Segway inventor's next endeavor

It's a stretch though...

http://www.usfirst.org

I've met dozens of students at MIT who say the experience with FIRST was the main reason they decided to study science and engineering. (And I've heard similar stories from folks at Stanford, CMU, etc.)

Dean's a genius with an amazing team, but that impact can only go so far. Inspiring thousands of new students in STEM careers is solving the world's problems at a meta level.

Second, I assumed the statement meant that Kamen et al. would be especially receptive to local women running the machines. Remember, that women are likely to be repressed in countries where this machine is going to be useful. Empowering women in developing countries has a history of being an effective way to lift people out of poverty. For examples, I point you to the success that microfinance has had in lending money to women.

Microcredit loans are for persons starting their own business. Selling drinking water sounds like a good match.

Still, the lower-level components and building blocks of the technologies that enable these applications still needs to be designed and distributed, and even those who generate their own electricity, grow their own food, and purify their own water are going to find it challenging to manufacture their own solar panels, construct their own pump systems, etc. More and more hackers might be designing homebrew electronics, but we're still a long way from DIY silicon fabrication.

So it's not that the large-scale, centralized economy will go away; it's that as the value of economies of scale in production of consumption goods diminishes, the centralized production systems and complex distribution networks of the industrial economy will pivot, and end up supplying tools and raw materials more, and finished goods less.

I bet over the next century, we'll see a gradual reversal of the economic patterns of the last 150 years or so, with more and more people adopting a kind of high-tech homesteading, fewer people working as employees for others, and finished goods being increasingly produced by end-users themselves or by smaller cottage industries, with the industrial infrastructure increasingly supplying inputs rather than final products.

At least according to How Stuff Works, they were two separate machines: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/re...

"But the two devices may fit together even more harmoniously. The generator happens to make a lot of extra heat as it burns fuel -- up to 85 percent of it doesn't get used. But when the generator and purifier are connected by a tube, hot air can blow into the purifier. There, it can do work, heating the incoming water and surrounding the purifier like a jacket, trapping heat inside. With help from the generator, the purifier can be even more efficient."

They're in the business of scarcity (Dasani bottled water).

Why teach a man how to fish when you can keep selling him the fish?

Basically this was a method to get their foot in the door and gain trust to a point to get the Slingshot project going, as far as I understand it.