Unlike a global pandemic that kills millions, a disruptive technology is an invention or breakthrough that opens up so many possibilities it changes everything.
Instead of capturing water when it falls as rain, we can now capture the water in fog, but more importantly, we can capture morning dew and turn it into water using solar-powered technology.
There is a term in business, disruptive technology, that sounds so threatening as if it will bring a lot of bad — in the same way as our pandemic has been disruptive and made us all anxious at one time or another.
Yet, unlike a global pandemic that kills millions, a disruptive technology is an invention or breakthrough that opens up so many possibilities it changes everything.
The biggest in recent times was the Internet, which has transformed our world. Yet, just as technology moves us forward, it’s our own adaptation to it that holds us back, and that’s from the start, with the nearly zero attention we pay to the technologies now bubbling up, and their implications.
That leaves us seizing the opportunities sometimes only decades later, and many industries dying a slow death as they fail to shift mindset and see new ways to do business.
So what are the biggest disruptive technologies ahead?
The first is livestock. I have written before about cultured meat, which is where a single farm of super animals provides cells to a factory that grows meat from them, beautiful, prime, first-class steak, chicken breasts and even fish fillets, without any animals except the original cell donors.
But, last week, when researching, once again, the issues that arise when you put food and drug regulation under the same body (the worst regulatory structure on the planet for securing food safety), I found the US Food and Drug Administration had drawn up agreements in 2019 on who would monitor the safety of cultured meats in the USA — with agriculture in charge of the cell-donor farms, and health overseeing all the cell-culturing factories.
Many of these plants now exist, and production has begun in several countries, with the world’s consumers likely to move to cultured meats without return.
But more than that, I have never seen a new regulatory structure created — and in an isolated way, it wasn’t one of a whole new set — and then that technology just disappears. Cultured meat is your future and mine.
Yet think about that and farming. And then, when will cultured meat become cultured cauliflowers and beans? And even flowers? Star Trek, here we come, with buttons pressed and a rose popping out.
Of course, hold onto your cynicism if you will, as you read your news on your phone and then jump into a quick video call. But there is another technology on its way that could change Kenya too, and that is the making of water. There are two ways to ‘make’ water.
The first literally takes oxygen and hydrogen cells and puts them together, but while that’s easy enough as a little science experiment, it requires a burst of energy and a production method that we don’t have yet.
The last big breakthrough was in 2007, and silence ever since as teams work to turn that into a commercial production model. And of course, they are working to do that — for whoever cracks the technology to make water isn’t going to be having an old age marked by poverty. And it will get cracked.
The other way of making water amounts to sophisticated water harvesting. Instead of capturing water when it falls as rain, we can now capture the water in fog, but more importantly, we can capture morning dew and turn it into water using solar-powered technology, and, apparently, dew falls even in deserts.
However, the most recent breakthroughs are better still, with MIT, widely acknowledged as the leading US technology school, having tested, just before the pandemic, a solar-powered machine that captures water from dry air.
It was producing about 0.8 litres of water per square metre of air, but that is set to climb by as much as five-fold, the developers suggest, as they work with more absorbent materials to draw in more water. The air humidity can be as low as 20 per cent too.
So, imagine now, your watermaker in the back compound, delivering 20 litres a day of clean drinking water, and your cultured beef and beans: and there you see where we humans get stuck. Where will we earn our money then?
