Can Software Change the (Real) World?

I’ve taught at Stanford University for more than twenty-five years and it’s a privilege to “warp young minds.” You may not realize it, but not everyone wants to build a better smart phone app, a new way to talk to his or her friends, or another way to buy something. Many students want to do something meaningful—something that might change the real world. But, what might that be?

Let’s start by realizing the global economy is driven by developing economies. Developing economies are driven by population growth, which is why Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa are interesting. Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Nigeria is projected to become the third most populous country in the world before 2050. Vietnam will soon have a population of 100 million with an average age being just 30 years old.

So what do developing economies need? They need infrastructure: power, water, agriculture, transportation, construction, healthcare and telecommunications. But will these be delivered the #firstworld way? Would you put up landlines for telecommunications in Rwanda? Of course not; instead you’d skip the old technologies and go straight to implementing a 4G cellular network.

What about electricity? Would you build giant, centralized, coal-fired plants and hierarchical power distribution networks? No, you’d build a distributed grid of solar, wind, battery storage, and hydroelectric generators all managed by software. You might even never go to AC and build a DC network on day one.

 What about healthcare? There is no way for developing economies to build enough medical schools and hospitals to replicate a #firstworld healthcare system. But, maybe it’s an opportunity to re-think healthcare. Today, hospitals are buildings with expensive machines sitting next to the people that use the machines. In the world of computing, we used to do it the same way; people were located next to their compute and storage machines. But twenty years ago we discovered networks, and now the servers are centrally located and the people are all on the network. So why don’t we do the same thing with healthcare machines? 

But this doesn’t have to just apply to developing economies. Today, there are about 500 children’s hospitals on the planet and on average there are 1,000 machines in each hospital. What if we could connect them all? The consumer Internet took off when 1,000,000 machines were connected. Maybe with 500,000 machines connected children’s healthcare could become dramatically different. Sadly, most of the attention today is on EMR/EHR applications, where doctors spend their evenings and weekends typing data into these pre-Internet applications. But the massive amounts of data, which will power AI applications is not there. The data is in the machines: the blood analyzers, gene sequencers, CAT scanners, and ultrasound machines.

These are just a few examples of the potential of software to change the planet. During the past 15 years, the Internet revolution has redefined business-to-consumer industries such as media, retail and financial services. In the next 10 years, according to the World Economic Forum, the Internet of Things will dramatically alter power, construction, agriculture, healthcare, textiles, mining, packaging, oil, gas, buildings, transportation, which together account for nearly two-thirds of the global gross domestic product.

Software has the potential to change the world—the real world. And unless we’re all moving to Mars—and I know some people are working on this—we’ll have to operate much more precisely. Next generation software can transform the planet in everything from power to healthcare, shrimp farming to textiles, and water to transportation. So if you’re a student at Stanford or any other university in the world, you can really change the world.