Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | SCD 303.483 DIA 9 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions of people. This book is an antidote to pessimism by tech-entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler.
Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing--fast. The authors document how four forces--exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion--are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. Abundance establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic road map for governments, industry, and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.
Examining human need by category--water, food, energy, health care, education, and freedom--Diamandis and Kotler introduce dozens of innovators making great strides in each area: Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, and many, many others.
Author Notes
Peter H. Diamandis received degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard Medical School. He is the founder of more than 15 high-tech companies. He is the co-author of Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think and Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Diamandis, a tech-entrepreneur turned philanthropist, and journalist Kolter (The Angle Quickest for Flight) contend that widespread pessimism about the future is due in part to our cognitive biases and the effects of mass media. Bad news sells newspapers, while good news escapes our attention or remains hidden in statistics. This engaging book is a needed corrective, a whirlwind tour of the latest developments in health care, agriculture, energy, and other fields as well as an introduction to thinkers and innovators such as Daniel Kahneman, Ray Kurzweil, and Craig Ventor. Augmented by the power of exponentially growing technologies, small groups of motivated individuals are accomplishing what used to require the resources of government or large corporations. Other forces driving innovation are infusions of money from techno-billionaires turned philanthropists and the integration of the poorest third of humanity into the global economy. Not every development will be appreciated; steak lovers may not take readily to in-vitro beef. New technologies contain novel risks, including the disquieting fact that robots will soon make up the majority of the blue-collar workforce. Nonetheless, the authors make a compelling case for optimism over dread as we face the exhilarating unknown. Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
We live in an age of incredible innovation in technology, medicine, and food science, under living conditions our ancestors would have killed for. Yet in poll after poll, the vast majority of people bemoan that things are getting worse, not better. This tendency for people to regret a loss much more than celebrate success may have helped us survive in the early days of our evolution, but in this age of abundance, clinging to bad news does more harm than good. This message is the springboard for Diamandis and Kotler to explore what the future holds for a species used to linear and local thinking in an age of exponential and global growth. We've seen that exponential growth in computer processing, which has taken a camera, telephone, computer, GPS, video games, and music system and put them in one device that fits in your pocket. The authors describe how similar exponential growth is being applied in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, food production, and clean energy, which could usher in a global era of abundance, particularly for the bottom billion, the poorest of the poor who have the most to gain in a future world in which abundance spreads like wildfire.--Siegfried, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE past few years have been trying ones for the world's optimists. In rapid succession, our global crises have ranged from the environmental to the economic - from tsunamis leveling entire regions of Asia and destroying seemingly impregnable nuclear reactors, to debt and unemployment crushing ostensibly healthy nations. Meanwhile, as the planet warms, ice caps melt, oceans acidify and dry regions desertify. To choose just one metric of doom, about 30 percent of the world's fish populations have either collapsed or are on their way to collapse; to choose another, global carbon emissions rose by a record 5.9 percent in 2010, a worrisome development considering that the period was characterized by slow economic growth. (What happens when things start booming again?) I could go on, but you get the gist. It seems self-evident that things are getting worse, doesn't it? Well, maybe. In Silicon Valley, where the locals tend to be too busy starting companies to wallow in gloom, Peter Diamandis has stood out as one of the more striking optimists. Several years ago, Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation, which rewards entrepreneurs with cash for achieving difficult goals, like putting a reusable spaceship into flight on a limited budget. More recently he helped start Singularity University, an academic program that convenes several weeks a year in the Valley and educates business leaders about the "disruptive" - i.e., phenomenally innovative - technological changes Diamandis is anticipating. To be sure, Diamandis is both very bright (he studied molecular biology and aerospace engineering at M.I.T. before getting an M.D. at Harvard) and well informed. Moreover, he's not the kind of optimist who will merely see the glass as half full. He'll give you dozens of reasons, some highly technical, why it's half full. Then he'll explain that your cognitive biases are tricking you into seeing the glass of water in a negative light, and cart out the research of acclaimed psychologists like Daniel Kahneman to prove his point. Finally he may suggest you stop fretting: new technologies will soon fill the glass up anyway. Indeed, they are likely to overfill it. I don't mean to fault this disposition. Our future depends on optimists like Diamandis, and his new book, "Abundance," written with the journalist Steven Kotler, is an enthusiastic take on what's to come. To Diamandis - though the book is co-written, it's narrated in his voice - the state of the world is in fact much better than it appears and will soon get even better. "Humanity," he says early on, "is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet." His thesis rests on a four-legged stool. The first idea is that our technologies in computing, energy, medicine and a host of other areas are improving at such an exponential rate that they will soon enable breakthroughs we now barely think possible. Second, these technologies have empowered do-it-yourself innovators to achieve startling advances - in vehicle engineering, medical care and even synthetic biology - with scant resources and little manpower, so we can stop depending on big corporations or national laboratories. Third, technology has created a generation of techno-philanthropists (think Bill Gates) who are pouring their billions into solving seemingly intractable problems like hunger and disease. And finally, we have what Diamandis calls "the rising billion." These are the world's poor, who are now (thanks again to technology) able to lessen their burdens in profound ways. "For the first time ever," Diamandis says, "the rising billion will have the remarkable power to identify, solve and implement their own abundance solutions." Diamandis and Kotler have written a frequently interesting and sometimes uplifting book. There are a number of ideas in "Abundance" that even devoted followers of technological trends may find new and reifying. The authors' tutorial on the declining costs of solar panels and power storage, for instance, makes a nearly airtight case for clean energy's imminent economic and environmental effects. And did you know that robotic surgeons - first developed for soldiers during battle, now used to help with knee-replacement surgeries - may be adapted to perform simple and urgent procedures in developing countries where doctors are scarce? Or that "vertical farms" within cities have a real potential to provide vegetables and fruits to local consumers on a mass scale? I didn't. Especially encouraging here is how the authors' vision for the world's poor - better medical care, clean water, more food, more education, all possible with the various technological tools we now have or soon will have - adds up to a deeply humanistic case. By a future of abundance, they do not mean luxury. They mean a future that will be "providing all with a life of possibility." Still, it's worth making a distinction. "Abundance" is not so much a report on the future as it is an argument for the potentiality of the future. And there is, so to speak, an abundance of problems in such an approach. To his credit, Diamandis acknowledges the magnitude of our global problems; and he hints, in places, at the complexity of overcoming them. Yet many new technological developments are presented here without the ballast of specific scientific, or economic, skepticism. Will we regularly "3-D print" human organs in the near future, just as laser printers now zip out documents? Will a revolutionary new generation of nuclear power plants actually be marketed by 2030? THE authors, keen on extrapolations, often show a casual disregard for what California's venture capitalists, an equally optimistic bunch, describe respectfully as the "Valley of Death." This term refers to the difficult, cash-starved terrain a new start-up and its technology must travel through to survive. Usually they fail. In California and elsewhere, it's never enough to make a breakthrough. The inventor or company must make something that succeeds technologically, economically and culturally on a large scale. Innovation, to put it another way, harmonizes closely with market acceptance and impact. Thus when Diamandis tells us about a water purification technology developed by the inventor Dean Kamen, we're led to believe it's an imminent leap forward and are told only later that the technology is still far too expensive for widespread adoption. In this instance, and several others in the book, the take-away is not quite convincing. More problematic, I think, is the authors' glorification of small groups over large ones. There's a curious absence of alarm over climate change in "Abundance," perhaps because arresting its effects will necessitate not only a huge technological push but also the messy business of changing human behavior, radically altering government policies and brokering international accords. In other words, it doesn't begin to fit into the authors' paradigm of a problem that requires a D.I.Y. or techno-philanthropic fix. (Nor does it appear to be a situation in which our glass-half-empty tendencies are leading us to an overly pessimistic view of the consequences. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center indicates that only 38 percent of Americans consider global warming a "very serious" problem.) Throughout the book Diamandis nevertheless offers small groups of driven entrepreneurs as a kind of Leatherman solution to the world's problems. It's true that plenty of insurgents are doing impressive things out there - Elon Musk's Tesla Motors, which helped jump-start the world's electric car industry, is a good example. But Diamandis neglects to point out that small and proficient groups also often function within the fertile confines of a larger corporation (Google, Apple, Intel, even General Motors) and thus draw on an enveloping pool of expertise in research, manufacturing and marketing. At the same time, small groups tend to be good at starting things but aren't equipped to finish things. Put another way, they can't stay small if they want to scale up. That Diamandis's X Prize Foundation awarded millions of dollars in 2007 to several inventors with car models that could achieve more than 100 miles per gallon does not implicitly prove the incompetence of companies like Ford and Toyota. To me, it merely adds to a conversation about the difficulty of moving away from cheap oil and of retooling the immensely complex global car industry, with its manufacturing challenges, liability issues and price-sensitive consumer markets. D.I.Y. folks don't worry much about such things. Regardless of the book's shortcomings, I'm fairly certain even the most skeptical readers will come away from "Abundance" feeling less gloomy. What's more, anyone contemplating the direction of our global society would do well to read and debate its arguments. The future may not turn out to be very bad, or even very good. We may just muddle through, with plenty of highs and lows, kind of as we're doing now. Still, there's a significant idea embedded within "Abundance": We should remain aware, as writers like Jared Diamond have likewise told us, that societies can choose their own future, and thus their own fate. In that spirit Diamandis and Kotler put forth a range of possible goals we may achieve if we have the imagination and the will. A little optimism wouldn't hurt, either. Diamandis says it's within our reach 'to significantly raise the basic standards of living' for all humanity. Jon Gertner is an editor at Fast Compa- ny and the author of "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation."
Choice Review
Optimism supported by action can turn dreams into reality. The ultimate goal is good health, education, and freedom for people worldwide. Here, technology entrepreneur Diamandis (X PRIZE Foundation; Singularity Univ.) and author/journalist Kotler discuss intermediate goals for a global society willing to cooperate. The next 25 years of world population growth, producing several billion additional people, will necessitate a focus on clean water, sufficient food, adequate housing, abundant energy, innovative health care, and universal education. Linear improvements will not meet these exponentially expanding requirements, so "technophilanthropists" are needed to encourage radical, game-changing innovations through their financial support. For example, the introduction of smart phone technology in underdeveloped countries brought access to information unavailable just ten years ago, resulting in improvements to local communities, countries, regions, and the world. But the many past accomplishments do not balance the enormous problems ahead for genuine progress amid wars, illness/epidemics, weather extremes, droughts, pollution, religious practices, and local customs that continually plague every area of the globe. According to the authors, technology and information sharing, combined with local action, may improve the odds of success. The 81 charts and tables show trends that support the engaging text, with notes and an appendix. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. F. Potter formerly, University of California, Irvine
Kirkus Review
A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life, 2010, etc.), things are going to work out just fine. The title speaks volumes. A tenet of capitalism is that resources are scarce, which justifies our scramble to get what we can. Yet, write the authors, "when seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce, they're mainly inaccessible." So drinking water is scarce and getting scarcer? There's a big ocean out there; what remains to be done is to develop some method to desalinate the ocean's water "in the same way that electrolysis easily transformed bauxite into aluminum." Of course, there is also a major shortage of fossil fuels--but no shortage of sunlight, and in fact more than 5,000 times as much solar power available as we could possibly use in our wildest dreams. It will bring some readers up short to contemplate the abundance that Diamandis and Kotler project in the face of the stark reality that there may well be 10 billion humans on the planet by the year 2050, but that doesn't daunt the authors much, given the human talent for engineering our way out of trouble. Engineering is a major part of their program, as "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." What about the health-care crisis? Well, nothing a few generations of robotic surgeons can't help, if not cure. Food crisis? Just 150 vertical-farm skyscrapers could feed all of New York City. And so on, to the point that there seems to be no problem that the authors find insurmountable, or even especially daunting. A nicely optimistic look at a matter that usually brings out the darkest thoughts among prognosticators--if a touch starry-eyed, at least a dream worth nurturing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER ONE OUR GRANDEST CHALLENGE The Lesson of Aluminum Gaius Plinius Cecilius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, was born in Italy in the year AD 23. He was a naval and army commander in the early Roman Empire, later an author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, best known for his Naturalis Historia, a thirty-seven-volume encyclopedia describing, well, everything there was to describe. His opus includes a book on cosmology, another on farming, a third on magic. It took him four volumes to cover world geography, nine for flora and fauna, and another nine for medicine. In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius. The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he'd extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome's great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. "Therefore," recounts Pliny, "instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded." This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia. It next reappeared during the early 1800s but was still rare enough to be considered the most valuable metal in the world. Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold. Aluminum's rarity comes down to chemistry. Technically, behind oxygen and silicon, it's the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust, making up 8.3 percent of the weight of the world. Today it's cheap, ubiquitous, and used with a throwaway mind-set, but--as Napoléon's banquet demonstrates--this wasn't always the case. Because of aluminum's high affinity for oxygen, it never appears in nature as a pure metal. Instead it's found tightly bound as oxides and silicates in a claylike material called bauxite. While bauxite is 52 percent aluminum, separating out the pure metal ore was a complex and difficult task. But between 1825 and 1845, Hans Christian Oersted and Frederick Wohler discovered that heating anhydrous aluminum chloride with potassium amalgam and then distilling away the mercury left a residue of pure aluminum. In 1854 Henri Sainte-Claire Deville created the first commercial process for extraction, driving down the price by 90 percent. Yet the metal was still costly and in short supply. It was the creation of a new breakthrough technology known as electrolysis, discovered independently and almost simultaneously in 1886 by American chemist Charles Martin Hall and Frenchman Paul Héroult, that changed everything. The Hall-Héroult process, as it is now known, uses electricity to liberate aluminum from bauxite. Suddenly everyone on the planet had access to ridiculous amounts of cheap, light, pliable metal. Save the beheading, there's nothing too unusual in this story. History's littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward: scarcity is often contextual. Imagine a giant orange tree packed with fruit. If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called a ladder, I've suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant. To expand on this a bit, let's take a look at the planned city of Masdar, now under construction by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company. Located on the edge of Abu Dhabi, out past the oil refinery and the airport, Masdar will soon house 50,000 residents, while another 40,000 work there. They will do so without producing any waste or releasing any carbon. No cars will be allowed within the city's perimeter and no fossil fuels will be consumed inside its walls. Abu Dhabi is the fourth-largest OPEC producer, with 10 percent of known oil reserves. Fortune magazine once called it the wealthiest city in the world. All of which makes it interesting that they're willing to spend $20 billion of that wealth building the world's first post-petroleum city. In February 2009 I traveled to Abu Dhabi to find out just how interesting. Soon after arriving, I left my hotel, hopped in a cab, and took a ride out to the Masdar construction site. It was a journey back in time. I was staying at the Emirates Palace, which is both one of the most expensive hotels ever built and one of the few places I know of where someone (someone, that is, with a budget much different from mine) can rent a gold-plated suite for $11,500 a night. Until the discovery of oil in 1960, Abu Dhabi had been a community of nomadic herders and pearl divers. As my taxi drove past the "Welcome to the future home of Masdar" sign, I saw evidence of this. I was hoping the world's first post-petroleum city might look something like a Star Trek set. What I found was a few construction trailers parked in a barren plot of desert. During my visit, I had the chance to meet Jay Witherspoon, the technical director for the whole project. Witherspoon explained the challenges they were facing and the reasons for those challenges. Masdar, he said, was being built on a conceptual foundation known as One Planet Living (OPL). To understand OPL, Witherspoon explained, I first had to understand three facts. Fact one: Currently humanity uses 30 percent more of our planet's natural resources than we can replace. Fact two: If everyone on this planet wanted to live with the lifestyle of the average European, we would need three planets' worth of resources to pull it off. Fact three: If everyone on this planet wished to live like an average North American, then we'd need five planets to pull it off. OPL, then, is a global initiative meant to combat these shortages. The OPL initiative, created by BioRegional Development and the World Wildlife Fund, is really a set of ten core principles. They stretch from preserving indigenous cultures to the development of cradle-to-cradle sustainable materials, but really they're all about learning to share. Masdar is one of the most expensive construction projects in history. The entire city is being built for a post-petroleum future where oil shortages and water war are a significant threat. But this is where the lesson of aluminum becomes relevant. Even in a world without oil, Masdar is still bathed in sunlight. A lot of sunlight. The amount of solar energy that hits our atmosphere has been well established at 174 petawatts (1.740 × 10^17 watts), plus or minus 3.5 percent. Out of this total solar flux, approximately half reaches the Earth's surface. Since humanity currently consumes about 16 terawatts annually (going by 2008 numbers), there's over five thousand times more solar energy falling on the planet's surface than we use in a year. Once again, it's not an issue of scarcity, it's an issue of accessibility. Moreover, as far as water wars are concerned, Masdar sits on the Persian Gulf--which is a mighty aqueous body. The Earth itself is a water planet, covered 70 percent by oceans. But these oceans, like the Persian Gulf, are far too salty for consumption or crop production. In fact, 97.3 percent of all water on this planet is salt water. What if, though, in the same way that electrolysis easily transformed bauxite into aluminum, a new technology could desalinate just a minute fraction of our oceans? How thirsty is Masdar then? The point is this: When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they're mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview. The Limits to Growth Scarcity has been an issue since life first emerged on this planet, but its contemporary incarnation--what many call the "scarcity model"--dates to the late eighteenth century, when British scholar Thomas Robert Malthus realized that while food production expands linearly, population grows exponentially. Because of this, Malthus was certain there was going to come a point in time when we would exceed our capacity to feed ourselves. As he put it, "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man." In the years since, plenty of thinkers have echoed this concern. By the early 1960s something of a consensus had been reached. In 1966 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out: "Unlike the plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases, which we do not understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess." Two years later, Stanford University biologist Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich sounded an even louder alarm with the publication of The Population Bomb. But it was the downstream result of a small meeting held in 1968 that really alerted the world to the depth of the crisis. That year, Scottish scientist Alexander King and Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei gathered together a multidisciplinary group of top international thinkers at a small villa in Rome. The Club of Rome, as this group was soon known, had come together to discuss the problems of short-term thinking in a long-term world. In 1972 they published the results of that discussion. The Limits to Growth became an instant classic, selling twelve million copies in thirty languages, and scaring almost everyone who read it. Using a model developed by the founder of system dynamics, Jay Forrester, the club compared worldwide population growth rates to global resource consumption rates. The science behind this model is complicated, the message was not. Quite simply: we are running out of resources, and we are running out of time. It's been over four decades since that report came out. While many of their more dire predictions have failed to materialize, for the most part, the years haven't softened the assessment. Today we are still finding proof of its veracity most places we look. One in four mammals now faces extinction, while 90 percent of the large fish are already gone. Our aquifers are starting to dry up, our soil growing too salty for crop production. We're running out of oil, running low on uranium. Even phosphorus--one of the principal ingredients in fertilizer--is in short supply. In the time it takes to read this sentence, one child will die of hunger. By the time you've made it through this paragraph, another will be dead from thirst (or from drinking dirty water to quench that thirst). And this, the experts say, is just the warm-up round. There are now more than seven billion people on the planet. If trends don't reverse, by 2050, we'll be closer to ten billion. Scientists who study the carrying capacity of the Earth--the measure of how many people can live here sustainably--have fluctuated massively in their estimations. Wild-eyed optimists believe it's close to two billion. Dour pessimists think it might be three hundred million. But if you agree with even the most uplifting of these predictions--as Dr. Nina Fedoroff, science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state, recently told reporters--only one conclusion can be drawn: "We need to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet cannot support many more people." Some things, though, are easier said than done. The most infamous example of top-down population control was the Nazis' eugenics program, but there have been a few other nightmares as well. India performed tubal ligations and vasectomies on thousands of people during the middle 1970s. Some were paid for their sacrifice; others were simply forced into the procedure. The results drove the ruling party out of power and created a controversy that still rages today. China, meanwhile, has spent thirty years under a one-child-per-family policy (while it's often discussed as a blanket program, this policy actually extends to only about 36 percent of the population). According to the government, the results have been 300 million fewer people. According to Amnesty International, the results have been an increase in bribery, corruption, suicide rates, abortion rates, forced sterilization procedures, and persistent rumors of infanticide. (A male child is preferable, so rumors hold that newborn girls are being murdered.) Either way, as our species has sadly discovered, top-down population control is barbaric, both in theory and in practice. This seems to leave only one remaining option. If you can't shed people, you have to stretch the resources those people use. And stretch them dramatically. How to do this has been a matter of much debate, but these days the principles of OPL have been put forth as the only viable option. This option bothered me, but not because I wasn't committed to the idea of greater efficiency. Seriously--use less, gain more--who would be opposed to efficiency? Rather, the source of my concern was that efficiency was being forwarded as the only option available. But everything I was doing with my life told me there were additional paths worth pursuing. The organization I run, the X PRIZE Foundation, is a nonprofit dedicated to bringing about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity through the design and operation of large incentive-prize competitions. One month before traveling to Masdar, I'd chaired our annual "Visioneering" board meeting, where maverick inventors like Dean Kamen and Craig Venter, brilliant technology entrepreneurs such as Larry Page and Elon Musk, and international business giants like Ratan Tata and Anousheh Ansari were debating how to drive radical breakthroughs in energy, life sciences, education, and global development. These are all people who have created world-changing industries where none had existed before. Most of them accomplished this feat by solving problems that had long been considered unsolvable. Taken together, they are a group whose track record showed that one of the better responses to the threat of scarcity is not to try to slice our pie thinner--rather it's to figure out how to make more pies. The Possibility of Abundance Of course, the make-more-pies approach is nothing new, but there are a few key differences this time around. These differences will comprise the bulk of this book, but the short version is that for the first time in history, our capabilities have begun to catch up to our ambitions. Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp. In this modern age of cynicism, many of us bridle in the face of such proclamation, but elements of this transformation are already underway. Over the past twenty years, wireless technologies and the Internet have become ubiquitous, affordable, and available to almost everyone. Africa has skipped a technological generation, by-passing the landlines that stripe our Western skies for the wireless way. Mobile phone penetration is growing exponentially, from 2 percent in 2000, to 28 percent in 2009, to an expected 70 percent in 2013. Already folks with no education and little to eat have gained access to cellular connectivity unheard of just thirty years ago. Right now a Masai warrior with a cell phone has better mobile phone capabilities than the president of the United States did twenty-five years ago. And if he's on a smart phone with access to Google, then he has better access to information than the president did just fifteen years ago. By the end of 2013, the vast majority of humanity will be caught in this same World Wide Web of instantaneous, low-cost communications and information. In other words, we are now living in a world of information and communication abundance. In a similar fashion, 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. There are three additional forces at work, each augmented by the power of exponentially growing technologies, each with significant, abundance-producing potential. 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. What's more, these days, small groups of motivated DIY-ers can accomplish what was once the sole province of large corporations and governments. The aerospace giants felt it was impossible, but Burt Rutan flew into space. Craig Venter tied the mighty US government in the race to sequence the human genome. The newfound power of these maverick innovators is the first of our three forces. The second force is money--a lot of money--being spent in a very particular way. 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 creation of a global transportation network was the initial step down this path, but it's the combination of the Internet, microfinance, and wireless communication technology that's transforming the poorest of the poor into an emerging market force. Acting alone, each of these three forces has enormous potential. But acting together, amplified by exponentially growing technologies, the once-unimaginable becomes the now actually possible. So what is possible? Imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy. Building this better world is humanity's grandest challenge. What follows is the story of how we can rise to meet it. (c) 2012 Peter H. Diamandis Excerpted from Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
