Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series)

Every few years a few truly great general interest books on technology, human problems, and social progress come along. Books like Carson's Silent Spring, 1962. Toffer's Future Shock, 1970. Piel's The Acceleration of History, 1972. Drexler's Engines of Creation, 1986. Moravec's Mind Children, 1988. Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, 1993. Stock's Metaman, 1993. Simon's The State of Humanity, 1996. Brin's The Transparent Society, 1998. Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, 1999. Rhodes's Visions of Technology, 1999. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, 1999. Wright's Nonzero, 2000. Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, 2001. Wallace's Moral Machines, 2008. Kelly's What Technology Wants, 2010. Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011. Ridley's The Rational Optimist, 2011. Now comes Diamandis and Kotler's Abundance, 2012, a member of this very rare and special class.To read books like these is to improve your ability to think, to see viable futures, to create and take control of your life's path, and to live in a way that best advances society as a whole. In short, they upgrade your world view, by addressing the most important questions and conversations of our era. How do we best steer our accelerating technologies to create social progress? What are the great human problems our technologies create? What greater problems can they solve? How and why does technology improve itself even in spite of human failings? What is technology becoming, and how is it changing us?Abundance helps us understand that we are not entering a "post-scarcity" world, but rather an abundance world. Scarcities and competitions will persist at the leading edge of civilization, and the winners will profit more than everyone else. But at the same time, our accelerating technologies are creating vast new abundance in living standards, and so much capability to take care of our environment, that the scarcities of today will be distant memories just a few generations from now. As long as we rise to the challenges.Peter Diamandis, Founder and Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, Co-Founder and Chairman of Singularity University, and pioneer of the personal spaceflight industry, is eminently qualified to write this book. He is both a visionary and an accomplished entrepreneur, with a passion for new horizons, and a deep ethical interest in global development. His practical, results-oriented perspective permeates the book, and frankly, it jumps right into the reader's psyche long before the end. His co-author, Steven Kotler, is a writer of vast experience, and it shows. Of all the books listed above, Abundance is perhaps the easiest to read, and digest. The writing is amazingly straightforward and clear. You can finish it in just a few evenings. If you are an influence leader with your family and friends I recommend getting a copy for them as well. If they are reading- or time-challenged, get them the MP3 audiobook. For special books like this, I recommend listening to the audiobook first in your car, then reading and annotating the book a week later. There's no better way to deeply understand important ideas than to hear them more than once by different modes, then to summarize them when done. If you can, post your thoughts on the book in an Amazon Review, and discuss and debate it with others when you are done.If Diamandis and Kotler don't do a video documentary to follow up this achievement, that would be a shame. The images and themes in this book are so well chosen, I'm convinced that Abundance: The Movie would change millions of lives and minds. The book shows how to get beyond hand-wringing and finger pointing for those who want to create a better world. Instead, we can actively seek out and celebrate examples of what works, incentivize innovation, aggressively back the best of the innovators and disruptors, and help clear the many roadblocks out of their way. I found Abundance to strike a realistic balance between sustainability and innovation. It makes clear we aren't just here to be change-averse stewards of the past, or the status quo. Humanity craves more freedom, intelligence, ethics, and ability, not just for us, but for every living creature. Increasingly, we're figuring out how to achieve what we dream.Singularity University, co-founded by Peter and the eminent futurist and innovator Ray Kurzweil, is an educational and entrepreneurship organization dedicated to defining and addressing the grand challenges of human development. I am an advisor at SU. Every year I'm privileged to meet the 80 students of their Graduate Studies Program, and every year I'm blown away by the vision, drive, ethics, and creativity of these students. I've also known several of them before they attended SU, and it's magical to see how much more practical and effective they become once they're part of the SU network. Peter and Ray have created an amazing environment, and it begins with the right mindset, the right world view. Unless you can afford to attend their GSP or their shorter Executive Program, reading this book is the closest you'll get to creating the Singularity University mindset for yourself. I have been thinking about these issues as a technology foresight professional since 2000, going on 12 years now. This book left me significantly more optimistic, practical, and empowered than when I began, and I've got several friends now reading it as well.Abundance, as I see it, has four main themes: 1. Mental blocks that keep us from seeing the world as it really is, 2. Grand challenges of global development, 3. Accelerating technological progress, and 4. Accelerating human ingenuity. Part One tackles the mental blocks that keep us from seeing accelerating change, and challenges us to improve our perspective. I think these 48 pages are the most important, for most people. If you have time for nothing else, just read this section. Part One helps us see how our culture and our human biases conspire to keep us cynical, passive, fear-driven, selfish, ignorant, and disconnected. Meanwhile planetary acceleration continues faster every year, with or without any individual nation, and it's a strongly positive sum game. The Chinese researcher who discovers the cure to the cancer your partner will get in twenty years will soon be your hero, or he should be. The more innovative, wealthy, and intelligent the world gets, the more human conflict migrates to where it belongs, at the leading edge, in the world of ideas, not in the realm of human rights, securities, and freedoms, which become increasingly clearly protected and defined.Parts Two through Six alternate the last three themes. We're introduced next to Exponential Technologies, and we begin to appreciate the disruptions to come, and the special tools that every wise society needs to employ. The reader considers a special set of Grand Challenge problems, and their looming solutions: The final spurt of Population Growth (in Africa and Asia only, it's pretty much over everywhere else). Sanitation. Water. Food. Energy. Education. Health Care. Freedom. Potential pitfalls of exponential technology like the growing rich poor divide, corruption, pandemics, military conflict, and terrorism are relegated to the Appendix. This is nervy yet ultimately a smart call. Abundance focuses our attention on all the problems that can be noticeably improved or eliminated in the next ten to twenty five years. The problems in the Appendix can and will be solved as well, but likely not nearly as fast.The fourth theme, rising human ingenuity, cooperation and collective intelligence, is treated in two groups of three chapters, so in essence it's the largest theme of the book. While Diamandis and Kotler make an excellent case that our Grand Challenge problems can be solved. They also make it very clear that these solutions won't happen if we don't keep striving. As always, a subset of motivated, visionary, talented, and practical entrepreneurs, innovators, policymakers, and philanthopists will lead the way, and the billions who are presently marginalized will do most of the heavy lifting, in pursuit of a decent quality of life, not the diversions of luxury.Books like Abundance help us to get our bearings in a sea of change. They remind us where we are, and where we are going. The more people read them, the more purposeful and effective we all become. We've got big problems to solve, and Abundance is one of the best guides to the near future that you could ever ask for. I hope you'll read it, learn it, and share it far and wide.

The one thing that is consistent about history is that it always fools us. Times of the greatest peace and prosperity lull us into complacency that is followed by peril. The 1920s seemed like a perfect time of peace and prosperity, only to dissolve into a decade and a half of the Great Depression and World War II. We recently experienced "déjà vu all over again" when the prosperity of the mid 2000's suddenly collapsed into the Great Recession.Just as times of peace and prosperity lull us into a false sense of optimism and complacency, troubled times drown us in an ocean of pessimism. We expect the troubles to last forever. In 1945 our government assumed that as soon as the 12 million service men and women were demobilized that the U.S. and the ruined economies of Europe would take us right back into the Great Depression. Instead the opposite happened. The central tendency of the world between 1945 and 2008 was a vast expansion of peace, prosperity, and freedom. The Nazis, Communists, and Fascists, and ultra-nationalists were replaced by democracies with a sense of shared global interests. The USA and Europe returned to sustainable full employment. Many countries, including the defeated Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and the former Communist countries like China joined together with the Western Democracies to promote global peace and prosperity.After a similar period of complacency, the economy came tumbling down in 2008 when the Great Recession nearly sent the entire world back into the Stone Age. Since then we've muddled along in an ocean of pessimism of high unemployment, foreclosures, budget deficits, collapsing currencies, and social welfare systems collapsing under the demographics of an aging population. Is it EVER going to get better? Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis say that not only will it get better, but that we are on the cusp of a new golden age of abundance of material and intellectual wealth.They say that the new golden age of peace and prosperity will be created by the power of the human mind unleashed in a free economy.This will result in:* An abundance of the material necessities of clean water, nutritious food, ample housing, and medical care.* An abundance of freedom to pursue opportunities. The advancing state of computer and communications technologies enables individuals to nowadays accomplish what formerly could only be accomplished by huge combinations of capital and labor organized as corporations. The advance of free market economies around the world will provide the economic freedom that speeds the process of wealth creation.The central premise of the book is:============================================================The advancement of new, transformational technologies--computational systems, networks and sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, bioinformatics, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, human-machine interfaces, and biomedical engineering--will soon enable the vast majority of humanity to experience what only the affluent have access to today. Even better, these technologies aren't the only change agents in play.A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) revolution has been brewing for the past fifty years, but lately it's begun to bubble over. In today's world, the purview of backyard tinkerers has extended far beyond custom cars and homebrew computers, and now reaches into once-esoteric fields like genetics and robotics...Small groups of motivated DIY-ers can accomplish what was once the sole province of large corporations and governments....The high-tech revolution created an entirely new breed of wealthy technophilanthropists who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges. Bill Gates is crusading against malaria; Mark Zuckerberg is working to reinvent education; while Pierre and Pam Omidyar are focused on bringing electricity to the developing world. And this list goes on and on. Taken together, our second driver is a technophilanthropic force unrivaled in history. Lastly, there are the very poorest of the poor, the so-called bottom billion, who are finally plugging into the global economy and are poised to become what I call "the rising billion."The final element in our pyramid of abundance is freedom.=========================================================I believe Kotler and Diamandis have nailed it on the head. In the realm of material wealth, for the first time Mankind has the capacity to provide the necessities of clean water, nutritious food, ample housing, and medical care to all. Indeed the number of people who don't have luxuries like electricity, TV's, and phones is shrinking. The authors are not talking a pipedream. They specifically explain how emerging new technologies of agriculture, energy, information, and production will create material abundance for all peoples.In the realm of expanding freedom the authors' thesis has been validated by the Internet and Facebook that have proven to more powerful than the police states of tyrants. Facebook has enabled people to organize to bring down repressive regimes in the Middle East and Russia. The peoples of all nations demand represenation in their governments, and they will have it.I see evidence of Kotler's and Diamandis' thesis at work right here in the USA. In times of economic crisis you might expect the people to lurch to the political left in demanding a larger role of government centralized planning in the economy. I notice that this sentiment is remarkably absent not only from Conservatives but also from traditional Liberals. The mainstream view of both camps is that "New ideas and new technologies working in the free marketplace will restore prosperity." I never thought I would hear political Liberals argue this way, but most that I know do have faith that new technologies operating in free markets is the correct path to prosperity.So we have every reason to believe that human ingenuity combined with economic freedom will indeed bring us to the cusp of unimagined prosperity, just as it happened after 1945. The picture they paint of the future resembles the high-tech, antiseptic, pacific world of the "Star Trek" series. They also point out that the world will not be perfect. Terrorists or mad scientists will have the ability to use do-it-yourself genetic engineering to create artificial plague germs that could render humanity extinct. Our ability to destroy ourselves will have to be controlled as we move into a world of unimagined prosperity.The authors also depict a certain spirit of innovation that will prevail in the future. The future world they are describing sounds a lot like the exciting time of the 1960s when the Space Race thrilled us with the quest to develop the manned rockets to carry us to the moon and the unmanned probes that gave us our first close up look at the other planets. The authors depict an era of exciting innovations in many dimensions of material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.This book is non-political. Its elements will appeal to people of almost all ideologies. The economic and sociological theories also seem to be spot on. This book is a COMPLETE encapsulation of the future in regard to economics and sociology.I looked hard to find any flaws in this book that might degrade it from fire-star and couldn't find any. This is exactly the right book at exactly the right time with exactly the right message: hang on for a couple more years; the best days are ahead!

This is the first of a 3 book series. Might seem strange to buy a book on the future which is more than 10 years old but Im glad I did. Its a super start to the set. Incrediblt well written and researched and jammed with insights. Only a third way through and already bought the 3rd one.

It is so easy to get bogged down in the noise of the modern world that one can scarcely be blamed for thinking that the world is falling apart. It is not, Peter Diamandis explains with evidence that the truth is in fact the opposite. Do yourself a huge favour and read this book, you'll think more critically and you'll never listen to the news media in the same way again.

This book was a marvellous experience! Its claims are verifiable, its optimism is bold but counter balanced with the very real obstacles in our way. Most of all it is a glimpse into a near future that can belong to everyone.

A good book!!

This is a book filled with an interesting and informative mix of the planet' s problems and solutions. It is very readable and hopeful but lacks a pulling together of the solutions which makes for an unsatisfactory finish to the book.