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Recognizing that global collaboration is imperative for solving the world's greatest challenges has been a powerful paradigm shift in recent years. This global focus is important to create impact at scale, and also helps when solving pressing challenges within our own local communities; sometimes the solution is right at our fingertips, and other times, the idea is budding across a distant border.
Launched at the Second Annual Exponential Impact Day on June 15th, the 2015 Singularity University Impact Challenge is a new impact competition in collaboration with California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. The goal? To help alleviate the severe drought in California by leveraging new and exponentially growing technologies.
"Water is certainly one of our Global Grand Challenges," says Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, chief impact officer at Singularity University. "And if you look at our mission, it embodies what we want to do as an organization, which is to leverage exponential technology to solve a Global Grand Challenge. What better way to do that than to solve the biggest problem in California right now and one that is in our backyard?"
Golden Opportunity, Soylentils: What's your technological magic bullet solve a problem caused by generations of water policy failures?
(Score: 1) by Murdoc on Wednesday July 29 2015, @07:42AM
This has practically been the motto of Technocracy [technocracy.ca] (probably not the kind you're thinking of). It's a proposal for for a sustainable, post-scarcity economic system, designed in the 1920s and usable since at least the 1930s, in North America anyway. When you simply organize what we already have properly, there is no need to wait for artificially intelligent humanoid robots, or nanotech replicators, or any of that stuff in order to produce an "abundance" of goods and services. You just have to get rid of the hugely monumental waste [technocracy.ca] that we have today that most people don't even know about. Technocracy would greatly help problems of poverty, crime, pollution, and certainly this water shortage. One way might be by having better water distribution throughout the continent so that places without a shortage could help places with. Another would be better energy production for desalination. The main way though is simply not wasting as much as we do today.
Of course this isn't a short-term solution for this particular drought, just one we could have had before any of us were even born. But maybe we can help prevent this and other problems in the future if we start treating our resources properly.