Name: Abundance
ISBN: 9781451616835

Abundance

roviding abundance is humanity’s grandest challenge—this is a book about how we rise to meet it. We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions. An antidote to pessimism by tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist, Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler. Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—fast. The authors document how four forces—exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. Abundance establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism. Examining human need by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce dozens of innovators making great strides in each area: Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, among many, many others.

What Hacker News says

danukerSep 2022

Each "mouth" has a chance of yielding infinitely scalable innovation. For example, the Haber-Bosch process supplies 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues.

Check out the book "Abundance" by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

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zephrx1111Sep 2022

Cannot agree. For neoteny on human, Peter Diamandis’ Abundance might give a better attribution.

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FredPretOct 2021

Fair point. In defense of my moral model, it's backed up by this idea: are things perfect? No. Is the system working? Yes, and astonishingly well. Is there a better way to get from here to there, where "there" is some improved state of prosperity and development? No. Human nature is what it is, and our systems must exploit our nature rather than combat it.

It's all based on measurable positive outcomes, rather than some theoretical idea that being eye-wateringly rich is somehow bad - morally bad, or bad for society. That idea is rooted in the old, pre-growth, pre-industrial paradigm, when all wealth was seized by force in some way. Today, some wealth is from violence, but the overwhelming majority is new money that was created out of nothing but good old human intelligence.

Here are some references backing up my idea that the system works.

Here's one focusing on the most important metric, human development: http://hdr.undp.org/en/dashboard-human-development-anthropoc...

This one is from the World Bank. You have to go into the metrics and countries. There are metrics that aren't of interest here, but some are, like access to clean cooking fuels, or electricity. But it's easy to see that most of it is pointing in the right direction. https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indi...

Here's a book about all the things that ordinarily fuel existential pessimism: https://www.amazon.com/Fewer-Richer-Greener-Prosperity-Popul...

Here's a book about how innovation progresses exponentially, and what it means for the masses: https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...

Here's that classic video by Hans Rosling giving us some perspective on the progress over the last century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Here's another video on the same thing, by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ

EDIT: here's another fun one: https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index

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dannelsAug 2016

Abundance by Peter Diamandis totally changed the way I look at businesses and future technology and helped me clearly see the difference between exponential growth and linear growth changing the world.

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Adam_OAug 2015

Here are 3 that I particularly liked in the last few years:

The Information, James Gleick

A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss

Abundance, Peter Diamandis

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gorkemyurtSep 2014

Abundance; great book that's insanely optimistic about the future. Sure it cherrypicks the "what went well" part of our history, but a lot more has went well compared to a couple of failing industries.. http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/...

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