by Robert Bryce
The Internet, mobile phones, text messaging, e-mail, GPS, and other digital communications technologies have dramatically changed our society. Thousands of books have been written about the Internet. This book could focus solely on the innovations of digital communications. But instead I will just make an obvious point: while our increased connectivity has brought us tremendous convenience, it has come with a worrisome downside. Our love of ubiquitous computing—the ability to get nearly any type of information we want on our mobile phones at any time—has enabled what Bruce Schneier calls “ubiquitous surveillance.”
In April 2013, Schneier, a security technologist and author of a dozen books on privacy and security issues, wrote that surveillance has become “efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.”99 (Orwell was the author of the dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949, which looked at a tyrannical society of the future that was ruled by Big Brother.)
Two months after Schneier’s essay was published, Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who was then working for London’s Guardian newspaper, began publishing stories based on documents he got from Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old former government contractor who had lifted a trove of secret documents while working for the National Security Agency. Those documents detailed, among other things, an NSA surveillance program, known as PRISM, which captures data from Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Apple, Microsoft, and a video-chat server in the Mideast known as Paltalk. The NSA’s snooping into phone calls and Internet traffic is part of a broader global trend toward increased surveillance of individuals. In 2011 alone, cellular phone providers in the United States provided customer-calling data to law enforcement officials some 1.3 million times, and those law-enforcement requests don’t always need to get a search warrant.100 Each year, according to the Economist, South Korean authorities make more than 37 million requests to see communications data on its citizens. (The country has about 50 million people.) In the UK, police make about 500,000 such requests per year. (The UK has about 63 million people.) In India, the government is considering a plan that will rout all communications through its own servers, a system that could allow it to eavesdrop without telling Internet providers.101
In short, as we have become more connected, we have made it easier for our government to monitor nearly everything: where we go, who we talk to, who sends us e-mail, and what we search for on the Internet. And it’s not just the government tracking us. So are advertisers and marketing companies.
In 2012, Alexis Madrigal, a writer for the Atlantic magazine, tracked all of the companies that were tracking him online. His conclusion: in one thirty-six-hour period, he was tracked by 105 different companies. Madrigal listed the outfits that followed his online clicks: “Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet. Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science. And that’s just the As . . .” Madrigal continued, writing that advertisers and data-management companies are collecting the data so that they can “show you advertising that you’re more likely to click on and products that you’re more likely to purchase.”102
While some people claim they are not worried about the government surveillance programs—“if you don’t have anything to hide, then you have nothing to worry about,” is their stock response—the potential for abuse of these surveillance operations is obvious, particularly when it comes to journalists who may be pursuing or publishing stories that the government doesn’t like. Anti-government activists could also be targeted by government snooping.
All of this is worrisome and leaves people who are concerned about privacy with few choices. In a 2012 article in the New York Times, Matt Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, said that when it comes to privacy, consumers have a choice: “Don’t have a cellphone, or just accept that you’re living in the Panopticon.”*
Digital communications are fundamentally changing the way we live, learn, and travel. And yes, they come with some enormous downsides, including the loss of privacy.
But it’s also abundantly clear that digital communications are fostering the exchange of ideas, and that exchange is further enabling liberty, freedom, and innovation. In his much-lauded 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that “successful innovators not only stand on the shoulders of giants; they engage in massive intellectual property theft, skimming ideas from a vast watershed of tributaries flowing their way . . . Societies that are marooned on islands or in impassable highlands tend to be technologically backward. And morally backward too.”103 Digital communications are allowing rivers of ideas to flow all over the world. And as those ideas flow, innovators are able to improve upon them.
Not every innovation is a net positive for human society; some create new problems. But it is undeniable that ongoing innovation is helping more people to live better lives than ever before.
I’ll prove that point in the next chapter.
* Power density is a measure of the energy flow that can be harnessed in a given area, volume, or mass. I discuss all three types of power density: areal, volumetric, and gravimetric. The book also discusses energy density, which is the amount of energy contained in a given volume or mass.
* An angstrom is one-tenth of a nanometer, or 0.1 billionth (10–10) of a meter. The unit is named for the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström (1814–1874), who did pioneering work in spectroscopy. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom.
* Designed in the late eighteenth century by Englishman Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon (“all-seeing”) was to be a round-the-clock surveillance machine. It would allow a watchman to observe all of the inhabitants of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they were being watched. For more on the Panopticon, see: Cartome.org, http://cartome.org/panopticon1.htm.
3
NEVER HAVE SO MANY LIVED SO WELL
In 1971, an epidemiologist, Abdel R. Omran, wrote that from ancient times until about the mid-1600s, humans were “caught between the towering peaks of mortality from epidemics and other disasters and the high plateaus of mortality dictated by chronic malnutrition and endemic diseases.” The result, he concluded, was that “life expectancy was short and human misery was assured.”1 Throughout much of recorded history, we humans have lived short, poverty-stricken lives. Epidemics and disease ran rampant and long life spans were rare.
That is no longer true. In 1900, the average US life span was about 47 years. Today, it’s nearly 80.2 People living in the world’s poorest countries are living longer, too. In 1970, the average life span in the least-developed countries was 43 years. In 2011, it was 59 years.3
In nearly every country on the planet, disease and premature death are on the run. In 1990, according to the World Health Organization, 61 out of 1,000 babies would die by age one. By 2010, that number had dropped to 40.4 Fewer women are dying during pregnancy and childbirth. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of women dying because of complications from pregnancy or birth was nearly halved, falling by some 3.1 percent per year over that time frame, according to the WHO.5 There’s positive news on the AIDS front. The disease hit its peak in the late 1990s, and by 2010 new infections were down by 20 percent when compared to 1997.6
There’s also good news on the literacy front. In 1970, about 47 percent of all the adults on the planet were literate.7 By 2009, according to the United Nations, the adult literacy rate was 83.7 percent.8 However, some 775 million adults still cannot read or write, and of that number about 500 million of them are women.9 Still, the progress is clear: as incomes continue rising, literacy rates will continue improving.10
Poverty is declining. In their 2013 book, Conscious Capitalism, John Mackey and Raj Sisodia point out that two hundred years ago, “85 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (defined as less than $1 per day); that number is now only 16 percent.”11 Data from the World Bank confirms that ove
r the past couple of decades, poverty has been on a downward trend. Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of people on the planet who are living in extreme poverty, which the World Bank defines as under $1.25 per day, dropped by half. In 1990, about 43 percent of the people in the developing world were living in extreme poverty. By 2010, that figure had fallen to 21 percent.12
A 2009 study by two economists, Maxim Pinkovskiy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin from Columbia University, also found sharp declines in poverty. “Using the official $1 per day line, we estimate that [from 1970 to 2006] world poverty rates have fallen by 80 percent.” Their paper, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” which was produced for the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that over the past four decades or so, “measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128 percent and 145 percent.”13
More people are living in freedom. According to Freedom House, in 1972, there were 44 countries that were considered “free.” By 2011, that number had nearly doubled, to 87. Over that same time period, the number of countries that were classified as “not free” declined from 69 to 48.14 Peter Wehner, an author, journalist, and fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has called it correctly: “In every corner of the globe, the tide is with human freedom and dignity.”
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker underscores and celebrates this remarkable progress. He demonstrates that violence is rapidly declining and that “we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”15 Of the many reasons for this, Pinker points to the rise of cities, education of the masses, the rule of law, and the rise of global commerce. While he makes many valid points, it’s also clear that things are improving because we are creating technologies that are raising living standards.
Declining Global Poverty for Various Income Levels, 1970–2006
Source: Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin.16
Those living standards are rising because we are finding and utilizing far more resources, from antimony to zinc, to produce more useful tools, from telephones and plows to online education systems and computers. By making all of them Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, we are getting richer.
Some extreme environmentalists as well as some neo-Malthusians think that finding and using so many resources is not only bad news, but also an indicator of imminent ruination. All of the planet’s resources are limited, the fearmongers remind us, and because they are limited, it must be true that we are running out of them—despite few indications that that will happen anytime soon. Remember the “peak oil” theorists, who got loads of media attention in the 1990s and 2000s? They are on the run. Hate the oil and gas industry if that’s what makes you happy, but the history of that sector is one of remarkable ingenuity. Prices and technology are always combining to unlock hydrocarbons once thought unreachable. Put another way, the more oil and gas we find, the more oil and gas we find.
Many natural resources are, in fact, getting Cheaper. That will be surprising to the doomsayers who claim that we are facing “peak everything,” as the title of Richard Heinberg’s 2007 book put it.17 Rather than “waking up to the century of declines” as the author’s subtitle warned, we’ve seen remarkable gains.
This was shown in a 2010 analysis by John Boyce, an economist at the University of Calgary, who examined the production and prices of dozens of commodities over a time span of more than a century. Boyce looked at things like beryllium, mercury, uranium, molybdenum, aluminum, helium, diamonds, and gold from 1900 to 2007. His finding: for forty-eight of the eighty-one minerals, the real prices of those commodities fell even though the per-capita consumption of those same commodities was increasing. What did Boyce point to as the reason for those price reductions? Better technology. “The only way to get rising output with falling prices is for the supply curve to be shifting faster than the demand curve, which is generally associated with technological change,” Boyce explained. In other words, we are getting better at finding and developing more resources.
To illustrate his claim, Boyce points to the Kern River oilfield in California, which was discovered in 1899. By 1942, the field had produced 278 million barrels of oil, and analysts believed that only some 54 million barrels of oil remained to be exploited. And yet, says Boyce, “by 1988, an additional 736 million barrels were produced and estimates of remaining reserves were raised to 970 million barrels.” By 2010, Boyce said, after Kern River had produced a total of more than 2 billion barrels, still more oil was being found in the field. The latest estimates were predicting that about “627 million barrels remain recoverable” in the Kern River field.18
In 2011, the Economist published a graphic that showed the declines in the magazine’s industrial commodity-price index between the mid-1800s and 2011. When measured in real-dollar terms, the cost of a basket of industrial commodities had declined by about 50 percent over a period covering more than 150 years.
Cheaper: The Trend in Industrial Commodities, 1850–2011
In 2011, the Economist published this graphic, which shows how a basket of industrial commodities has declined in price, in real-dollar terms, between 1850 and 2011. Source: the Economist. 19
I’m not claiming that the Earth’s resources are infinite or that we won’t one day run out of some commodities or rare elements. What’s clear is that we are continually figuring out ways to do more with less, to make things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, a trend that can easily be seen in manufactured goods.
In 1980, the average global cost of a solar photovoltaic module (which converts sunlight into electricity) was about $23 per watt.20 By 2010, that price had fallen to about $2 per watt.21 Back in 2005, I installed 3,200 watts of solar panels on the roof of my home in Austin, Texas. Since then, the price of photovoltaic panels has fallen by about half. Clearly, installing solar panels will still be expensive due to the high cost of labor as well as equipment like inverters and mounting brackets. But the cost-per-panel trends are positive. In 2013, First Solar, one of the biggest US-based producers of solar panels, claimed that it will be able to produce panels costing just $0.40 per watt by 2017.22 If First Solar and other makers continue reducing costs, solar energy will be deployed more widely.
Cheaper: The Trend in Photovoltaic Prices, 1980–2010
Global solar energy use is growing rapidly—up 58 percent in 2012 alone. That surge in use is due in large part to the availability of Cheaper photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight into electricity. And while it’s good to be bullish on Cheaper solar, keep scale in mind. In 2012, solar’s contribution to global energy demand was about 400,000 barrels per day of oil equivalent. Total global demand was roughly 250 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or about 625 times as much.23 Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory.24
The pundits who warn of imminent resource depletion routinely discount the fact that we are wringing more and more value out of the energy that we consume. In 1970, American consumers drove about 1.1 trillion miles, and domestic airliners flew some 2 billion miles. That same year, US oil consumption was 14.7 million barrels per day. Forty years later, in 2010, Americans drove more than 2.9 trillion miles, and domestic airlines flew 5.9 billion miles. That year, the United States consumed an average of 19.1 million barrels of oil per day. Thus, over a period of four decades, Americans nearly tripled the number of miles they drove, and domestic airlines nearly tripled the number of miles flown; yet domestic oil consumption increased by just 30 percent over that time period.
How do we explain what happened? The companies that build airplanes and cars made operating their machines Cheaper by cutting their fuel use. In 1970, it took 10,185 Btu to move a single passenger one mile on an airliner. By 2008, that number had fallen to 2,931 Btu, a 71 percent reduction. A similar trend can be seen in passenger cars. In 1970, it took 4,842 Btu to move a single passenger one mile in a passenger car. By 2008, that figure had declined to 3,501 Btu, a reduction
of about 28 percent.25
Travel has become commonplace because our transportation machines are Faster Lighter Cheaper than ever before. In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, sustained flight with an airplane by flying at about 30 miles per hour (48 km/h).26 Just 110 years later, Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company, tested a rocket ship that traveled at 1.2 times the speed of sound. (For reference, 1.2 Mach is 913 mph or 1,469 km/h.) The company hopes to begin offering rides into space, for $200,000 per person, in the near future.27 While Joe Six Pack won’t be traveling into space anytime soon, it’s abundantly obvious that travel has become Faster Cheaper and safer.
In 1970, 52,627 Americans were killed in car accidents. By 2009, that number had fallen to 33,808. Put another way, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled fell from 4.7 in 1970 to just 1.1 in 2009. The reduction in air-travel fatalities is even more striking. In 1970, the fatality rate per 100 million aircraft-miles traveled was 5.438. By 2009, that number was 0.688.28 Thus, even though the total number of aircraft miles had nearly tripled, the fatality rate fell dramatically.
Even as we are traveling Faster Cheaper and safer than before, air quality has improved. In the United States, emissions of key air pollutants like sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds have been falling. In 1990, sulfur dioxide emissions were 23 million tons. In 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, they were just 14.7 million tons.29 In 1990, VOC emissions were 23 million tons. By 2005, they had fallen to 15 million tons.30 Those numbers are remarkable enough by themselves. But they become even more astonishing when you consider that those dramatic reductions occurred over a period when US energy consumption increased by 19 percent.31