Digital List Price:	$23.99
Kindle Price:	$10.44 Save $13.55 (56%)
Sold by:	Amazon.com Services LLC

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add an

audiobook with Audible narration for $7.49

Audiobook Price: $15.04

Save: $7.55 (50%)

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the authors

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

by Peter H. Diamandis (Author), Steven Kotler (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 2,876 ratings

Part of: Exponential Technology (3 books)

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

See all formats and editions

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

A New York Times–bestselling manifesto for the future addressing the world’s concerns like food, water, energy, education, healthcare, and freedom.

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—and 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, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two hundred years. We will soon be able 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” (The Christian Science Monitor).

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I’d like readers to read Abundance...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% 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, inventor, futurist, and author of The Singularity is Near

"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

“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.”
—Tim Ferriss, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek

“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

"This engaging book is a needed corrective, a whirlwind tour of the latest developments in health care, agriculture, energy, and other fields ...The authors make a compelling case for optimism over dread as we face the exhilarating unknown."
—Publisher's Weekly

"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

“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

About the Author

Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is a New York Times bestselling author and the cofounder of Singularity University, Human Longevity, Inc., Celularity, Inc., and founder of Bold Capital Partners. He is the founder and Executive Chairman of XPRIZE. Diamandis has degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT and an MD from Harvard Medical School.

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. His books include Stealing Fire, Bold, The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, Tomorrowland, West of Jesus, and Last Tango in Cyberspace. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, has been translated into more than forty languages, and has appeared in over a hundred publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Forbes, and Time.

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

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005FLOGMM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; Reprint edition (February 21, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 21, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 24167 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 402 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #69,398 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Oil & Energy Industry (Kindle Store)
- #4 in Social Science Research
- #14 in Oil & Energy Industry (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 2,876 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Steven Kotler
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Steven Kotler is a New York Times-bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of nine bestsellers (out of thirteen books total), including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, TIME and the Harvard Business Review. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Along with his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is the cofounder of the Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice and special needs dog sanctuary.
See more on the author's page
Peter H Diamandis
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

2,876 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

John M. Smart

Why You Should Read/Hear This Book

Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2012

Verified Purchase

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.

12 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ian Mann

Abundant Hope

Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2012

Verified Purchase

WHAT caught my attention was the sub-title of the book, "The future is better than you think".

Has anything you have read in the latest books on economics, the accounts of the state of the financial service industry, the business press, and your other reading rest, given you a sense that the future won't be much worse than the present?

It would be fair to say that the commonly accepted view is that those who feel positive about the future, well, don't know what is going on.

There is a difference between wishing and hoping. One may wish to win the lottery despite not having bought a ticket. One may hope to win the lottery only when one owns a ticket.

I am sure we all wish things will get better, but we lack the facts that would give us reason for hope. In their book Abundance, the authors make a very strong, fact-based case for the view that we have reason to be optimistic.

They call on science, engineering, social and economic trends in support of their thesis.

We are clearly going through a rough period economically with so many of our key trading partners in worrying state and others affected by their worries.

Consider this: through the 20th century we witnessed mind-numbing tragedies. A flu epidemic in 1918 killed 50 million people, World War II killed 60 million, and there were tsunamis, hurricanes, earth quakes, floods and even plagues of locusts.

Despite all this we saw infant mortality drop by 90%, maternal mortality drop by 99%, and human lifespan increase by 100%.

The quality of life has improved more in the past century than ever before, and the authors demonstrate that global living standards will continue to improve exponentially.

If your concern is more for your immediate surroundings - what is going on in South Africa and not the whole world - it is worth remembering that we are deeply interconnected.

Research shows that the wealthier, more educated and healthier a nation is, the less violence and civil unrest there is among its population, and the less likely that unrest will spread across borders. What happens elsewhere does affect us.

The authors do not ignore the fact that we are currently consuming 30% more of the planet's natural resources than we replace. They point out if we all lived the lifestyle of the average European we would need three planets worth of resources to pull it off, and five if we all wanted to live like Americans!

How do we get out of this bind? Consider that there is 5 000 times more solar energy falling on the planet's surface than we use in a year. The problem is not an issue of scarcity, rather one of accessibility - how do we get all this energy?

There was a time when a shiny metal, aluminium, was rarer than gold. Technological advances in electrolysis has allowed us to easily transform bauxite into aluminium and far from being rare today, we wrap food in it and then throw it away.

There is no shortage of water on the planet; about 70% of the earth is covered in it - it is just that it is far too salty for drinking or irrigation. What if a new technology could desalinate water cheaply and quickly, just as electrolysis has done for aluminium?

If this sounds farfetched, consider that in one generation we have made goods and services once reserved for the wealthy few available to any and all who need or simply desire them.

A Masai warrior with a cellphone has better mobile capability than the president of the United States had 25 years ago, as well as access to more information via Google if he has a smartphone.

Many factors are contributing to our betterment, not only technology. A do-it-yourself revolution has made it possible for individuals to do what only governments could have done in the past, and small firms with limited resources are making breakthroughs in medicine and the sciences.

Add to this the power of the money being spent in very deliberate ways by individuals. Bill Gates is crusading against malaria, Mark Zuckerman is working to reinvent education, Pierre and Pam Omidyar are focusing on bringing electricity to the developing world. And this is only the beginning of the list, not the end.

What is possible with the electrification of the developing world? A cheap two-burner stove would change much for the estimated 3.5 billion people who cook burning biomass: wood, dung and crop residue.

According to the World Health Organisation's 2002 report 36% of acute upper respiratory infections, 22% of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 1.5% of preventable cancers are caused by "indoor air pollution" from cooking with biomass. An electric stove would alleviate 4% of the global disease burden.

This is only a tiny fraction of what is possible; consider only the impact of clean water on everything from general health to infant mortality.

So why are we so pessimistic? Diamandis and Kolter dedicate a whole section of their book to this problem and provide many research-based explanations.

One is related to the speed of the primitive part of our brain. At the slightest hint of danger we overreact as a survival mechanism, including interpreting much in our environment with suspicion.

We still have that component in our brains and so we react in the same ways as our ancestor did thousands of years ago. We are living in the safest, healthiest, most comfortable time in human history. These are undeniable facts. Not 100 years ago the world was much more dangerous, unhealthy and uncomfortable than it is now.

In the 1900s London was in grave danger of becoming uninhabitable due to horse excrement in the streets. The problem appeared insoluble as more people came into the city and horses where an essential mode of transport. At the time, who would have thought that pollution of the skies rather than the roads would become the major issue?

Viewed objectively there is reason not only to wish for a better tomorrow, but adequate grounds to hope for a better future and even to reasonably expect it.

This is a must-read book.

Readability: Light ---+- Serious
Insights: High +---- Low
Practical: High ----+ Low

* Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Diniz Kranz

Excelente livro, gostaria de ter lido 5 anos antes.

Reviewed in Brazil on January 13, 2021

Verified Purchase

Excelente livro, muito bom, trazendo temas muito relevantes e inclusive de fora conhecimento comum. Gostaria muito de ter lido esse livro 5 anos atrás pois teria me ajudado muito mais. Único detalhe que julgo poderia ser melhor é com relação as tabelas e gráficos que fundamentam o raciocino ao invés de serem apresentadas no decorrer dos capítulos são todos colocados no anexo do livro o que dificulta e perde uma ótima oportunidade de gerar a reflexão, analisando os dados dos estudo no momento da leitura do capítulo, fora isso o livro é impecável! Recomendo fortemente para quem quer enxergar o mundo de uma forma diferente do que é propagado em jornais e revistas tradicionalmente.

Translate review to English

Happy Chappie

Great start to the series

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 27, 2022

Verified Purchase

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.

TaniaRivera

Lo recomiendo ampliamente pero si tendrás que investigas sobre algunos conceptos

Reviewed in Mexico on November 19, 2020

Verified Purchase

Me bachateo el libro, la narración es compleja sino tienes el background de todos los temas pero al final los autores lo hacen accesible

Translate review to English

Anthony

Spiega e chiarisce come la terra potrebbe soddisfare la vita di tutti

Reviewed in Italy on December 22, 2020

Verified Purchase

Apre la mente in larga scala esaminando tutti gli aspetti, legati al progresso tecnologico e la disponibilità dei beni della terra, su quello che il mondo potrebbe realmente essere e potrebbe dare ad ogni singolo uomo se ogni cosa venisse sfruttata al meglio e tutti pensassero al bene di tutti. Tutto ciò è descritto e spiegato con esempi e idee realistiche. Tutti dovrebbero leggerlo!

Translate review to English

tbe

Librazo!

Reviewed in Spain on December 25, 2016

Verified Purchase

Peter Diamandis nos cuenta qué le depara a la humanidad en el futuro cercano. Con el desarrollo exponencial del poder computacional e desarrollo tecnologico en general, Diamandis cuenta cómo de brillante puede ser el futuro.

Pone referencias historicas muy interesantes dónde es gracias a las nuevas tecnologías de la época que avanzaban el desarrollo económico y nivel de vida de las personas.

Sin duda una lectura entretenida y imprescindible a para cualquiera que esté buscando ideas de startups disruptivas.

Volvería a comprarlo.

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the authors

Image Unavailable

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the authors

Steven Kotler

Peter H Diamandis

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries