(book review) "2030, Technology that will change the world" (Van Santen, Khoe, Vermeer)

Despite of the catchy title this is a relatively down-to-earth account on how technology might resolve some of the challenges the world is facing in the next decade. The book is –I guess- intentionally kept simple and high level. For specialists in any of the matters that are treated in the book it will therefore look almost simplistic. It doesn’t help that many of the ideas expressed are based on interviews with a single expert in each of the field. On the other hand, this is probably contributing to the clarity of the view expressed.

But the beauty of the book lies in the breadth of topics covered. The authors investigate how technological evolutions apply on ‘usual suspects’-topics such as climate change, energy shortage and Health Care, to name just a few, but also on less obvious subjects such as pandemic risks, ageing population and peace.

An ambitious program… Perhaps too ambitious for a book of 260 pages. Unsurprisingly the authors stay somewhat vague on some of the subjects, and sometimes the link with technology is hard to find.

Nevertheless, it offers some surprising perspectives which at least should be common knowledge for everyone dealing with the future, with technology, or with innovation.

Some examples:

• Most of the water usage in the world is used in farming, especially in land irrigation. The scarcity of usable water is currently most acute in Africa, where water supply for basic human needs conflict with its use for irrigation purposes. However, there are times at which water for irrigation is most efficient, and these times depend on weather conditions. But these are hardly known in most parts of Africa, there are simply too few weather stations to report on local weather conditions.  Advising local farmers on the best time to use water for irrigation, is a major challenge because of this. The solution? Provide local farmer communication tools to report on weather conditions, so someone can advise them ‘on the spot’ on the most efficient periods for irrigation. Simple, clear, doable. 
• Another puzzling reasoning: air pollution is de facto slowing down global warming, because the sulphur it contains. Obviously, the answer to global warming is not to pollute more, but are there ways to develop some ‘clean pollution’ that might stop global warming? It doesn’t exist yet, but is it possible?
• The answer to some of the risks modern life brings along (pandemics for instance, but also air traffic) is, according to the authors, the decentralization of decision taking. Much like the Internet is self-healing since it doesn’t have a central decision power (but rather, connected nodes that can change according to the state of the network as a whole), other systems might benefit from a decentralized decision model. It is a thought that is worth much more thought than what the book provides. Perhaps a separate book altogether.

The book might have done with double the amount of pages, though it would've made it les enjoyable... The Return on Investment for the time spent on 260 pages is pretty high (hey, did I just find a new metric to judge the value of a book? ‘Return per Page Read’, or RPPR? Quickly trademark that one ;-)

Click to buy on Amazon.com:

Check out my previous book reviews:

• "What Technology wants" David Kelly
• "Crowdsourcing" Jeff Howe
• "The next big thing" William Higham
• "Future Files" Richard Watson
• "Future savvy" Adam Gordon
• "Futurewise" Patrick Dixon
• "Ecological intelligence" Daniel Goleman