The Future Is Better Than You Think

I spotted an optimist as I was listening to the American Public Radio show MarketPlace last week. I thought about transcribing part of the interview, which you can hear here (audio only). Peter Diamandis is the co-author of Abundance —The Future Is Better Than You Think, and serves as Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. It wasn't necessary to transcribe the radio segment because the book summary and the X Prize video below say it all.

As we might expect, Diamandis is a techno-optimist. There is no problem technology can not solve. Thus will human cleverness and ingenuity always get us out of any hole we've dug for ourselves, no matter how deep and how wide that hole is. In the human delusion department, no one has anything on Peter Diamandis. He takes a back seat to no one, as you shall soon see.

I should write a book called Optimist Spotting—A Field Guide to Delusional Thinking In The 21st Century.

Abundance provides a "thrilling antidote to today's dark pessimism" espoused by killjoys like me. It seems particularly apropos to look at Peter's work after the two critiques of Progress I published earlier this week.

The Failures Of Progress — What We Have Lost

The Failures Of Progress — What Will Be Lost

If you think Reality is a downer, Peter Diamandis has the cure. Enjoy.

Abundance—the Future is Better Than You Think—is a new book by Dr. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler (bestselling author and science journalist), launching February 21, 2012. It is a thrilling antidote to today’s dark pessimism.The authors rely on exhaustive research and extensive interviews with top scientists, innovators, and captains of industry to explore how four emerging forces—exponential technologies, the DIY [do-it-yourself] innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve our biggest problems.

Diamandis and Kotler examine the stunning impact these forces are having on categories of critical importance while establishing hard targets for change, laying out a strategic road map for governments, industry, and entrepreneurs, and giving us plenty of reason for optimism. 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, 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 decades than we have in the previous two hundred years.

We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child 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 dozens (and dozens) of innovators and industry captains making tremendous strides in each area:

• Dean Kamen’s “Slingshot,” a technology which can transform polluted water, salt water or even raw sewage into incredibly high-quality drinking water for less than one cent a liter;
• the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE which promises a low-cost, handheld medical device that allows anyone to diagnose themselves better than a board certified doctor;
• Dickson Despommier’s “vertical farms,” which replaces traditional agriculture with a system that uses 80 percent less land, 90 percent less water, 100 percent fewer pesticides, and
• zero transportation costs.

As a bonus, the authors provide a detailed reference section filled with ninety graphs, charts and graphics offering much of the source data underpinning their conclusions. Providing abundance is humanity’s grandest challenge—this is a book about how we rise to meet it.

I am sure we all eagerly await those zero transportation costs. And now the video, which is even better.

 

Comments

[John Frum]

Space Age Cargo Cult bullshit.

"The cults that won Cargoist adherents among the citizens of advanced nations were not always obviously religious. The Type II belief held that great technological breakthroughs would inevitably occur in the near future, and would enable man to continue indefinitely expanding the world's human carrying capacity."

an excerpt from "Overshoot", by William R. Catton Jr., pages 187, University of Illinois Press, 1980.