Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

WHICH WAY NEXT? The Adjacent Possible At the very beginning of this book, we argued that the true promise of abundance was one of creating a world of possibility: a world where every-one’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping. Never before has such promise really been in the offing. For most of human history, life was a constrained affair. Just finding ways to survive took most of our energy. The gap between one’s day-to-day reality and one’s true potential was vast indeed. But in these extraordinary days, that chasm is beginning to close. On a certain level, change is being driven by a fundamental property of technology: the fact that it expands into what theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman calls “the adjacent possible.” Before the invention of the wheel, the cart, the carriage, the automobile, the wheelbarrow, the roller skate, and a million other offshoots of circularity were not imaginable. They existed in a realm that was off-limits until the wheel was discovered, but once discovered, these pathways became clear. This is the adjacent possible. It’s the long list of first-order possibilities that open up whenever a new discovery is made. “The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them,” wrote author Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal. “Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open...