, manually cranked, or otherwise not dependent on the existence of an electrical grid, can produce at least 4 liters of potable (drinkable) water per day, either condensed from the air (as measured in approximate 50% ambient humidity) or filtered through a nanomembrane, and can be mass-produced (as demonstrated by a pilot run of no less than 100 units) for a cost of less than $5 per unit. The filter should be washable and re-usable, without requiring a periodic supply of new filters, as the device may be used in areas without access to a suitable distribution channel.
As part of my ongoing campaign to bring about a “transvaluation of all values”, I would like to suggest that “humanitarian” initiatives like this and Bill Gates’ 10 billion dollar fund to combat malaria are actually unethical and self-destructive. When the lifeboat is overfull, the last thing you want to encourage is more passengers. I know this is a difficult idea for the “progressive” Western mind to accept, but if we can’t make this mental leap soon I’m afraid we’re headed for a rather dire Malthusian correction in the not too distant future.
If scientists want to do something truly humanitarian on this planet, they should be working on technologies to humanely reduce the human population. Why is it that only the Chinese seems to understand this? Mao said “300 million Chinese is enough for the survival of mankind”, and he may be proven correct. I can only hope that there are also scientists working on depopulation initiatives, perhaps in secret laboratories somewhere at the behest of some “diabolical” group of elites, to counteract the incalculable damage that the overpopulationists continue to inflict upon this planet.
I’m not a big fan of some of these humanitarian efforts but at the same thime I dont think that we are inevatably heading for overpopulation. Puplation growth declines naturally once people have achieved a certain standard of living. Actually, the Chinese are doing everything right in this respect. They build up infrastructure in Africa but at thes time they teach them progressive values by making them ‘pay’ for their services.
@Sean Taylor
This neo-Malthusian line of reasoning is inconsistent with observable reality, nor does it take into account future technological advancement. The planet is more than capable of sustaining 6+ billion humans, and will likely sustain many tens of billions more if we develop the proper technologies. The problem isn’t too many people, but too few.
Quoting an article titled “Too Many People?” in issue 68 of International Socialist Review, “The reality is that overpopulation arguments come at a time when enough food is produced globally, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to more than feed everyone.” and “Even at the height of the food crisis last year when the number of seriously malnourished people rose to 963 million, from 923 million in 2007, according to the UN—almost one in every seven people on the planet—there was more than enough food available to give every single person 2800 kilocalories per day, enough to make every person on the planet overweight.”
Source: http://www.isreview.org/issues/68/feat-overpopulation.shtml
The UN has made similar statements regarding the water supply saying, “There is enough water for everyone” and “Water insufficiency is often due to mismanagement, corruption, lack of appropriate institutions, bureaucratic inertia and a shortage of investment in both human capacity and physical infrastructure.”
Source: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001444/144409E.pdf
In both cases, food supply and water, the resources are more than adequate, but not properly utilized. The answer isn’t draconian population controls, but better infrastructure. Infrastructure that would benefit greatly from cheaper and more efficient manufacturing technologies.
Personally, I think civilization would also benefit greatly from better and more accountable governments, but Michael is also entirely correct to espouse technological development as a means to overcome whatever political obstacles may lie in the path to meeting human need.
Considering impacts from emerging technologies like desalinization, solar & geothermal energy, robotics, vertical farming, rapid manufacturing,(even ignoring the real game changers, nanotech & AI for the sake of argument), we could see a dramatic improvement in the quality of life for a vast majority of the world’s current population. Combine that with the fact that world population has been declining since it’s peak in the 1960′s, and Malthusian arguments become even less meaningful.
Er sorry, in the last part of my post, I should have said world population growth is in decline, not population itself.
Actually, most of these proposed technological solutions to political and humanitarian problems like the water liberation prize are a total distraction from the real issues.
First, the proposed device requires so many innovations on so many levels that it is totally unworkable on any realistic time scale.
Second, how would the devices be distributed if there are no distribution channels for replacement parts? This seems more like a fancy gadget for western adventure travellers.
Third, who would actually mass produce these devices if Americans cant even mass produce enough goods to pay off their debt?
Person with the excessively long handle, I disagree. First, people always say stuff like that. I do agree that this seems undoable by 2012, but how about by 2016 or 2018? The printing of computer circuits thing is pretty major, but honestly, I doubt you are technically knowledgable enough about fab labs to even make this statement. Even a timescale of 20-30 years would be “realistic” to me, so I’m not sure what you mean by realistic. If humanity gets the next million years with this, then that’s a million years of positive utility, so why rain on this parade?
Most present-day 3D printers can be fed with common plastics. Your comment shows that you aren’t really aware of that relatively straightforward fact about 3D printers, so wtf. Third World garbage dumps are filled with plastics.
Third, economic catastrophism is common among laypeople but few economists take it very seriously. (See Bryan Caplan’s “Myth of the Rational Voter” for detailed comparisons between the beliefs of economists and hysterical, ignorant laypeople.) Economic catastrophism is especially popular among the radical left and right who love to brainwash their listeners, so wtf. If the US economy was collapsing that would seem to be a reason to push more for good fab labs, not less, anyway. I don’t see the connection. It’s just seems that you’re randomly complaining about anything that’s not your pet initiative.
First, if my username is too long you can always copy and paste. Second, the project is unrealistic in the sense that it most likely wont be able to compete with alternative approaches. Sometimes I feel that most Americans think that the world would stop spinning without them. However, not everything is well in America and not everyhting is bad in Africa. If you can already see political stability and the level of education increasing in Africa, then why not invest in projects that take advantage of these developments instead of projects that are essentially backwards-oriented?
Unlike the “correctional institution employee”, I think the development of highly autonomous personal technologies that empower individuals and decrease their dependence on (either inaccessible or exclusion-prone)centralized power-generation and production networks would go a long way in circumventing the problems of implementing political and social solutions, which often take decades. Also, such technologies would ensure better chances of survival even for people in developed countries, in cases of natural disasters or even global catastrophic risks.