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The New York Times bestselling “manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions addressing the world’s most pressing concerns: overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom” (The Wall Street Journal).
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.
In Abundance, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every person on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp.
Breaking down human needs by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce us to innovators and industry captains making tremendous strides in each area. “Not only is Abundance a riveting page-turner…but it’s a book that gives us a future worth fighting for. And even more than that, it shows us our place in that fight” (The Christian Science Monitor).
- Sales Rank: #8241 in Books
- Published on: 2014-09-23
- Released on: 2014-09-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x 1.10" w x 5.50" l, .86 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
Review
“I’d like readers to read Abundance, the Peter Diamandis book with his coauthor, because if they did that, they would see that while the headlines are really bad in the world today, the trend lines are pretty good. Extreme poverty is down. [H]ealth care is improving dramatically around the world. There are developments now which make me believe we might be able to do what we did in the 90s which is use technological developments to create more jobs than we lose. For the last few months, for the first time in literally more than a decade, 40 percent of the new jobs have been in higher wage categories. I think people should read this and get some good ideas.” (President Bill Clinton)
“At a moment when our world faces multiple crises and is awash in pessimism, Abundance redirects the conversation, spotlighting scientific innovators working to improve people's lives around the world. The result is more than a portrait of brilliant minds - it's a reminder of the infinite possibilities for doing good when we tap into our own empathy and wisdom.” (Arianna Huffington CEO, Huffington Post)
“This brilliant must-read book provides the key to the coming era of abundance replacing eons of scarcity, a powerful antidote to today’s malaise and pessimism.” (Ray Kurzweil author of The Singularity Is Near)
“Diamandis and Kotler challenge us all to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Innovative small teams are now empowered to accomplish what only governments and large corporations could once achieve. The result is nothing less than the most transformative and thrilling period in human history.” (Timothy Ferris #1 NY Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek)
"Now that human beings communicate so easily, I suspect that nothing can stop the inevitable torrent of new technologies, new ideas and new arrangements that will transform the lives of our children. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler give us a blinding glimpse of the innovations that are coming our way — and that they are helping to create. This is a vital book."—Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
“Today, philanthropists, innovators and passionate entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever before to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Abundance chronicles many of these stories and the emerging tools driving us towards an age of abundance. This is an audacious and powerful read!”—Jeff Skoll
“Abundance provides proof that the proper combination of technology, people and capital can meet any grand challenge.”—Sir Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group
"Our future depends on optimists like Diamandis...even the most skeptical readers will come away from Abundance feeling less gloomy." --New York Times Book Review
"A manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions addressing the world's most pressing concerns: overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom. " --The Wall Street Journal
"A breezy case for optimism... Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think...[is] a godsend for those who suffer from Armageddon fatigue." --The Economist
“In Abundance: Why the Future is Better Than You Think, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler offer a vision of the future that’s truly awesome in both the most traditional and modern understandings of the word; it’s as big as it as awe inspiring.” –The Futurist
"Abundance is not fantasy. It is a tale, say authors Diamandis and Kotler, of “good news;” a spritely and exciting collection of reasons why, despite the ever-constant refrain that Earth is on the verge of disaster, we must stay positive." --Christian Science Monitor
" Enough with the dystopian fiction and Mayan end-of-the-world predictions! According to tech entrepeneur and philanthropist Peter Diamandis and science writer Steven Kotler, things are getting better, not worse. " --USA Today
"[Abundance is] fascinating and inspirational -- every politician should read it (but sadly that may be too much to hope for!)" --Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, UK
"Welcome to the feel good future." -Smithsonian
"A nice reminder of how far we’ve come." --The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Peter H. Diamandis is a New York Times bestselling author, and the founder of more than fifteen high-tech companies. He is the CEO of the XPRIZE (XPrize.org), Exec. Chairman of the Singularity University (SingularityU.org), a Silicon Valley based institution backed by Google, 3D Systems and NASA. He is Co-Chairman of Planetary Resources, Inc. and the Cofounder of Human Longevity, Inc. Dr. Diamandis attended MIT, where he received his degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, and Harvard Medical School, where he received his MD. In 2014 he was named one of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” by Fortune magazine.
Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the Cofounder and Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project (FlowGenomeProject.com). His books include Bold, The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, West of Jesus, and The Angle Quickest for Flight. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages and his articles have appeared in over seventy publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, Forbes, and Time. He also writes Far Frontiers, a blog about science and innovation for Forbes.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
© 2012 Peter H. Diamandis
Most helpful customer reviews
308 of 330 people found the following review helpful.
A Brief Summary and Review
By A. D. Thibeault
*A full summary of this book is available here: An Executive Summary of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think'
In their new book `Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think', Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue that, despite the problems that our technology has recently created (including dwindling resources, global warming, and a population explosion that threatens to confound [and in some cases already does confound] our advances in agricultural production and medicine), we needn't discard our techno-optimism after all. Indeed, according to Diamandis, the world is on the precipice of another explosion in technology that will soon bring refuge from many of our current problems, and abundance to our doorstep. Not content to let the goal or the timeline remain vague, Diamandis is happy to hang a more precise definition on each. When it comes to abundance, Diamandis defines it as "a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and non-polluting, ubiquitous energy" (loc. 317), and, to top it all off, the freedom to pursue their goals and aspirations unhindered by political repression. With regards to the timeline, Diamandis claims that it "should be achievable within twenty-five years, with noticeable change possible within the next decade" (loc. 580).
In an attempt to convince us that this goal is achievable (and convincing he is), Diamandis takes us through the latest technological developments (and those that will soon be coming down the pipe) in numerous fields such as water filtration and sanitation (including advancements in water desalination, nano-filtering, sewage recycling, and the smart-water-grid); food production (including the next generation of genetically modified foods, vertical farming, in-vitro meat, and agroecology); education (including personalized education, the OLPC [One Laptop Per Child program], AI education programs, and advancements in educational games, video-games and computer programs); energy (including solar and wind power, the next generation of nuclear energy and algal biofuel, the smart-energy-grid, and battery-encapsulated energy storage); healthcare (including stem cell therapy and organ creation, robotic medical care-givers and surgeons, genomic medicine [based on your individual genome], and Lab-on-a-Chip technology [a diagnostic tool compatible with your cell phone that can instantly analyze samples of saliva, urine and blood]), and many, many more.
According to Diamandis, the technological innovations mentioned above are being spurred on by 3 forces in particular these days that are likely to bring us to a state of abundance even quicker than we might otherwise expect, and one that extends to all parts of the world. The 3 forces are (in reverse order as to how they are presented), 1) the rise of the bottom billion--which consists in the fact that the world's poorest have recently begun plugging into the world economy in a very substantial way, both as a consumer and as a producer of goods (largely as a result of the communications revolution, and the fact that cell phones are now spreading even to the world's poorest populations); 2) the rising phenomenon of the tech-philanthropists--a new breed of wealthy individuals who are more philanthropic than ever, and who are applying their efforts to global solutions (and particularly in the developing world); and 3) the rising phenomenon of DIY innovation--which includes the ability of small organizations, and even individuals to make contributions even in the most advanced technological domains (such as computing, biotechnology, and even space travel).
With regards to this last force, part of Diamandis' purpose here is to inspire the layperson to enter the fray with their own contributions towards abundance by way of joining one of the numerous open-source innovation projects available on line, or throwing their hand into one of the many incentivized technological prizes in existence, or in some other manner of their own devising. In this regard, the authors are very successful, as the work is both invigorating and inspiring, and I highly recommend it. A full summary of the book is available here: An Executive Summary of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think'
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Not an other review!
By Jerome C. Boyer
About a century ago:
"The presence of 120,000 horses in New York City, wrote one 1908 authority [...], is "an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life.""
Human history (and pre-history, no doubt) is littered with situations akin to New York in 1908. The sub title, The future is better than you think, is well illustrated when one considers that, in New York alone, over 20,000 people a year died (in the 1900s) from infection carrying horse manure. No such deaths today, of course. The fact that people still die because of air pollution is a concern, but, like what happened since 1908, one can see that the pollution problem will wane as did the horse manure one.
Abundance is about being human, believing in the infinite creativity of people in inventing solutions, not only survive, but to improve one's life beyond any reasonable expectations.
The daily news confirm the research and analysis of the authors, as seen in U.K. recently:
"Dutch scientists Monday unveiled their ambitious research project, years in the making, with a public taste test of their cultured beef in London." (L.A. Times Aug 5, 2013)". Cultured beef? no cow polluting the environment, devastating our landscape and clogging our rivers?
Abundance should be a book unveiled in first grade classes, to help children understand the immense potential of human creativity. Abundance is a rebuttal from doomsday know-all that want to replace human ingenuity by their own ignorant utopia.
Abundance reflects how harsh history has been on people that believe today is the last good day on earth, that tomorrow will be hell unless humanity goes back to the "Good Old Days" (of horse manure pollution?)
Abundance's research is current, fast forwarding those who care about the future, into the unthinkable, but almost there, new reality. The book could be read from cover to cover as novel about human nature, but is better enjoyed step by steps, as the authors develop various themes in every chapters.
I am anxiously waiting for 100 story buildings filled with hot houses floors feeding the neighborhood. "[...] vertical farms offer the clearest path towards ending hunger and malnutrition." Chapter 9 Feeding Nine Billion.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Optimism is good, but this book has too much naive utopian techno-hype.
By Jeffrey
The authors are totally right: attitude is everything. We can get through this mess we've created, and we probably will.
But the zealous, uncritical celebration of all things technological and disruptive takes it too far. As a graduate of the MIT Media Lab I am familiar with a brand of pumped-up utopianism surrounding world-changing technologies. This is the familiar voice of highly-funded technology institutions.
When the authors launched into a semi-politicized, whole-hearted acceptance of genetically-modified foods, my opinion of the book took a nose dive. This is a controversial subject; highly debated by people all over the world. Our 3-billion-year-old biosphere has refined the code of life in ways that we barely understand yet. We arose from it, and we rely on it for our survival. It deserves our reverence as we fiddle with it to fuel our insane population growth. The authors should not have taken a partisan stand on this issue.
The book also emphasizes celebrities like Ray Kurzweil and Craig Venter in a predictable way. The story of abundance involves more than the obvious line up of Hollywood stars.
Overall, I think this is a worthy book, full of good factoids, observations. It has a good overall message.
We will get through this mess, and technology will be an important factor. But a little more reverence for the natural balance of things would have been appreciated. For instance, I think the solution to most of these problems would be for us to keep our population low. Not easy to implement, I know...but easy to understand, and logically a no-brainer. I think Earth would prefer that.
-J
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