Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

The point is that incentive prizes have a three-hundred-year track record of driving progress and accelerating change. They are a great way to steer toward the future we really want. So start your own. Help with ours. Whatever. In areas like chronic disease, where governments spend billions of dollars, the offer of a massive incentive prize seems like a no-brainer. AIDS costs the US government over $20 billion a year; that’s more than $100 billion during a five-year period. Imagine, for example, a $1 billion purse offered for the first team to demonstrate a cure or vaccine. Sure, the marketplace is vast and the corporation that develops this cure will reap huge rewards, but what if the government’s $1 billion was paid directly to the scientists who made the discovery? How many more brilliant minds might be turned on to this problem? How many graduate students might start daydreaming about solutions? Now apply this thinking to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or your cancer of choice. Whatever you like. The advantage here is an army of brilliant people around the world thinking about your problem and working on their own nickel to solve it. Properly executed, this mechanism offers the potential for fixed-cost science, fixed-cost engineering, and fixed-cost solutions. I’ve always believed (to paraphrase computer scientist Alan Kay) that the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself, and in my five decades of experience, there is no better way to do just that than with...