The Carousel of
Progress
In 1964 Walt Disney
unveiled a New York City World’s Fair attraction consisting of six theaters
with a fixed stage encircled by a ring of rotating seats that transported
audience-members through the innovations of the 1900s, 20s, 40s and to a nondescript,
future horizon.[1] The “Carousel of Progress” served as part GE
commercial but also as a panoramic view of the innovations of yester-year
detailing the “towering”, 20-story buildings, moving pictures, gas lamps and soda
fountains of the 1900s, the single-engine planes, sports-stadiums, radios and in-door
plumbing of the 20s and the automatic dishwashers, televisions, and refrigerators
of the 40s. Each “theater-era”
represented a different season - spring, summer, fall and winter respectively -
all transitioning to the tune of the Sherman Brothers, “There’s a Great Big
Beautiful Tomorrow” and revolving to rest on a final act four: a futuristic
“family of tomorrow,” on the crest of New Year’s Eve.[2]
The Threshold of a
New Year
Over the years the
attraction underwent five major updates in 1967, 1975, 1981, 1985 and 1994,
which chiefly focused on the family of act four and their “marvelous”
technologies.[3]
As each era bore down on the animatronic family making them obsolete, it was
necessary to upgrade the group with new innovations - satellite TV, the
personal computer, virtual reality - in order to keep them ahead of the curve and
dangle them out in the future.
The task of
deciding what innovations to place in the scene would be a difficult one indeed,
but it would prove interesting to be in the shoes of the Disney Imagineer
tasked with updating act four of the Carousel of Progress. What representative, future innovations would
you place in the final New Year’s Eve scene?
Here’s my list:
The Steve Jobs
Textbook
In the fall of 2010, Steve Jobs met with
President Obama and expressed his views that America’s educational system was
“hopelessly antiquated” and structured to treat teachers as unionized,
industrial assembly-line workers instead of professional educators.[4] He suggested that schools should stay open
longer and found it absurd that American classrooms were still based on teachers
standing at a chalkboard teaching from a textbook.[5]
He envisioned a future in which kids did
not have to lug around heavy textbooks that had been filtered through a corrupt
certification process and he believed that all “books, learning materials and
assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and
providing feedback in real-time.”[6]
Since Jobs’ passing in October of 2011 Apple
has carried forward the torch of the textbook revolution. Here’s how they have fared:
An Apple for the Teacher
In
January of 2012 Apple held an education event in New York and revealed three
key, iPad-centric features, that will help reinvent the old-fashioned textbook: [7]
1) A partnership with
major, educational publishers
2)
iBooks 2 and
3)
iBooks Author
Publishers
Although Jobs original vision was to “hire
great writers” to create digital textbooks, Apple has decided to partner with
the publishing houses that employ them. Apple
revealed partnerships with McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
who when combined publish about 90% of the textbooks in US schools.[8]
iBooks 2
In addition to providing many of the key,
original iBooks app features such as pinching to zoom, page flipping and
book-marking, the new, free iBooks2 app provides an enhanced interactive experience
for textbooks. For example, a biology book can have animated 3D cell structure
models, DNA animations, tap-on, in-text glossary terms and search
features. The app also allows digital,
“swipe” highlighting and simple note-taking features which can be transformed
into digital index cards for study purposes.[9] Also, in keeping with a key Jobs’ initiative,
the books provide real-time, immediate feedback for end-of-chapter review
questions.
The textbooks are available in Apple’s
iBookstore for $14.99 a piece, an already contentious price between Apple and
its partner publishers.[10]
Jobs wanted them to be free and included with the iPad. [11]
iBooks Author is a free, simple, drag and drop authoring
and self-publishing app used to create the textbooks.[12]
Industries Impacted: Education and
Publishing
Educational publishing is an $8 billion
industry[13]
and publishers seem to see the writing on the iPad and are positioning themselves
ahead of the sea-change. iTunes helped
to save the music industry by legitimizing the music file download process and
it appears that the iPad and iBooks are poised to do the same for publishing. McGraw Hill “admitted that its business would
be altered by selling directly to the students at a lower cost, but making it
up on volume with non-transferable books that would need to be purchased by
every student, every year.”[14]
Item One to be Placed in The Carousel of
Progress: an iPad.
The Singularity is
Near
Ray Kurzweil and Nanotechnology
Ray Kurzweil is an author, inventor and
“futurist” who predicts that by 2045 technologists will have recreated the full power of human
intelligence in a machine, resulting in a billion-fold increase in intelligence
that allows humans to transcend limitations and reach immortality.[15] This profound change as detailed in his 2005
book The Singularity is Near, stems
from a series of steps or epochs of evolution leading to the merger of technology
and human intelligence, creating a universal saturation of intelligence.[16] Ultimately, the universe will “wake up.”
Kurzweil is not
completely out of left field either: he
is the principal developer of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the inventor of
the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, a member of the
Inventor's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology.[17]
Nanotechnology
Two key variables underlie
Kurzweil’s theorem:
1.
A Law of Accelerating Returns - essentially an enhanced version of
Moore’s Law, which indicates that computing power is roughly doubling every year,
leading to smarter, smaller and cost-effective technology.
2.
Nanotechnology - Epoch Five in Kurzweil’s world in which technology
integrates with biology and masters its methods, including human intelligence. [18]
In 30 or 40 years according to Kurzweil, microscopic
machines called nanobots will travel throughout human bodies, repairing damaged
cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases. This technology will also be
used to back up memories and personalities and ultimately, we will “replace our
frail, ‘version 1.0’ bodies with a greatly enhanced version 2.0.” [19]
Kurzweil believes that by 2024, instead of time running
out, it will be running in and humans will be adding a year to life expectancy
for every year that passes, reversing the loss of remaining life expectancy.[20]
Features of Kurzweil’s Nanotechnology
·
Enhanced physical
and mental capabilities
·
Radical life
extension through the destruction of pathogens, cancer cells, toxins and debris
·
DNA error repair
In the Real World
Researchers at MIT are already using nanoparticles to deliver killer genes to
battle late-stage cancer and claim they have killed ovarian cancer in
mice. Scientists at the
University of London recently reported using
nanotechnology to blast cancer cells in mice and the tests have shown that the
new technique leaves healthy cells undamaged. [23]
Industries
Impacted: Healthcare and Technology
The $5 trillion, world-wide health-care industry will be decimated by a proliferation of
life-sustaining, health-enhancing technology such as nanobots while the technology
sector, by default, will boom. Patients
will receive check-ups from nano-technology specialists instead of doctors and
thus, it may be necessary for doctors to receive nanobot, skillset updgrades.
Item Two to be Placed in The Carousel of
Progress: a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s The
Singularity is Near. (A nanobot would be too small to see. It’s a small world after all.)
A Cure for Cancer
The Story of Steve
Jobs and Molecular Targeted Therapy
In 2003 Steve Jobs
learned that he had a rare form of islet cell neuroendocrine cancer which, if
caught early, had a “real potential for cure.” [24] In lieu of surgery though, Jobs treated the
disease with a 9-monh regiment of alternative, dietary restrictions and juices.
Subsequent scans revealed that the tumor had grown and in July 2004, Jobs
underwent a modified Whipple procedure that removed the right side of his pancreas,
gallbladder, parts of his stomach, bile duct and small intestine.[25]
In 2009, Jobs received
a liver transplant in Memphis, an indication that the cancer had spread beyond
the digestive system.[26] Finally, in 2011, Jobs resigned as CEO from
Apple stating that “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no
longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to
let you know. Unfortunately that day has
come.”[27]
“Although Jobs passed
away in October of 2011, a positive result emerged from his treatment: a focus
on molecular targeted therapy.
Jobs was only one
of 20 people in the world to have the genes of their cancer tumor and normal
DNA sequenced in entirety.[28] “By knowing the unique genetic and molecular
signature of Jobs’ tumor, his doctors had been able to pick specific drugs that
directly targeted the defective molecular pathways that caused his cancer cells
to grow in an abnormal manner.”[29]
This molecular targeted
therapy approach allowed doctors to shed traditional chemotherapy, which
attacks the division of all of the body’s cells, and instead select more
effective drugs which at times, according to Job’s biographer Walter Issacson,
appeared to be a silver bullet allowing them to stay ahead of the cancer.[30]
This treatment is not new, but certainly,
Job’s regimen has placed a spotlight on the treatment and created enthusiasm in
the medical community: Dr. Matthew H. Kulke, a physician at Harvard-affiliated
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston states that drugs such as these are “exciting alternatives to
conventional chemotherapy that has been the mainstay since the early 1990s” and
“they have been shown to cut the growth of
metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer in half.”[31]
It is not much of a leap to envision a time in the near
future when advanced cancer treatments such as molecular targeted therapy and
nanotechnology converge to effectuate a solution for cancer.
Industries Impacted:
Healthcare
Healthcare will
again be impacted by this innovation and as technology scales and manufacturers
are able to mass-produce targeted, effective drugs, costs should diminish.
Item Three to be Placed in The Carousel of
Progress:
Disney has somewhat
beat me to the punch on this one. With
the renovation of Epcot’s Spaceship Earth in 2007, a bearded, long-haired man
who looks like Jobs working in a California garage on an early version of the
personal computer, has been added to the end of the attraction. [32] The company claims that it is not in fact
Steve Jobs but a composite of all the early pioneers who worked on the first
personal computers.[33] I believe the presence of even a “composite-Jobs”
in the attraction serves as a reminder of his contributions but also as a reminder
that perhaps a solution to cancer lies on the near-horizon. I of course would move the figure to the
Carousel of Progress.
The Bottom Line -
Now is the Time
The future is
difficult to predict just as it is nearly impossible to keep the Carousel of
Progress’s “Family of Tomorrow” up-to-date and relevant. Although it may seem trivial to figuratively
place items in the den of the New Year’s Eve family, the exercise to me seems to indicate that we
stand on the precipice of extraordinary breakthroughs in science, healthcare
and technology, innovations that create a gate-way to a great big beautiful
tomorrow.
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