Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

“Right now,” says Joy, “we’re fixated on having too much of everything: thousands of friends, vacation homes, cars, all this crazy stuff. But we’re also seeing the tip of the dematerialization wave, like when a phone dematerializes a camera. It just disappears.” Just think of all the consumer goods and services that are now available with the average smart phone: cameras, radios, televisions, web browsers, recording studios, editing suites, movie theaters, GPS navigators, word processors, spreadsheets, stereos, flashlights, board games, card games, video games, a whole range of medical devices, maps, atlases, encyclopedias, dictionaries, translators, textbooks, world class educations (more on this in chapter 14), and the ever-growing smorgasbord known as the app store. Ten years ago, most of these goods and services were available only in the developed world; now just about anyone anywhere can have them. How many goods and services? In summer 2011 the Android and Apple App stores boasted 250,000 and 425,000 applications, respectively, with a staggering 20 billion downloads combined. Moreover, all of these now dematerialized goods and services used to require significant natural resources to produce, a physical distribution system to disperse, and a cadre of highly trained professionals to make sure that everything ran smoothly. None of these elements remain in the picture. And the list of those items no longer necessary keeps growing.