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

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

Abundance is the most enjoyable, exciting and motivating book I have read in a long time. Over the years I have read many books about the future, particularly about the technology of the future and how it will affect our lives. 32 years ago I was sitting here under the skylight of my then unfinished home architectural office reading another book that got me excited about the future: Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave. He was telling me that in the near future, many of us would be working at home "telecommuting" and that there would be a personal mini-computer in most homes, as common as a refrigerator, I think he said. I was all charged up about this wonderful future, then realized it was the middle of a week day, I was in my home office, and there was a computer on my desk, very primitive by today's standards, but a "personal mini-computer" nevertheless. But 1980 was quite a ways back on the still close to flat part of that exponential curve of technological progress that you may have seen in some of the magazine articles about Abundance, the book. I read it as a Kindle application on my iPad, PC, and iPhone seamlessly going from one to the other, depending on whether I was in my office, the kitchen, on the Stairmaster at my club, or in bed. On the PC or my iPad, I could click on any of the many highlighted references and be taken to the appendix and returned to where I had been reading with another click. On the PC, an internet reference in the text or appendix would take me to that external referenced article or graph or website. On the iPad, it would also take me back to where I was reading in the book when finished. This was the most elegant and useful integration of a book with Kindle technology that I have seen to date. Had the publisher chosen to allow Amazon's text to speech feature, I would have used my Kindle too. That may seem a little off-point, but I include it to illustrate just one of the changes we have so adapted to in those 32 years that we just take them for granted. Dr. Diamandis makes a seemingly air-tight case for an exponential acceleration of change to solve the problems that face us now and in the future, whether it is in energy, scarcity of resources, health, education, and even freedom. He seems to share much of the vision of the future of his colleague Ray Kurzweil, who is referenced and quoted in the book, along with many, many other experts. Dr. Kurzweil and Dr. Diamandis are the co-founders of Singularity University. (singularityu.org) There are many excellent talks and other resources on the web by both of them, including a very recent fifteen minute or so talk by Dr. Diamandis at TED (ted.com). Just the existence of Singularity University and TED.com are confirmation of the rapid and impactful changes in communication and education discussed in the book. They include an interesting quote from The Rational Optimist where the author of that book, Matt Ridley compares the cross-pollination of ideas facilitated by communication to the mixing of genetic information in the natural world. There were a couple of things in the book that I frankly wish were not there. Why the authors drag the name of Sarah Palin into a discussion of confirmation bias strikes me as inappropriate and more of an example of their own confirmation bias than hers - but then they would say that is just my confirmation bias. Less annoying but still a negative mark to me was a contradiction in two references to Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who sailed the raft Kon-Tiki across the Pacific in 1947. In the first they refer to Kon-Tiki as a raft, which it was, but in a reference a few pages later they describe the process of building it as if it were a dugout canoe, which it was not. Yes, I know - trivial, but it undermines the credibility, at least to me. But I don't want to make too much of my small disagreements. This is a powerful, optimistic, well documented and well written look at our future. That future is coming, whether we like it or not, so we had better get our minds ready to recognize it as it occurs. I suppose the one concept that keeps reoccurring to me in the days since I finished the book is the thought that the ideas that may change my life in unforeseen ways may come from some kid in Nepal or Siberia or Somalia. He or she may be a part of the bottom billion now, but how many more potential Mozarts or Einsteins or Hawkings or Edisons or Whitneys or Fords or Kamens are out there to be discovered and allowed to blossom? How many will take their dirt-cheap laptop and connect up with the Kahn Academy or something like it and learn to create world-changing products or ideas? As the creator of the X-prize and his many other accomplishments, Peter Diamandis has in my mind reserved a very honorable place in the future history of the world. With this current book, I think he has shown us how exciting and wonderful a history that is likely to be.

If you haven't seen the TED video lecture given by Peter Diamondis, you owe it to yourself to see it. He is even better in video than he is in the book. The authors give an excellent case for optimism. The book covers some interesting scenarios where humans working together are likely to solve the pressing problems we face in providing clean water, food, energy, medical care and education in abundance for the over nine billion people we can expect to have alive on our planet in this century. While the authors do an excellent job of giving the overview of how people are working to solve these problems, I am disturbed more by what they don't say. I can tell that they shy away from controversy so as not to alienate large segments of readers. I suspect that these guys are secular humanists who tend to be shills for the Obama Administration. That's OK but I like writers to be up front and with full disclosure about where they stand. Here are some examples of major omissions by the authors: 1. Energy - The book says some great things about the future of solar energy without saying how long it will take before solar energy becomes economically viable and effective. Solar still has a future but that future is a good 15-20 years away at best. No mention is made of massive government failures such as Solyndra and the even bigger fiascos with wind energy, which is neither cost effective nor environmentally sound. You won't find out about the over 1,000 birds a day that are killed in the US by wind turbines. Not much is said about new safer forms of nuclear power such as pebble bed reactors which are show more promise than wind or solar right now. I couldn't find anything about the most promising energy revolution of the past decade - shale oil and gas. Fracking, which is safer than nuclear or wind turbines and has a history of 50 years, is not just being done in the US but all over the world. In the US it has already reduced electricity costs and has also reduced greenhouse gas emissions to the lowest level in about 20 years. The US may reach energy independence which will contribute greatly to Mideast peace. 2. Health Care - There some great descriptions of new break-throughs resulting from stem cell research. The authors neglect to say that all of these improvements are from ADULT stem cells, not embryonic cells. They also err in saying that George Bush banned research on stem cells. That is not true; the Bush administration banned funding of any new research on EMBRYONIC stem cells, not on adult stem cells or existing embryonic cell lines that were in progress. They were also unfair in their criticism of Sarah Palin's comment about Obamacare and "death panels". The term was used to describe how some of the many new agencies would behave when rationing health care. This is something that has been known to happen in other countries with socialized medicine and has been a long time concern of ethical experts. Interesting, no shots were taken at the incredible waste and stupidity rampant in healthcare bureaucracies established by governments all over the world, including the US. The authors obviously haven't enrolled in Medicare yet! 3. Education - I really love what the book covers about the revolutions in how students of all ages will be educated all over the world. They even broach the controversial topic of the future of most established collegiate institutions in the US - and that future is not good at all. However, they completely avoid the more controversial topic of the dismal failure of the government and union-dominated public education establishment in the US. 4. Human Psychology - The authors display their excellent technical and educational credentials in this book but they seem to be naïve about human nature. They actually believe that most war and strife stems from a lack of abundance and that once humans get to a high level of prosperity they will beat their swords into plowshares and concentrate on the arts and sciences to make the human race even better. I don't think the authors have thought this concept through. The terrorists of 9/11 were all well educated and from good families. Most came from a part of the world known for its fabulous oil wealth. What drove them was not a desire for wealth but an insane hatred of "infidels" and a distorted belief that they would attain eternal glory from their actions. While I agree with the authors' optimism, I don't think that humans are capable of perfecting themselves through technology. That will take something beyond what this book covers. Despite some objections, this book is an excellent read. You should buy it, read it and then read it again in ten years to see how things are progressing.

*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'

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

Full disclosure - This is one of the weirdest disclosures I've ever had to write. In short, between my declaration that I was going to read this book as part of my Club 52 project and this review, I've gotten to know Peter and have become part of a large (everyone in it because they love the message / not because we're making a dime) marketing campaign to promote the book. If that affects your view of my review, so be it. I'd rather see the book get out there. However, read the review anyway ;-) Let's start with the elephant in the room - no, "Abundance" has NOTHING to do with any "law of attraction" nonsense. This is a book about facts. So, the future. Is it scary? It is something we should be looking forward to? As a lover of gadgets and tech, I've always been one with an optimistic view towards what is ahead - but it's been really nice to get some solid logic behind it. Peter Diamandis (look him up) has a long list of accomplishments under his belt. The thing that impressed me most about the guy was/is the fact that he pretty launched the commercial spaceflight industry. No, it wasn't the government, or NASA, or anyone else. Look up the Xprize if you have a few minutes. Throw in a little Singularity University and a side business that got Stephen Hawking (again, look it up) to experience Zero G weightlessness and he's an intriguing character. But back to the book ... It's clear a guy like this will obviously be looking to the future with some excitement and expectations of good things to come. This book, however, shows not only why he's got a reason to be excited - but why we do as well. In short, he examines four forces (exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the "Rising Billion") that give us cause for hope and explores how they affect the hotbed issues of water, food, energy, healthcare, education, and freedom. These aren't only passion points for him - but with the people he's been able to surround himself with in life, he's experienced/touched a bunch of this. It's personal reflection, scientific proof and some wrappers around these concepts that help you come to term with it all. It's not just a book of facts - it's a big story of, gosh darn it, why the future is better than we might have thought. I won't go into why the book cover was designed to look like it was wrapped in aluminum but ... it's all part of the big picture. It isn't just happy juice in written form. The book is filled with a ton of supporting material for all his claims and, gosh darn it, it all seems to come together nicely. As I wrote at the beginning of this, I'm pretty personally involved in this project right now, so consider accordingly. But after you've done that, get yourself a copy. One of my new years declarations was that I'd read a book every week. Join me on this journey? [...]

There a few negatives to this book that keep it from really becoming a seminal work in scientific popularization and literature. For one, certain self-promotion efforts, although informative, border on initiative nepotism. There are constant references to the X Prize Foundation and Singularity University, and although the X Prize Foundation is an admirable effort that really deserves much more promotion, the amount of references to Singularity University and people that work with or speak at the institution causes one pause, and makes one wonder how much of the book is simply a means to self-promotion. Another problem with the book is its overly optimistic take on corporations. Although the authors do give a small appendix that talks about the dangers of exponential scientific discovery, and this section does talk about the potential for most jobs to be replaced by automated machines, there is little in the way of examining the sort of shift in economic and philosophical ideas about production that needs to occur in order for the gap between the wealthy corporate owners and those who used to be middle-class workers to not explode. In fact, at one point, the authors embrace the centralization of many technological services as a positive outcome, but one only needs to look at the privacy practices of Google and Facebook, the developer API changes of Twitter, Apple's handling of their AppStore, or the former monopolies of Microsoft and IBM to know that centralization that leaves power to only a few companies has not worked out in the past, and should be cautiously approached in the future. Despite these complaints, Abundance is still a fantastic book that breaks from the pessimism of the current media and shows us a way towards abundance in health and life thanks to advancing science and technology. Although the authors' pyramid is an arbitrary construct, the theory that abundance lies in a few key categories is not far-fetched. Advancing education and health - both of which can be exponentially enhanced by the increasing ability to communicate thanks to cell phones and the Internet - provides the knowledge and longevity that we all seek, including fixes to the environment like clean water, reduction in carbon output, renewable energy, better waste management and ending poverty and health epidemics in places like Africa. Abundance hits home on the game-changing technologies of smart phones, the available of solar resources, a toilet that can turn waste into salt, water and energy, desalination technology, advanced robotics, and much more. One note, however, is that the earlier chapters on clean water, abundant food and renewable energy ends up being far more interesting than the latter chapters on education and freedom. In addition to solutions, Abundance also introduces us to a great number of visionaries that are helping to make these solutions a reality, such as Dean Kamen, best known for inventing the Segway - although he should be better known for inventing the first drug infusion pump. We also meet 3D printing evangelist Chris Anderson and hear about his ideas of a future of personal manufacturing. Whether any of these game-changing technological solutions pan out, who know? Many of the people involved are already highly successful visionaries and inventors, so prospects remain good, and since we never really hear about them in the mainstream media, it's good to see a book like Abundance dedicate so much time to them.

First off, I loved this book. It made me consider for a change that mankind could not just be the causing problem, but also the solution to big issues like climate change, overpopulation and dwindling resources that plague us today. It was amazingly refreshing to read about all those new technologies that are in progress of being developed, from water purification to renewable energies, medical bots, diagnostic apps on your smartphone, vertical gardens for local food production and supply, just to name a few. This read sure brings the optimist out in you, and makes you feel good about being part of the human race again. I would love to give it 5 stars, but I settle for only 3 (3 1/2 if I had the option), because there is great danger here that you are left with a false sense of security about the future. Even though there is much cause for optimism, there are a few things that I wish the authors would have brought to the readers awareness with more emphasis (they actually do point them out, but not clearly enough in my opinion). They missed the opportunity to clearly communicate that everyone of us has responsibilities we have to meet if we want to see this future happen. 1) Time for business as usual is running out. After finishing the last pages of the book and still riding high on this most welcome endorphin flush it promotes, one could feel confident to simply put all the chips on one bet and bank on the vision that help in form of brilliant new technologies is on the way, the future is secure, and no further personal action is needed to make this future happen, other than not hindering private entrepreneurship and free markets in their activities in form of government intervention, bureaucracy, or rules and regulations. I don't think that is what the authors are trying to say, but it might be perceived this way. Until those tech solutions become available AND INTEGRATED, the best course of action for every consumer still is to be frugal with energy and resources, and show more respect and empathy to all the other species we share this planet with. That means we still should try conserve water and energy, buy a fuel efficient car, drive less, consume less plastic to keep it from clogging up the oceans and landfills, etc, you get the idea. No, this won't solve the problems, but it sends important signals to people around us, and more importantly the markets, and if done on a large scale it might buy valuable time! 2) All these innovations and new technologies don't just have to be developed and made available on a massive scale, they also have to be accepted by mainstream. Just because new technologies are available and affordable, we can't simply assume that they will be widely accepted. New ideas and inventions also mean a lot of change in a very short time, and many people don't deal all that well with change, now matter how benign it might be. As an example I would like to take the nurse robots that could take care of our elderlies to bring down end of life and health care costs. Many people might resist this approach as 'inhuman'. And as amazing as this 'no plumbing, turn poop into power' toilet sounds, it might not get embraced by the home depot shopper right away simply because he knows from experience that the water toilet works, but who knows if the new one doesn't turn out downright disgusting? Old habits die hard. As an example take an alternative technology that is already available today, the electric car, which I think deserves a lot more credit than it currently gets. Yes, it is not without flaws, from battery production and recycling all the way to range anxiety. Yes, it uses your local power plant and thus still contributes to the carbon footprint. But the bottom line is that an electric car is still many times more energy efficient than a conventional car, just because it so much more effective turning that energy into speed, not 90% heat that disappears into the atmosphere. Most people don't realize that their internal combustion car is mainly a HUGE RADIATOR that they haul around. Nor do they realize how convenient it is not to have to get gas at a filthy gas station any more. Instead the car can be topped off in the driveway every night when power is cheap, and the power grid is underloaded anyway. There is hardly any costly maintenance, because there are a lot less moving parts to take care off. All that torque the electric motor provides makes it zippy, and the silent, magic carpet experience makes it really fun to drive. I think the electric car deserves a lot more consideration at least as a secondary vehicle, yet Nissan and GM are sitting on their Leafs and Volts, because people by nature are resisting too much change in a too short amount of time. So as consumers again I think we have the responsibility to give new technologies a chance and support their creators by purchasing them even if they feel a little strange to us. Iphones and ipads, and the world wide web had it easy because their wasn't really a similar established product in use that they had to compete with. Many new products and technologies will have to compete with well established products and will have a lot harder time making it mainstream. 3) Private enterprise can bring the solution, but also can be an obstacle to the changes we so badly need. Not only will the consumer resist change, even more resistance to change is to be expected from the firms, cooperations, and manufacturers that are currently making money with conventional technology. Yes Exxon and other oil companies have a budget for renewable energiy research, but it is pretty much insignificant compared to what they spend on conventional drill site development. Why? Because drilling is the time proven way to make money for their share holders. That's where I think government should step in by creating incentives and support for start up companies and garage DIYers to make sure all those new ideas and creations we so badly need get a fair chance at survival. Free Markets are less effective in this regard because, again, change isn't easy, old habits die hard, and the old boy cooperations and power movers will resist change as long as there is money to be made the conventional way. New technologies that come online will have flaws, and some of them might have the potential to produce a whole new host of collateral damage that will have to be taken care of later on. So another role for government should be to make sure we don't accidentally open another Pandora's box, by providing appropiate safety standards and test routines before a new product gets unleashed. For us as consumers this means that we should take the time to do some research, keep in touch with what comes down the pipeline, consider the pros and cons of the products we buy on a broader scale than just cost and convenience, send the right buying signals to the markets, and make well informed decisions about who we vote into office. Just leaning back and looking forward to a golden tech future won't get us there.