Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Your chances of dying a violent death have dropped five hundredfold since the Middle Ages.

Our days of isolation are behind us. In today’s world, what happens “Over there” impacts “Over here.”

In today’s hyper-linked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.

One idea that will become clearer as we go along is the notion that the world’s biggest problems are also the world’s biggest business opportunities.

Consider that nothing drives abundance more than connectivity (global access to the Internet), better health, and increased literacy.

History’s littered with tales of once-rare resources made plentiful by innovation. The reason is pretty straightforward: scarcity is often contextual.

Not for all resources, but yes it is contextual.

Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.

One Planet Living (OPL). To understand OPL, Witherspoon explained, I first had to understand three facts. Fact one: Currently humanity uses 30 percent more of our planet’s natural resources than we can replace. Fact two: If everyone on this planet wanted to live with the lifestyle of the average European, we would need three planets’ worth of resources to pull it off. Fact three: If everyone on this planet wished to live like an average North American, then we’d need five planets to pull it off. OPL, then, is a global initiative meant to combat these shortages.

They stretch from preserving indigenous cultures to the development of cradle-to-cradle sustainable materials, but really they’re all about learning to share.

The most important thing wrt to sustainability - learning to share.

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.

“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man.”

Either way, as our species has sadly discovered, top-down population control is barbaric, both in theory and in practice.

Absolute poverty measures the number of people living under a certain income threshold. Relative poverty is a keeping up with the Jones’ measure, comparing an individual’s income with the average income for an entire economy. But the difficulty with both terms is that abundance is a global vision and neither hold up well when spread beyond borders.

Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.

At the very top are his “self-actualized needs,” which are about personal growth and fulfillment—though they really constitute one’s devotion to a higher purpose and a willingness to serve society.

In fact, the ancient Romans had better water quality than half the people alive today.

“The key thing you can do to reduce population growth is actually improve health . . . . [T]here is a perfect correlation, as you improve health, within half a generation, the population growth rate goes down.”

It’s counterintuitive, but eradicating smallpox and vaccine-preventable disease and stopping diarrheal diseases and malaria are the best family planning programs yet devised.

catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by the division of labor.

Trade is often unequal but it still benefits both sides.”

Moreover, our current system is built around fact-based learning, but the Internet makes almost every fact desirable instantly available. This means we’re training our children in skills they rarely need, while ignoring those they absolutely do. Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.

Love is a better master than duty.

It means the individual must matter, and matter like never before.

If the individual matters, then the individual’s well-being matters; thus preserving good health and providing good health care are core components of an abundant world.

the inability of people to see the positive trends through the sea of bad news— that may be the biggest stumbling block on the road toward abundance.

Kahneman describes the illusion of validity as “the sense that you understand somebody and can predict how they will behave,” but it’s since been expanded to “a tendency for people to view their own beliefs as reality.”

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts: time-saving, energy-saving rules of thumb that allow us to simplify the decision-making process.

confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions—but it can often limit our ability to take in new data and change old opinions.

Human beings are designed to be local optimists and global pessimists and this is an even bigger problem for abundance.

Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

The natural dangers are no longer there, but the response mechanisms are still in place, and now they are turned on much of the time. We implode, turning our adaptive fear mechanism into a maladaptive panicked response.

A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than the average seventeenth-century citizen encountered in a lifetime.

the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes . . . It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.”

Instead we fall prey to what’s become known as the “hype cycle.” We have inflated expectations when a novel technology is first introduced, followed by short-term disappointment when it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Putting it all together, he realized that humans evolved in groups of 150, and this number—now known as Dunbar’s number—is the upper limit to how many interpersonal relationships our brains can process.

But we still have this primitive pattern imprinted on our brain, so we fill those open slots with whomever we have the most daily “contact”— even if that contact comes only from watching that person on television.

And because of our local and linear brains—of which Dunbar’s number is but one example—we treat those authority figures as friends, which triggers the in-group bias (a tendency to give preferential treatment to those people we believe in our own group) and makes us trust them even more.

Age-adjusted cancer rates, for example, are falling, not rising. Furthermore, I noticed that people who pointed these facts out were heavily criticized but not refuted.”

time is a resource. In fact, time has always been our most precious resource, and this has significant consequences for how we access progress.

“The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”

Yes, there are still billions living in back-breaking destitution, but at the current rate of decline, Ridley estimates that the number of people in the world living in “absolute poverty” will hit zero by 2035.

Hadith on nobody need alms in the future

“Once the rise in the position of the lower classes gathers speed,” economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, “catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed toward the needs of the masses. Those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating thus later tend to diminish it.”

Good food for thought. From catering to the rich to the masses.

“If I have seen further, it is only because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.”

“Specialization encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool.

Culture is the ability to store, exchange, and improve ideas. This vast cooperative system has always been one of abundance’s largest engines.

“This is the diagnostic feature of modern life,” writes Ridley, “the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots. The self-sufficient peasant or hunter-gatherer predecessor is in contrast defined by his multiple production and simple consumption. He does not make just one thing, but many: his shelter, his clothing, his entertainment.

“In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game,” says inventor Dean Kamen. “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”

Moore’s law states that every eighteen months, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles, which essentially means that every eighteen months, computers get twice as fast for the same price. In 1975 Moore altered his formulation to a doubling every two years, but either way, he’s still describing a pattern of exponential growth.

Fast-forward another thirty years, and the average $1,000 laptop is performing 100 million billion billion calculations (1026) per second—which would be equivalent to all the brains of the entire human race.

“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world.”