Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese telecommunications tycoon, recently established the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, which awards $5 million (and $200,000 a year for life afterward) to any African leader who serves out his or her term within the limits of a country’s constitution and then leaves office voluntarily.

“If we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up,” and an even stronger statement of possibility: “The BOP market potential is huge: 4 to 5 billion underserved people and an economy of more than $13 trillion PPP (purchasing power parity).”

“[I]t is very difficult to remove cost from a business model aimed at higher-income customers without affecting quality or integrity.”

There are two main drivers at work here. The first is that before the discovery of coffee, much of the world was intoxicated much of the day. This was mostly a health issue. Water was too polluted to drink, so beer was the beverage of choice. In his New Yorker essay “Java Man,” Malcolm Gladwell explains it this way: “Until the eighteenth century, it must be remembered, many Westerners drank beer almost continuously, even beginning their day with something called ‘beer soup.’ Now they begin each day with a strong cup of coffee. One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.”

The London coffee-houses provided a gathering place where, for a penny admission charge, any man who was reasonably dressed could smoke his long, clay pipe, sip a dish of coffee, read the newsletters of the day, or enter into conversation with other patrons. At the period when journalism was in its infancy and the postal system was unorganized and irregular, the coffee-house provided a centre of communication for news and information . . . Naturally, this dissemination of news led to the dissemination of ideas, and the coffee-house served as a forum for their discussion.

The opportunities for collaborative thinking are also growing exponentially, and since progress is cumulative, the resulting innovations are going to grow exponentially as well. For the first time ever, the rising billion will have the remarkable power to identify, solve, and implement their own abundance solutions.

Bio- and nanotechnology create products and services at the molecular level, holding the potential to completely eliminate waste and pollution. Biomimicry emulates nature’s processes to create novel products and services without relying on brute force to hammer goods from large stocks of virgin raw materials. Wireless information technology and renewable energy are distributed in character, meaning they can be applied in the most remote and small-scale settings imaginable, eliminating the need for centralized infrastructure and wire-line distribution, both of which are environmentally destructive. Such technologies thus hold the potential to meet the needs of the billions of rural poor (who have thus far been largely ignored by global business) in a way that dramatically reduces environmental impact.

Liquid Metal Battery (LMB) originally inspired by the high current density and enormous scale of aluminum smelters. Inside an LMB, the temperature is hot enough to keep two different metals liquid. One is high density, like antimony, and sinks to the bottom. The other is low density, such as magnesium, and rises to the top. Between them, a molten salt electrolyte helps the exchange of electrical charge. The result is a battery with currents ten times higher than present-day high-end batteries and a simple, cheap design that prices at $250 a kilowatt-hour fully installed—less than one-tenth the cost of current lithium-ion batteries. And Sadoway’s design scales.

Generation IV technologies come in two main flavors. The first are fast reactors, which burn at higher temperatures because the neutrons inside bounce around at a faster rate than in traditional light-water reactors. This extra heat gives fast reactors the ability to turn nuclear waste and surplus weapons-grade uranium and plutonium into electricity. The second category are liquid fluoride thorium reactors. These burn the element thorium, which is four times more plentiful than uranium, and don’t create any long-lived nuclear waste in the process.

According to retired Argonne National Laboratory nuclear physicist George Stanford, the reactors can’t melt down. “We know this for certain,” he says, “because in public demonstrations, Argonne duplicated the exact conditions that led to both the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, and nothing happened.”

kids, working in small, unsupervised groups, and without any formal training, could learn to use computers very quickly and with a great degree of proficiency.

“minimally invasive education.”

Taken together, this work reverses a bevy of educational practices. Instead of top-down instruction, SOLES are bottom up. Instead of making students learn on their own, this work is collaborative. Instead of a formal in-school setting for instruction, the Hole-in-the-Wall method relies on a playground-like environment. Most importantly, minimally invasive education doesn’t require teachers. Currently there’s a projected global shortage of 18 million teachers over the next decade. India needs another 1.2 million. America needs 2.3 million. Sub-Saharan Africa needs a miracle. As Peter Smith, the United Nations’ assistant director-general for education, explained recently, “This is the Darfur of children’s future in terms of literacy. We have to invent new solutions, or we are as good as writing off this generation.”

But Mitra discovered that solutions already exist. If what’s really needed are students with no special training, grandmothers with no special training, and a computer with an Internet connection for every fourth student, then the Darfur of literacy need not be feared. Clearly, both kids and grandmothers are plentiful. Wireless connectivity already exists for over 50 percent of the world and is rapidly extending to the rest. And affordable computers? Well, that’s exactly where the work of Nicholas Negroponte comes in.

From that perch, in 1970 Papert delivered a now-famous paper, “Teaching Children Thinking,” in which he argued that the best way for children to learn was not through “instruction,” but rather through “construction”—that is, learning through doing, especially when that doing involved a computer.

What we do know is that the industrialized model of education, with its emphasis on the rote memorization of facts, is no longer necessary. Facts are what Google does best. But creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving—that’s a different story. These skills have been repeatedly stressed by everyone from corporate executives to education experts as the fundamentals required by today’s jobs. They have become the new version of the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic); the basics of what’s recently been dubbed “twenty-first-century learning.”

When I talk to my clients, the challenge is this: How do you do things that haven’t been done before, where you have to rethink or think anew, or break set in a fundamental way. It’s not incremental improvement anymore. That just won’t cut it. The markets are changing too fast, the environments are changing too fast . . . You have to spend the time to ask the next question. There is something about understanding what the right questions are, and there is something about asking the nonlinear, counterintuitive question. These are the ones that take you to the next level.

If boredom is the number one cause of truancy, then our new education system needs to be effective, scalable, and wildly entertaining. In fact, wildly entertaining might not be enough. If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.

This is just the beginning. Studies have shown that games outperform textbooks in helping students learn fact-based subjects such as geography, history, physics, and anatomy, while also improving visual coordination, cognitive speed, and manual dexterity.

Sheldon has implemented an “experience points” game-based design. Students begin the semester as a level zero avatar (equivalent to an F), and strive toward a level 12 (an A). This means that anything you do in the class produces forward motion, and students always know exactly where they stand—two conditions that serve to motivate.

Surprisingly, his cousins preferred Khan on YouTube to him tutoring them in person.

Instead of teachers using classroom time to deliver lectures, students are assigned to watch Khan Academy videos as homework, so that class time can be spent solving problems (also provided by Khan) and getting points along the way (ten correct answers earns them a merit badge). This lets teachers personalize education, trading their sage-on-a-stage role for that of a coach. Students now work at their own pace and advance to the next topic only once they have thoroughly learned the last. “This is called mastery-based learning,” says Sinha, “and there’s research going back to the seventies that shows it produces greater student engagement and better results.”

In the next five to ten years, we’re going to be able to use stem cells to correct chronic autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and scleroderma. After that, I think neurodegenerative diseases will be the next big frontier; this is when we’ll reverse the effects of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, even stroke. And it’ll be affordable too. Cell manufacturing technology has seen vast improvements over the past decade. To give you an idea, we’ve gone from thinking that cell therapy would cost over $100,000, to believing that we can do it for about $10,000. Over the next decade, I think we can lower costs significantly more. So we’re speaking about the potential for “curing” chronic diseases and revitalizing key organs for less than the price of a new laptop.

type 1 people are fearful of making mistakes. For them, failure is shameful and disastrous. As a result, they are risk averse, and whatever progress they make is incremental at best. On the other hand, type 2 people are fearful of losing out on opportunities. Places like Silicon Valley are full of type 2 entrepreneurs. “What is shameful to these people,” says Shiv, “is sitting on the sidelines while someone else runs away with a great idea. Failure is not bad; it can actually be exciting.

You’ll never be able to achieve big-time success without risking big-time failure. If you want to succeed big, there is no substitute for simply sticking your neck out. Of course, nobody likes to fail, but when the fear of failure translates into taking fewer risks and not reaching for our dreams, it often means never moving ahead. Fearlessness is like a muscle: the more we use it, the stronger it becomes. The more we are willing to risk failure and act on our dreams and our desires, the more fearless we become and the easier it is the next time. Bottom line, taking risks is an indispensable part of any creative act.

That day, I learned how a powerful first impression (in other words, announcing your idea in a supercredible way) is fundamental to launching a breakthrough concept. But I also saw the importance of mind-set. My mind-set. Sure, I had wanted to open up space since my childhood, but was I really sure this approach would work? In getting to supercredibility, I had to lay out my ideas before the aerospace industry’s best and brightest, testing my premises and answering uncomfortable questions. In doing so, whatever doubts I’d had vanished along the way.

The point, however obvious, is pretty fundamental: you need to be a little crazy to change the world, and you can’t really fake it. If you don’t believe in the possibility, then you’ll never give it the 200 percent effort required.

The engineers who got us to the Moon were in their mid- to late twenties. Fast-forward thirty years, and once again it was a group of twenty-somethings driving a revolution, this time in the dot-com world. This is not a coincidence: youth (and youthful attitudes) drives innovation—always has and always will.

“failure is a goldmine” when explaining why his company instituted a prize for the best failed idea that taught the company an important lesson.

“A company looking to drive breakthroughs in a particular area sets up five teams of five people and gives each team five days to come up with a portfolio of five ‘business experiments’ that should take no longer than five weeks to run and cost no more than five thousand dollars each to conduct.

Under these circumstances, there’s no downside to having a crazy idea, and a tremendous upside if that crazy idea turns out to be revolutionary, so people are much more willing to take risks. Because each idea takes only five days and $5,000 to implement, no one worries too much about a significant loss of time or capital.

What the data show is that one’s emotional satisfaction moves in lockstep with one’s income—as income rises, well-being rises—but only to a point. Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness. Above that number, the correlation disappears. This tells us something interesting: that in the United States, the freedom to flourish—to truly enjoy a life of possibility—costs roughly $75,000 a year in 2008 dollars. But what’s really important is what that money buys.

Daniel Kahneman’s calculation has lately been extended to the rest of the planet. On average, across the globe, the point on the chart where well-being and money diverge is roughly $10,000. That’s how much the average global citizen needs to earn to fulfill his or her basic needs and gain a toehold toward much greater possibility.