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How AI Could Change the Future of Medicine

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Does social media help or harm our society?

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How has technology helped us in the past?

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Will AI be the solution to our problems or will it get out of our control?

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Almost every development that we cover on Our World in Data is underpinned by some form of technological change.

Medical innovations contributed to the decline of child mortality and the improvements in life expectancy. Improved crop yields and reductions in hunger were made possible thanks to the advances in agricultural technologies. The long-term decline of global poverty was primarily driven by increased productivity from technological change. Access to energy, electricity, sanitation, and clean water have transformed the lives of billions. Transport, telephones, and the internet have allowed us to collaborate on problems at a global level.

Emerging technologies are often expensive and therefore initially limited to the richest in society. A key part of technological progress is making these life-changing, and often life-saving, innovations affordable for everyone.

In many ways, technology has transformed our lives for the better. But these developments are not always positive: many of humanity's largest threats - such as nuclear weapons and potentially also artificial intelligence - are the result of technological advances. To mitigate these risks, good governance can be as important as the technology itself.

On this page, you can find our data, visualizations, and writing on many of the most fundamental technological changes that have shaped our world.

Research & Writing

Key articles on Technological Change

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and communication technologies

Energy and agricultural technologies

Concepts of technological change

Interactive charts on Technological Change

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu (2023) - "Technological Change". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/technological-change' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owidtechnologicalchange, author = {Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu}, title = {Technological Change}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/technological-change} }

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Technological change underpins so many of the developments we've seen in health, agriculture, energy and global development.

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Improvements in technology - magic bullets - Medicine in modern Britain, c.1900-present - Edexcel - GCSE History Revision - Edexcel - BBC Bitesize

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Learn about and revise medicine in modern Britain from c.1900 to the present with BBC Bitesize GCSE History - Edexcel.

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Proponents say social media spreads information faster than any other media. Opponents say it enables the spread of unreliable information.

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Will future robots & AI take over? | How Sci-Fi Inspired Science

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is the use of "computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind," according to IBM.

The idea of AI goes back at least 2,700 years. As Adrienne Mayor, research scholar, folklorist, and science historian at Stanford University, explained: "Our ability to imagine artificial intelligence goes back to the ancient times. Long before technological advances made self-moving devices possible, ideas about creating artificial life and robots were explored in ancient myths."

Mayor noted that the myths about Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention and blacksmithing, included precursors to AI. For example, Hephaestus created the giant bronze man, Talos, which had a mysterious life force from the gods called ichor. Hephaestus also created Pandora and her infamous box, as well as a set of automated servants made of gold that were given the knowledge of the gods. Mayor concluded, "Not one of those myths has a good ending once the artificial beings are sent to Earth. It's almost as if the myths say that it's great to have these artificial things up in heaven used by the gods. But once they interact with humans, we get chaos and destruction."

The modern version of AI largely began when Alan Turing, who contributed to breaking the Nazi's Enigma code during World War II, created the Turing test to determine if a computer is capable of "thinking." The value and legitimacy of the test have long been the subject of debate.

The "Father of Artificial Intelligence," John McCarthy, coined the term "artificial intelligence" when he, with Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon, proposed a 1956 summer workshop on the topic at Dartmouth College. McCarthy defined artificial intelligence as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." He later created the computer programming language LISP (which is still used in AI), hosted computer chess games against human Russian opponents, and developed the first computer with "hand-eye" capability, all important building blocks for AI.

The first AI program designed to mimic how humans solve problems, Logic Theorist, was created by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon in 1955-1956. The program was designed to solve problems from Principia Mathematica (1910-13) written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

In 1958, Frank Rosenblatt invented the Perceptron, which he claimed was "the first machine which is capable of having an original idea." Though the machine was hounded by skeptics, it was later praised as the "foundations for all of this artificial intelligence."

As computers became cheaper in the 1960s and 70s, AI programs such as Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA flourished, and US government agencies including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began to fund AI-related research. But computers were still too weak to manage the language tasks researchers asked of them. Another influx of funding in the 1980s and early 90s furthered the research, including the invention of expert systems by Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg. But progress again waned with a drop in government funding.

In 1997, Gary Kasparov, reigning world chess champion and grand master, was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue AI computer program, a huge step for AI researchers. More recently, advances in computer storage limits and speeds have opened new avenues for AI research and implementation, such as aiding in scientific research and forging new paths in medicine for patient diagnosis, robotic surgery, and drug development.

Now, artificial intelligence is used for a variety of everyday implementations including facial recognition software, online shopping algorithms, search engines, digital assistants like Siri and Alexa, translation services, automated safety functions on cars (and the promised self-driving cars of the future), cybersecurity, airport body scanning security, poker playing strategy, and fighting disinformation on social media, among others.

Amid the field growing by leaps and bounds, on Mar. 29, 2023, tech giants including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, as well as leaders in other industries including Craig Peters, CEO of Getty Images, author Yuval Noah Harari, and politician Andrew Yang, published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI "systems more powerful than GPT-4." The letter states, "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.... AI research and development should be refocused on making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal." The letter, which was open for additional signatures, garnered 1380 signatures by Mar. 30, 2023, from other industry leaders as well as professors, artists, and grandmothers.

Is Artificial Intelligence Good for Society?
Discussion Questions
1. Is artificial intelligence good for society? Explain your answer(s).

2. What applications would you like to see AI take over? What applications (such as handling our laundry or harvesting fruit and fulfilling food orders) would you like to see AI stay away from. Explain your answer(s).

3. Think about how AI impacts your daily life. Do you use facial recognition to unlock your phone or a digital assistant to get the weather, for example? Do these applications make your life easier or could you live without them? Explain your answers.
Take Action
1. Consider Kai-Fu Lee's TED Talk argument that AI can "save our humanity."

2. Listen to AI-expert Toby Walsh discuss the pros and cons of AI in his recent interview at Britannica.

3. Learn " everything you need to know about artificial intelligence " with Nick Heath

4. Examine the " weird" dangers of AI with Janelle Shane's TED Talk.

5. Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the "other side of the issue" now helps you better argue your position.

6. Push for the position and policies you support by writing US national senators and representatives.
Sources

21.

Noah Rue, "How AI Is Helping People with Disabilities," rollingwithoutlimits.com, Feb. 25, 2019

26.

Amisha, et al., "Overview of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine," Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, July 2019

28.

Science Daily, "First AI System for Contactless Monitoring of Heart Rhythm Using Smart Speakers," sciencedaily.com, Mar. 9, 2021

54.

Retail Technology Innovation Hub, "Retailers Invest Heavily in Self-Checkout Tech amid Covid-19 Outbreak," retailtechinnovationhub.com, July 6, 2021

59.

Future of Life Institute, "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter," futureoflife.org, Mar. 29, 2023

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Is Artificial Intelligence Good for Society? Top 3 Pros and Cons

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The World is Getting Better

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We are working on Our World in Data to provide 'research and data to make progress against the world's largest problems.'

Our mission only makes sense if it is in fact possible to make progress against the large problems the world faces. Very few think the world is making progress. A 2015 survey, long before the circumstances of the pandemic, asked, "All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?" In Sweden, 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%, and in Germany only 4%.

What is the evidence that we need to consider when answering this question?

The question is how the world has changed, so we must take a historical perspective. And the question is about the world as a whole, so the answer must, therefore, consider everybody. The answer must consider the history of global living conditions - a history of everyone.

Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static - the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there - and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that.

Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago.

To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.

The United Nations focus on 'extreme poverty', an extremely low poverty line that has the purpose to draw attention to the very poorest people in the world.

The chart below shows long-run estimates of global poverty, published by the historian Michail Moatsos. These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income - for poor families today and in the past, this is important, as many of them are subsistence farmers who live largely from their own food production. These poverty estimates also take into account different price levels in different countries. It is, of course, also adjusted for price changes over time (inflation). As a consequence of these adjustments, this data is expressed in 'international dollar'. One international dollar has the same purchasing power as one US dollar had in the US in 2011.

The chart shows that almost 10% of the world's population live in extreme poverty. It also tells us that two hundred years ago, the same was true for almost 80% of the world's population. In 1820, only a small elite enjoyed higher standards of living, while the vast majority of people lived in conditions that we call extreme poverty today. Since then, the share of extremely poor people fell continuously. More and more world regions industrialized and achieved economic growth which made it possible to lift more people out of poverty: In 1950 about half the world were living in extreme poverty; in 1990, it was still more than a third. By 2019 the share of the world population in extreme poverty has fallen below 10%.

The world is also making progress against poverty relative to higher poverty lines, as this visualization shows. In fact, no matter what poverty line you choose, the share of people below that poverty line has declined globally.

That is a huge achievement. For me, as a researcher who focuses on growth and inequality, it may be humanity's biggest achievement in the last two centuries. It is particularly remarkable if we consider that the world population has increased 7-fold over the last two centuries - via the chart's settings, you can switch this chart to see the number of people in and out of poverty. In a world without economic growth, a 7-fold increase of the population would have resulted in less and less income for everyone, it would have driven everyone into extreme poverty. Yet, the exact opposite happened. In a time of unprecedented population growth, our world managed to give more prosperity to more people and to lift more and more people out of the worst poverty.

Increasing productivity was important because it made vital goods and services less scarce: more food, better clothing, and less cramped housing. Productivity is the ratio between the output of our work and the input that we put in our work; as productivity increased, we benefitted from more output, but also from less input - weekly working hours fell very substantially.

Economic growth was also important because it changed the relationship between people. In the long time in which the world lived in a non-growth world the only way to become better off was for someone else to get worse off. It was a zero-sum economy. Your own good luck was your neighbor's bad luck. Economic growth changed that. Growth made it possible for you to get better off while others become better off, too. The ingenuity of those who built the technology that increased productivity - modern transportation, production machinery, and communication technology - made some of them very rich and at the same time, it increased the productivity and the incomes of others. It is hard to overstate how different life is in zero-sum and positive-sum economies.

Unfortunately the media is overly obsessed with reporting single events and with things that go wrong and does not nearly pay enough attention to the slow developments that reshape our world. With this empirical data on the reduction of poverty, we can make concrete what a media that would report global development would look like. The headline could be "The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 130,000 since yesterday" and they wouldn't have this headline once, but every single day since 1990, since, on average, there were 130,000 people fewer in extreme poverty every day. If you prefer to rely on a higher poverty line, the numbers are even more impressive. The daily headline would point out that the number of people living on more than $10 per day increased by a quarter of a million on any average day in the last decade.

It is important to know that it is possible to make progress against poverty because, despite two centuries of progress, poverty remains one of the very largest problems in the world. The majority of the world population still lives in poverty: Almost every tenth person lives in extreme poverty, and two-thirds live on less than $10 per day. In rich countries, a person is considered poor when she or he lives on less than $30 per day; if we rely on this poverty definition, then we find that 85% of the world lives in poverty. Much more progress is needed.

Note: Since the publication of this article, the UN has updated their measurement of extreme poverty and the World Bank has updated its poverty data. See the note at the end for more information.

How did the education of the world population change over this period? This chart shows the increasing share of the world population that is able to read and write. Today's education - including in today's richest countries - is again a very recent achievement. Only in the last two centuries did literacy become the norm for the entire population.

In 1820, only every tenth person older than 15 years was literate; in 1930, it was every third, and now we are at 87% globally. Put differently, if you were alive in 1800, there was a chance of 9 in 10 that you weren't able to read; today, close to 9 out of 10 people are able to read. And among today's young population, the chances are much higher since many of today's illiterate population are old.

If you think science, technology, and political freedom are important to solve the world's large problems and you think that it helps to read and write to solve problems, then consider the figures in absolute numbers. Today, there are about 5.1 billion people who can read and write. In 1800, there were fewer than 100 million people with the same skill.

One reason why we do not see progress is that we are unaware of how bad the past was.

The chart here shows that in 1800, the health conditions were such that around 43% of the world's newborns died before their fifth birthday. The historical estimates suggest that the entire world lived in poor conditions, so that there was little variation between different regions, in all countries of the world more than every third child died before it was five years old.

When considering the entirety of childhood - not just up to the age of five, but until the end of puberty - then we find that around half of all children died in the past (see my article on this data).

It would be wrong to believe that modern medicine was the only reason for improved health. Initially, rising prosperity, public health interventions, and the changing nature of social life mattered more than medicine. Improvements in housing and sanitation improved our chances in the age-old war against infectious disease. Healthier diets - made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade - made us more resilient against disease. Improving nutrition and health also made us taller.

Science and medicine mattered as well. A more educated population achieved a series of scientific breakthroughs that made it possible to reduce mortality and disease further. Particularly important was the discovery of the germ theory of disease in the second half of the 19th century. In retrospect, it is hard to understand why a new theory could possibly be so critical. But at a time when doctors did not wash their hands when switching from post-mortems to midwifery, the theory was crucial in convincing our ancestors that hygiene and public sanitation are essential for health.

The germ theory of disease laid the foundation for the development of antibiotics and vaccines, allowing humanity to finally gain some ground in the age-old battle against the microbes. Public health mattered hugely: Everybody benefits when everybody else is vaccinated, and everybody benefits from everybody else obeying the rules of hygiene.

With these changes, global health improved in a way that was unimaginable to our ancestors. In 2021 child mortality was down to 4% - 10-fold lower than two centuries ago.

The same data on child mortality also shows us just how large of a problem child mortality still is. On average, 15,000 children die every day. More progress is urgently needed and, as our history suggests, possible.

You have to take this long perspective to see the progress that we have achieved. It is just hard to imagine how bad the living conditions in the past were.

Political freedom and civil liberties are at the very heart of development because they are both a means for development and an end of development.

Merely qualitative assessments of these aspects bear the risk that we are mistakingly perceiving a decline of liberties over time when, in fact, we are raising the bar by which we judge our freedom and liberty. This is why quantitative assessments can be useful. They can help us to measure freedom against the same yardstick across countries and over time.

There are various attempts to measure the types of political regimes that govern the world's countries. To capture something as complex as a political system is necessarily controversial. There is just no way around that. In this analysis, I rely on the assessment by Svend-Erik Skaaning, John Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusevičius for a very long-term perspective of political regimes around the world.

My colleague Bastian Herre has brought together many other datasets that assess and classify political regimes around the world. To make it possible to study them in detail and see where they agree and where they differ, we made them available in our Democracy Data Explorer.

The long-term data in the chart below shows the share of the world population living in democracies in green. Throughout the 19th century, there was hardly any country in the world that met the criteria for a democracy of Skaaning and colleagues. The first expansion of political freedom in the early 20th century was crushed by the rise of authoritarian regimes in the time leading up to the Second World War.

In the second half of the 20th century, the world changed significantly: Colonial empires ended, and more countries turned democratic. The share of the world population living in democracies increased from 25% in 1950 to 35% in 1980. Particularly important was the breakdown of the Soviet Union, which allowed more countries to democratize. It is worrying, however, that the share living in democracies has not increased in recent years.

Over the long-run the evidence is clear. While every generation was pessimistic that democracies can last, it should have been the autocrats who needed to worry. Autocratic rulers lost their power in more and more places over the last two centuries. Today, more than every second person in the world lives in a democracy.

The world population was around 1 billion in the year 1800 and increased more than eight-fold since then.

The increase of the world population should evoke more than doom and gloom. First of all, this increase shows a tremendous achievement. It shows that humans stopped dying at the rate at which our ancestors died for the many millennia before.

In pre-modern times, fertility was high - 5 or 6 children per woman were the norm. What kept the population growth low was the very high rate at which people died, and that meant that many children were dead before they reached their reproductive age. The increase of the world population followed when humanity started to win the fight against death. Life expectancy doubled in all world regions.

Population growth is a temporary phenomenon, it is the consequence of fertility and mortality not declining simultaneously. The fast population growth happened when fertility was still as high as it was in the unhealthy environment of the past, but mortality has already declined to the low levels of our time.

What we have seen in country after country over the last 200 years is that when women gain more independence, education, and prosperity and realize that the chances of their children dying declined, they choose to have fewer children. Rapid population growth comes to an end. This transition from high mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility is called the demographic transition. In those countries that industrialized first, it lasted at least from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century - it took 95 years for fertility to decline from above six children to less than three children per woman in the UK. Countries that followed later often achieved this transition much faster: South Korea went from more than six children per woman to less than three in just 18 years, and Iran even went through it in only ten years.

Just as countries went through this transition, so is the world going through it. Global fertility has more than halved in the last 50 years, from more than 5 children per woman in the early 1960s to below 2.5 today. This means that the world is well into the demographic transition and the global population growth rate has in fact peaked half a century ago.

Now that we see fertility declining in countries around the world, we approach the end of global population growth: The global population has quadrupled over the course of the 20th century - this century, it is not expected to double. The UN demographers expect population growth to end before the end of this century.

None of the achievements over the last two centuries could have been made without the expansion of knowledge and education. The revolution in how we live was not only driven by education, but it also made education more important than ever.

Contrary to many other social aspects where forecasts are of limited use, I think education is an aspect where we can make some useful projections. The simple reason is that the educational composition today tells us something about the education of tomorrow - a literate young woman today will be a literate old woman in 2080.

As we've seen before, education - measured by the essential skill of literacy - has already improved. And we know that it will continue as the younger cohort today is much better educated than people in older cohorts.

This visualization shows the projection of the IIASA demographers for the size and the educational composition of the world population until 2100. It is an interesting look into the future: With today's lower global fertility, the researchers expect that the number of children will decline from now - there will never be more children on the planet than today. As mentioned, before demographers expect the world population to peak in the second half of this century and to decline thereafter.

Focusing on the educational breakdown the projection suggests that by 2100, there will be almost no one without formal education and there will be more than 7 billion minds who will have received at least secondary education.

With the great importance of education for improving health, increasing political freedom, and ending poverty, this prospect is very encouraging.

The motivation for this history of global living conditions was the survey result that documented the negative perspective on global development that most of us have. More than 9 out of 10 people do not think that the world is getting better. How does that fit with the empirical evidence?

I do not believe that the media are the only ones to blame, but I do think that they are to blame for some part of this. This is because the media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us what in the world goes wrong.

One reason the media focuses on things that go wrong is that the media focuses on single events, and single events are often bad - look at the news: plane crashes, terrorism attacks, natural disasters. Positive developments, on the other hand, often happen very slowly and never make the headlines.

The result of a media - and education system - that fails to present quantitative information on long-run developments is that most people are very ignorant about global development and have little hope that progress against serious problems is even possible.

Even the decline of global extreme poverty - by any standard one of the most crucial developments in our lifetime - is only known by a small fraction of the population of the UK (10%) or the US (5%). In both countries, the majority of people think that the share of people living in extreme poverty has increased. Two thirds in the US even think the share in extreme poverty has 'almost doubled.' When we are ignorant about the basic facts about global development it is not surprising that we have a negative view of our times and that few have the hope that the world can get better.

The only way to tell a history of everyone is to use statistics. Only then can we hope to get an overview of the lives of the 22 billion people that lived in the last 200 years. The developments that these statistics reveal transform our global living conditions - slowly but steadily. They are reported in this online publication - Our World in Data - that my team and I have been building over the last few years. We see it as a resource to show these long-term developments and thereby complement the information in the news that focus on events.

The difficulty in telling the history of how everyone's lives changed over the last 200 years is that you cannot pick single stories. Stories about individual people are much more engaging - our minds like these stories - but they cannot be representative for how the world has changed. To achieve a representation of how the world has changed at large, you have to tell many, many stories all at once; and that is statistics.

To make it easier for myself and for you to understand the transformation in living conditions that we have achieved, I made a summarizing visualization in which I imagine this 200-year history as the history of a group of 100 people to see how the lives of them would have changed if they lived through this transformative period of the modern world. It shows at once some of the very largest problems we face and the progress that the last generations have made.

A single person can't change the world. The transformation of our living conditions was possible only because of collaboration. It is our collective brains and our collaborative effort that are needed for such a revolution.

There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done - accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity's impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. We urgently need to reduce our impact, and on Our World in Data, you can find detailed information about the world's environmental problems.

It is far from certain that we will make progress against these problems - there is no iron law that would ensure that the world continues this trend of improving living conditions. However, what is evident from the long-term perspective is that progress is possible and that the last 200 years have brought us to a better position than ever before to solve problems. Solving problems - big problems - is always a collaborative undertaking. The group of people that can work together today is a much stronger group than ever existed on this planet. Healthier, richer, and better educated.

For our history to be a source of encouragement, however, we have to know our history. The story that we tell ourselves about our history and our time matters. Because our hopes and efforts for building a better future are inextricably linked to our perception of the past it is important to understand and communicate the global development up to now. An understanding of our efforts and our fellow humans is a vital condition to the fruitfulness of our endeavors. Knowing that we have come a long way in improving living conditions and the notion that our work is worthwhile is to us all what self-respect is to individuals. It is a necessary condition for improvement.

Freedom is impossible without faith in free people. And if we are not aware of our history and falsely believe the opposite of what is true, we risk losing faith in each other.

The data in this article uses a previous release of the World Bank's poverty and inequality data in which incomes are expressed in 2011 international-$.

The World Bank has since updated its methods, and now measures incomes in 2017 international-$. As part of this change, the International Poverty Line used to measure extreme poverty has also been updated: from $1.90 (in 2011 prices) to $2.15 (in 2017 prices).

This has had little effect on our overall understanding of poverty and inequality around the world. But because of the change of units, many of the figures mentioned in this article will differ from the latest World Bank figures.

Read more about the World Bank's updated methodology:

The Japanese translation of this blog post is here:世界的な生活条件の短い歴史、そして私たちがそれを知っていることが重要な理由. The Portuguese translation is available here: A curta história das condições globais de vida e por que é importante que a conheçamos.

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The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it

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Very few think the world is making progress. In this article I am looking at the data to challenge the widespread negative sentiments.

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It has been called one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century, and without it almost half the world's population would not be alive today.

A hundred years ago two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, devised a way to transform nitrogen in the air into fertiliser, using what became known as the Haber-Bosch process.

But Haber's place in history is controversial.

He is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of work developing and weaponising chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War One.

Plants need nitrogen: it is one of their five basic requirements, along with potassium, phosphorus, water and sunlight.

In a natural state, plants grow, they die, the nitrogen they contain returns to the soil, and new plants use it to grow.

Agriculture disrupts that cycle: we harvest the plants, and eat them.

From the earliest days of agriculture, farmers discovered various ways to prevent crop yields from declining over time: by restoring nitrogen to their fields.

Manure has nitrogen. So does compost.

The roots of legumes host bacteria that replenish nitrogen levels.

That is why it helps to include peas or beans in crop rotation.

Industrial process

But these techniques struggle to fully satisfy a plant's appetite for nitrogen.

Add more, and the plant grows better.

That is exactly what Fritz Haber worked out how to do, driven in part by the promise of a lucrative contract from the chemical company BASF.

That company's engineer, Carl Bosch, then managed to replicate Haber's process on an industrial scale.

Both men later won Nobel Prizes - controversially, in Haber's case, as many by then considered him a war criminal.

Find out more

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy highlights the inventions, ideas and innovations which have helped create the economic world we live in.

It is broadcast on the BBC World Service.

You can listen online and find information about the programme's sources or subscribe to the programme podcast.

The Haber-Bosch process is perhaps the most significant example of what economists call "technological substitution", where we seem to have reached some basic physical limit, then find a workaround.

For most of human history, if you wanted more food to support more people, then you needed more land.

But the thing about land, as Mark Twain once joked, is that they are not making it any more.

Haber and Bosch provided a substitute: instead of more land, make nitrogen fertiliser.

It was like alchemy.

"Brot aus Luft", as Germans put it, or "Bread from air".

From air and quite a lot of fossil fuels.

How it is done

First of all, you need natural gas as a source of hydrogen, the element to which nitrogen binds to form ammonia.

Then you need energy to generate extreme heat and pressure.

Haber discovered that was necessary, with a catalyst, to break the bonds between air's nitrogen atoms and persuade them to bond with hydrogen instead.

Imagine the heat of a wood-fired pizza oven, with the pressure you would experience 2km under the sea.

To create those conditions on a scale sufficient to produce 160 million tonnes of ammonia a year - the majority of which is used for fertiliser - the Haber-Bosch process today consumes more than 1% of all the world's energy.

That is a lot of carbon emissions.

Environmental damage

And there is another very serious ecological concern.

Only some of the nitrogen in fertiliser makes its way via crops into human stomachs, perhaps as little as 15%.

Most of it ends up in the air or water.

This is a problem for several reasons.

Compounds like nitrous oxide are powerful greenhouse gases.

They pollute drinking water.

They also create acid rain, which makes soils more acidic, disrupting ecosystems, and threatening biodiversity.

When nitrogen compounds run off into rivers, they likewise promote the growth of some organisms more than others.

The results include ocean "dead zones", where blooms of algae near the surface block out sunlight and kill the fish below.

The Haber-Bosch process is not the only cause of these problems, but it is a major one, and it is not going away.

Demand for fertiliser is projected to double in the coming century.

In truth, scientists still do not fully understand the long-term impact on the environment of converting so much stable, inert nitrogen from the air into various other, highly reactive chemical compounds.

Population growth

We are in the middle of a global experiment.

One result is already clear: plenty of food for lots more people.

If you look at a graph of global population, you will see it shoot upwards just as Haber-Bosch fertilisers start being widely applied.

Again, Haber-Bosch was not the only reason for the spike in food yields.

New varieties of crops like wheat and rice also played their part.

Still, if we farmed with the best techniques available in Fritz Haber's time, the earth would support about four billion people.

Our current population is around seven and a half billion, and growing.

Back in 1909, as Haber triumphantly demonstrated his ammonia process, he could hardly have imagined how transformative his work would be.

On one side of the ledger, food to feed billions more human souls; on the other, a sustainability crisis that will need more genius to solve.

For Haber himself, the consequences of his work were not what he expected.

As a young man, he converted from Judaism to Christianity, aching to be accepted as a German patriot.

Beyond his work on weaponising chlorine, the Haber-Bosch process also helped Germany in World War One.

Ammonia can make explosives, as well as fertiliser.

Not just bread from air, but bombs too.

When the Nazis took power in the 1930s, however, none of this outweighed his Jewish roots.

Stripped of his job and kicked out of the country, Haber died, in a Swiss hotel, a broken man.

Tim Harford is the FT's Undercover Economist. 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy was broadcast on the BBC World Service. You can listen online and find information about the programme's sources or subscribe to the programme podcast.

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It has been called one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century, and without it almost half the world's population would not be alive today. A hundred years ago two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, devised a way to transform nitrogen in the air into fertiliser, using what became known as the Haber-Bosch process.

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The big debate about the future of work, explained

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The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different this Time

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Will nuclear technology be the solution to climate change or the end of life?

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COP28 is underway and grand commitments to triple nuclear power by 2050 are recognition of the following reality: There is no way, absolutely none, that the world's energy transition away from fossil fuels can be achieved without a massive increase globally of nuclear power. Yet, western governments and companies are failing to get new nuclear technologies and projects off the ground. Outdated anti-nuclear opinions, massive initial capital costs, risks that governments haven't found a mechanism to share with the private sector, and a crushing and irrational regulatory framework are all holding the industry back.

Wedged between energy crises and climate change natural disasters, there is no longer the luxury of choice. The industry has responded by seeking to develop new technology that can assuage public concerns about safety. Some are designing micro reactors or SMRs. Others are working with new materials or techniques, such as replacing water in cooling systems with molten salt, or using boiling water instead of pressurized water to make the NPP more efficient. Still others are working on new safety systems, or fuel fabrication innovations, or new approaches to storage of nuclear materials. In the U.S., top tier research outfits like the Electric Power Research Institute are finding their expertise in demand all round the world, creating something resembling nuclear diplomacy. The U.S., U.K, Canada, and South Korea are leading the pack on investment in nuclear.

The nuclear industry has been riding high on a wave of enthusiasm for a few years. In recognition of the cost savings of "going nuclear," smart companies are already making plans to transition to nuclear power. This includes Microsoft, which announced in September that it will use nuclear plants to power its artificial intelligence operations. With electrification the foundation of any coherent energy transition plan and grids struggling to balance themselves with an abundance of non-dispatchable renewables, nuclear is increasingly acknowledged to be the solution. Just as apex science fiction writer Isaac Asimov fantasized in his 1940-50s Foundation books, nuclear energy may save humanity.

And yet, recent headlines have revealed some major setbacks. Small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) company NuScale, once lauded as the leading SMR developer and despite receiving almost $2 billion in U.S. government support, has cancelled its flagship project due to rising costs and mismanagement. It is now facing investor lawsuits for fraud. TerraPower, Bill Gates' SMR company, was delayed several years by the Russian invasion of Ukraine-Russia was the only country that produced the nuclear fuel needed for TerraPower's SMR design. X-Energy has walked back its plans to go public. The U.K.'s Rolls Royce SMR is plagued by financial problems. France's EDF is posting record low power outputs and financial status reports. Others are also delayed, struggling, or facing bankruptcy.
Read More: Nuclear Energy Could Hold Key to Green Future
Setbacks are normal for new technologies and emerging markets, but for nuclear power such bumps in the road have outsized potential to disrupt because many people are still hesitant or downright hostile to nuclear power. The Chornobyl, Fukushima Daiichi, and Three Mile Island catastrophes loom large in the imagination. "Meltdown" itself has entered idiom to mean falling apart rapidly and irrationally and beyond control. The world's preoccupation with Russia's attacks on Ukraine's Zaporizhzhye nuclear power plant (NPP), the largest in Europe, shows how gripped we can be by nuclear disasters. In keeping, a March 2023 Gallup poll found that although support for nuclear is increasing slowly, 44% of Americans still somewhat or strongly oppose it, down from 54% in 2016. Similar polls in Switzerland and the U.K. peg support for nuclear at just 49% and 24%, respectively. In Germany, despite still being in the middle of an energy crisis and desperate for additional power sources, 50% of people under 34 want nuclear power eradicated.

With the exception of France, which is 69% nuclear, many of the developed world's leading economies and governments have been too scared of nuclear power to allow it to flourish. Germany was so spooked by Fukushima it completely phased out its nuclear power program, finally turning off its last three (of an original 17) reactors on April 15, 2023. Belgium and Switzerland decided not to build new plants and to phase out those existing, although the 2021-2023 energy crisis has forced a reconsideration. In the U.S. the trigger was the March 28, 1979 partial meltdown of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. No one died or even suffered negative health effects, in the aftermath dozens of planned NPPs were cancelled and almost nothing has been built in decades.

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Unfortunately, unencumbered by popular opinions against nuclear, the Western world's great geostrategic rivals are years if not decades ahead. There are sixty nuclear projects in various stages of construction around the world, and 22 of them are in China; and 22 use Russian technology, and 18 use Chinese technology, or technology China stole from other countries and rebranded. Some European countries, notably Hungary and Serbia, and some NATO countries, such as Turkey, are planning new NPPs using Russian designs and supply chains. Ironically, and tragically, even all four of Ukraine's NPPs are Russian VVER models, entirely reliant until quite recently on Russian fuel. And Russia controls much of nuclear supply chains.

The Western world ended up so far behind because of fear. Governments around the world are now struggling to catch up, slowed by still-high public opposition rates and regulatory regimes that institutionalized fear of nuclear into licensing and permitting processes. In countries that never had nuclear power, such as Poland and Egypt, opposition is not baked into law, and so they can paradoxically move faster than some countries with longstanding nuclear programs.

In the U.S. the opposite is true; it keeps tripping over the fear-based regulatory regimes that govern its nuclear industry. Tasked by Congress in the 2019 Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act with liberalizing the licensing process to foster innovation and accelerate the commercialization of nuclear power, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2022 released draft rules and processes for consideration of new nuclear technologies that managed to take all the worst and most burdensome aspects of existing rules and, instead of reducing them, added some new hurdles and standards, some of which nuclear engineers say are scientifically impossible to meet. The draft is twice as long (1252 pages) as the one it was supposed to simplify. Many requirements, both old and new, shouldn't apply to SMRs and other advanced nuclear designs. The result was decried by experts and companies as a complete failure that will continue to hobble the industry for decades, adding further time and expenses to the already billion-dollar licensing process. The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, said the proposal will "increase complexity and regulatory burden without any increase in safety and reduce predictability and flexibility."
Read More: Nuclear Energy's Moment Has Come
Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to export this same cumbersome nuclear regulatory regime, including to Saudi Arabia. Calling it the "gold standard" of nuclear regulation, the U.S. has refused to allow Saudi, much like it did with the United Arab Emirates, to use U.S. nuclear technology unless the Kingdom also adopts prescribed U.S. safety regulations. What a surprise that Saudi is actively considering Russian nuclear technologies instead.

Yet, the scientific reality is that the rising generation of nuclear innovation doesn't need to be subjected to a crippling approval process-it is safe. The risk profile of new reactors and other technologies in development is very low. This is especially true relative to the risks of climate change fallout or, for example, the health risks of burning fossil fuels or inhaling combustion engine exhaust. And the waste from a new nuclear plant is far less problematic than that of spent solar panels, for example. The nuclear renaissance is not just more nuclear power, it's also better, cleaner, safer, more efficient.

SMRs, for example, are much safer than full sized NPPs. They have outputs of 50-300 MW depending on design, compared to 800-1600 MW for traditional NPPs. Microreactors, "pocket nukes" with 1-50 MW outputs, are even more resilient because simple physics means they are harder to damage and so it's less likely that an accident could result in a radioactive release. Whereas seismic activity is a grave concern for large NPPs like Fukushima, smaller technologies soon to be built do not require the seismic cushions that were needed under previous plants to protect them from even the smallest earthquakes. Micros and SMRs can also be manufactured in a factory-that's what the "modular" in small modular reactor means - allowing for standardization and systematized security measures, as well as sealed transport. And smaller amounts of radioactive fuel in smaller reactors mean less that could go wrong even in the case of an accident.

One persistent concern opponents of nuclear power often voice is the risk of reactor cooling systems failing, but this not an issue with the new generation of nuclear designs. Fukushima Daiichi NPP's water-based cooling system stopped when a tsunami disabled the electricity source powering the circulation. This is the same risk Ukraine's Zaporizhzhye NPP is facing thanks to Russia bombing the dam that held the water that kept the plant's water cooling system operating. In emerging advanced reactor technologies, however, this vulnerability is eliminated entirely. Many of the new designs have entirely reconsidered systems with passive safety features that maintain cooling without reliance on external power. Others use water in innovative ways. GE Hitachi's BWRX-300 SMR is designed for the water inside to boil, creating its own convection that in turn powers its own cooling circulation. This eliminates the need for an extensive circulation system of pipes and keeps all potentially contaminated water inside the plant. Some also use materials other than water, such as molten salts.

Another common objection to nuclear power is the disposal of radioactive material. But new technological innovations are mostly eradicating the need to store spent fuel at all. New fuels have a lower enrichment level, which is less radioactive and thus safer. And there's no such thing as nuclear waste unless the material is wasted. Canada's Moltex, for example, is developing a fuel recycling "waste to stable salt" technology that repurposes spent fuel into new fuel, reducing waste by over 75% and cutting its radioactive half life to approximately 300 years, down from thousands. Moltex is also designing an SMR, the Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner, to run on the recycled fuel, which will cut down the transport of radioactive materials. Other technologies are reducing risk in parallel.

Nuclear energy will never be absolutely, perfectly, guaranteeably safe because nothing is. Wind turbines can fall over, and they can kill birds and negatively impact marine life. Solar panels produce significant volumes of toxic waste, and they take up space that impedes whatever is trying to live under them. Both wind and solar rely on minerals and manufacturing mostly controlled by China, and neither is entirely reliable as a power source. They're also not dispatchable at times of peak electricity demand. Hydropower only works with abundant water, and droughts are eviscerating rivers across the world. Coal is killing our children and our planet. So is oil. So is natural gas. Geothermal, biofuels, hydrogen, et cetera-these aren't able to satisfy even a fraction of the demand for energy.

Nuclear power isn't perfect, and initial construction costs are high. But the marginal risks of nuclear pale in comparison to the proven dangers of air pollution and climate change. Even Japan is reopening its nuclear plants using new, advanced technology. Scary though the specter of a nuclear meltdown or even just radioactive contamination is, the new class of technology should make such accidents almost impossible. Governments need to get out of the regulatory way and allow private sector nuclear companies to expand the reach of their technologies. Cost sharing and risk sharing mechanisms should be used to make these companies' work easier and their technologies faster to reach market, versus being used to impose additional regulatory conditions. We have to embrace nuclear power; there's no other option.

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The world has to embrace nuclear power in order to solve the climate crisis.

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Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?

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Nuclear Weapons: Article and Graphs

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The Social Dilemma | Official Trailer | Netflix

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Can renewable resources save our planet?

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Renewable Energy 101 | National Geographic

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Can 100% renewable energy power the world? - Federico Rosei and Renzo Rosei

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Green Energy in Panama

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Harnessing the sun for #climateaction and Clean Energy in Panama

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Energy system of Panama

Panama's National Energy Plan 2015-2050 outlines long-term strategy for the country's energy sector development, including renewables. The Plan established that 15% of Panama's generation capacity will come from renewables by 2030 and 50% by 2050.

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Panama's National Energy Plan 2015-2050 outlines long-term strategy for the country's energy sector development, including renewables. The Plan established that 15% of Panama's generation capacity will come from renewables by 2030 and 50% by 2050.

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Many mental health experts were initially skeptical that there was a mental health crisis raging among young people. The days after Jon published The Coddling of the American Mind, an essay appeared in The New York Times with the headline "The Big Myth About Teenage Anxiety." In it, a psychiatrist raised several important objections to what he saw as a rising moral panic around teens and smartphones. He pointed out that most of the studies showing a rise in mental illness were based on "self-reports." A change in self-reports does not necessarily mean that there is a change in underlying rates of mental illness. Perhaps young people just became more willing to self-diagnose or more willing to mistake mild symptoms of anxiety for a mental disorder.

Changing mental health norms and practices is certainly part of the story, and the psychiatrist was right to note that we need to look at multiple indicators of mental health problems to know if mental illness is really increasing. So, let's dive into the data to see what is really happening.

Below you will find the evidence laying out the there is a mental health crisis among our youth, that the crisis is international, and how the play-based and phone-based childhoods fit into this story. For a deeper dive into the evidence, check out our two major open-source Google Docs where we collect the citations and abstracts of the published articles that shed light on these topics (One on adolescent mental health trends and the second on the impact of social media on youth mental health). You can also read more on our Substack, After Babel, where we have published a series of articles on the international youth mental health crisis, the loss of the play-based childhood, and the rise of the phone-based childhood.

(Note that we do not address questions of causality on this page. You can learn more about that in the book or on the After Babel Substack. you can also find data on youth mental health trends around the world in our complementary open-source Google Docs).

1. The Youth Mental Health Crisis

It starts in the early 2010s...

It is mostly "internalizing disorders," like anxiety and depression...

It hits younger people more than older people, Gen Z harder than any other generation...

It's not just self-report data. It's also behavioral data like self-harm and suicide...
It's not only that young people are going to the emergency department more. They are also being These trends are unique to adolescent girls. Figure 6. The rate per 100,000 in the population at which U.S. females are treated in hospital emergency rooms for non-fatal self-injury. Data from U.S. Centers for Disease Control. [Note that suicide rates today are higher for adolescent girls than any point previously recorded. In fact, suicide rates are higher for Gen Z girls in the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than any previous generation when they were young. Zach's spreadsheet Figure 11. Total public hospital discharges for intentional self-harm by age and sex, 2005-2019. Figure 12. Percent of European students who experienced three or more psychological distress symptoms in the last week for at least six months. The percent change compares the average 2002-2010 scores with 2018 scores. Source: Health Behavior in School-Age Children Survey, 2002-2018. (See Zach's spreadsheet for data points). See more on European trends in Zach's Substack post.
Ministry of Health, New Zealand Figure 2.3 High school seniors get together with friends almost every day. (Source: Monitoring the Future . Data from The Ministry of Health's National Minimum Dataset (NMDS). See 1.3.6 in The Coddling of the Kiwi Mind? ]. hospitalized more (which is reflective of more severe symptoms).
The story for boys becomes clearer when we turn to suicide...

In other words, this is not just an American problem...

United Kingdom

Canada

Australia

New Zealand

Europe

Worldwide

Figure 13. From Twenge, Haidt et al. (2021).Data from PISA. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey of 15- and 16-year-old students around the world included a 6-item measure of school loneliness in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015, and 2018 (n = 1,049,784, 51% female) across 37 countries. Note that the increase in school loneliness occurs in all regions other than Asia. [Zach's spreadsheet]. See more on global adolescent mental health trends in Global Adolescent Mental Health Since 2010: A Collaborative Review.

The crisis goes beyond mental health...

Since the early 2010s, there have also been substantial declines in

2. The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood

The story begins at the end of the 1970s as social trust collapses among adults. The "play-based" childhood starts to dissipate as parents become more fearful, overprotective, and less willing to let their kids spend time with other kids unsupervised in the real world.

The decline accelerates in the 1990s as parents start supervising their kids more...

And kids start spending less time with each other...

And do less of the stuff that they have historically done...

As overprotection in the real world increased, a new and exciting virtual world opened up to kids. The old play-based childhood was being replaced...

3. The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood

The virtual world arrives. Smartphones and social media platforms are adopted faster than any communication technology before it...

The play-based childhood officially ends as teens' social lives move onto smartphones filled with social media apps...

By 2015, one in five American teen girls use social media more than 40 hours a week...

By 2023, more than 46 percent of teens report being online "almost all of the time."

Childhood transformed into something unrecognizable. And it has caused an epidemic of mental illness among our youth.

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The Anxious Generation begins by examining adolescent mental health trends. What happened to young people in the early 2010s that triggered the surge of anxiety and depression?

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Medical Technology

Video Games

Space Exploration

Agriculture

Music Technology

Can you think of anything else?

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Tech Wave: Riding the Current of Change - Mr. Hull

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The 6 Most Exciting Medical Technology Breakthroughs - The Medical Futurist

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These are the benefits of space exploration

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Why We Go to Space

At NASA, we explore the secrets of the universe for the benefit of all, creating new opportunities and inspiring the world through discovery.

NASA's exploration vision is anchored in providing value for humanity by answering some of the most fundamental questions: Why are we here? How did it all begin? Are we all alone? What comes next? And, as an addendum to that: How can we make our lives better?

NASA was created more than half a century ago to begin answering some of these questions. Since then, space exploration has been one of the most unifying, borderless human endeavors to date. An international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries operates the International Space Station, and two dozen countries have signed the Artemis Accords, signaling their commitment to shared values for long-term human exploration and research at the Moon. Through space exploration, we gain a new perspective to study Earth and the solar system. We advance new technologies that improve our daily lives, and we inspire a new generation of artists, thinkers, tinkerers, engineers, and scientists.

Unite with us on our journey to explore.

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At NASA, we explore the secrets of the universe for the benefit of all, creating new opportunities and inspiring the world through discovery.

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Why exploring space matters | Stephen Hawking | TEDxLondon