Medicine
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Needed technological advances
In keeping with Instapundit’s list of needed technological advances, here are four of mine
- Cheaper Carbon Fiber materials – Much lighter and much stronger than metal, but at the moment, much more expensive. If this cost could be brought down many other technologies become economical, electric cars, prefabbed buildings, small scale wind generation, etc.
- Smart traffic lights – while these do exist at the moment, they are not in wide use. I live in a traffic-light heavy part of the city. I also do most of my car travel at non-peak hours. I still stop at most of the lights for no reason whatsoever. Smart lights (these exist already) would sense if there is a car that needs to get by and turn green (assuming there was no competing traffic) and then snap back to it’s existing cycle.
- Decentralized electric power – To my knowledge, the main power grid has not been modernized, ever.
- Cheap wholesale medical testing – imagine just having a machine in your home that could analyze your blood or urine every day or week and test it for the top 50 detectable problems. If all of these problems are caught at the first opportunity, how many lives could be saved?
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Someone is finally doing this
I’ve often wondered why we don’t have simple home medical testing kits for the most common problems one is likely to have. Just do a simple blood or urine sample at home once a month, and then send it off to be analyzed for the 15 most common (or cheapest to test for) illnesses and you’re much more likely to catch something early. I would imagine legal liabilities are the likely culprit.
It would seem that they’re doing something like this in Japan.
I predict that this will be a condition of health insurance in the future.
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China and India
While various members of the Commentariat (I’m looking at you Charlie Rose) talk quite a bit about the “peaceful rise of China” articles like this one about Indian Medical Vacations make me think that it will be India that will rise much higher. China seems to be putting a lot of effort into posturing lately, and their currency machinations will come back to bite them big time.