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Economics of Technology for Clean Drinking Water
Posted on Oct 12, 2012
Slingshot is the name that the folks at Deka, the company Dean Kamen founded, have given to their water purification machine. The main goal is to provide an affordable machine to clean the all too often polluted water that globally causes a large proportion of all health problems.
Two important issues become apparent when reviewing this incredible machine. First, the problem of affordability, is a major focus of this technology because, if it can't produce water with a cost these typically very poor people can afford, then, according to our economic system, this brilliant invention won't work. This brings us to the second problem. Our economic system itself is a form of technology. Most inventors work within the confines of our existing economic system. What would happen if we let them invent a new economic system that might prevent the problem in the first place? Surely keeping water clean in the first place must, in any sane economic system, be more affordable than building machines after the fact to clean it up. So, another way to address the clean water problem would be adjust the economic system in order to make polluting it cost prohibitive.
Technology broadly speaking, whether it be physical machines or social systems like economics, or the monetary system, are all just human inventions that have served a purpose. All too often, technologies like nuclear power and weapons, fossil fuels for cars and electricity, and capitalist economic systems are used by the most powerful to maintain their power despite the devastating future impacts. At the same time we currently have all the technology we need to prevent water pollution, to power all our needs using renewable energy, and to create an equitable and socially responsible economic system. Our great challenge with technology becomes a moral and ethical one. How do we apply the science of natural systems limits, equality, fairness, and consideration of the impacts to the rights of future generations? What drives our choices of technology and how we value and cost them? Technology in the form of social systems like economics are just as ripe, if not more so as drivers of direction in physical technology, for re-invention, transformation, and innovation.