Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Beyond banking, cell phones are now enabling improvement at every level of our abundance pyramid. For water, there’s already SMS-delivered information available on everything from hand washing to conservation techniques and technology is now being pioneered that turns a smart phone into a testing device for water quality. In food, fishermen can check in advance which ports are paying top dollar before hauling their catch into shore, and farmers can do the same before bringing fruits and vegetables to market, in both cases maximizing their time and revenue. The impacts of mobile telephony on health stretch from being able to quickly locate the nearest doctor to a smart phone app invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London, that turns an iPhone into a stethoscope and has since been downloaded by over 3 million doctors. And it is only one of 6,000 health care apps now available through Apple. These examples go on and on, but what they all have in common is that they empower the individual like never before. Most of these services used to require tremendous amounts of infrastructure, resources, and well-trained professionals, making them accessible primarily in the developed world. If one of the definitions of abundance is the widespread availability of goods and services—such as stethoscopes and water-quality testing— then the now-networked rising billion are rapidly gaining access to many of the fundamental mechanisms of first world prosperity.