Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series)

by Peter H. Diamandis

Over the next eight years, three billion new individuals will be coming online, joining the global conversation, and contributing to the global economy. Their ideas—ideas we’ve never before had access to—will result in new discoveries, products, and inventions that will benefit us all.

by the founder of system dynamics, Jay Forrester, the club compared

According to the government, the results have been 300 million fewer people. According to Amnesty International, the results have been an increase in bribery, corruption, suicide rates, abortion rates, forced sterilization procedures, and persistent rumors of infanticide. (A male child is preferable, so rumors hold that newborn girls are being murdered.) Either way, as our species has sadly discovered, top-down population control is barbaric, both in theory and in practice.

The second force is money—a lot of money—being spent in a very particular way. The high-tech revolution created an entirely new breed of wealthy technophilanthropists who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges. Bill Gates is crusading against malaria; Mark Zuckerberg is working to reinvent education; while Pierre and Pam Omidyar are focused on bringing electricity to the developing world. And this list goes on and on. Taken together, our second driver is a technophilanthropic force unrivaled in history.

Lastly, there are the very poorest of the poor, the so-called bottom billion, who are finally plugging into the global economy and are poised to become what I call “the rising billion.

Today Americans living below the poverty line are not just light-years ahead of most Africans; they’re light-years ahead of the wealthiest Americans from just a century ago. Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning. This may not seem like much, but one hundred years ago men like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the richest on the planet, but they enjoyed few of these luxuries.

Currently a billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack access to basic sanitation.

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

Energy provides the means to do work; education allows workers to specialize; information/communication abundance not only furthers specialization (through expanding educational opportunities), it allows specialists to exchange specialties, thus creating what economist Friedrich Hayek called catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by the division of labor.

As experts like Sir Ken Robinson—who was knighted for his contribution to education—have said repeatedly, these days, antiquated classrooms are the least of our worries. “Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything,” says Robinson. “When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job, it was because you didn’t want one.

A technology now under development, known as Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC), has the potential to solve these problems. Packaged into a portable, cell-phone-sized device, LOC will allow doctors, nurses, and even patients themselves to take a sample of bodily fluid (such as urine, sputum, or a single drop of blood) and run dozens, if not hundreds, of diagnostics on the spot and in a matter of minutes.

This may seem a tall order, but it’s a critical one. In his 1999 book Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen pointed out that political liberty moves in lockstep with sustainable development. Since abundance, by definition, is a sustainable goal, then a certain level of freedom is the prerequisite for reaching that goal. Luckily, a certain level of freedom also emerges organically in response to certain new technologies—especially those of the communication and information variety.

“[H]e beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me … He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.

I was so impressed by the complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight that I coined a term for it: “the illusion of validity.

One reason abundance remains hard to accept is because we live in an extraordinarily uncertain world, and decision making in the face of uncertainty is never easy. In a perfectly rational world, when given a choice, we would assess the probability and the utility of all possible outcomes and then combine these two to make our call.

Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts: time-saving, energy-saving rules of thumb that allow us to simplify the decision-making process. They come in all flavors. In the study of visual perception, clarity is a heuristic used to help us judge distances: the more sharply an object is seen, the closer it appears.

Normally, this is not a bad way to go. Heuristics are an evolutionary solution to an ongoing problem: we have limited mental resources. As such, they have a very long and thoroughly time-tested history of helping us—on average—make better decisions. But what Kahneman discovered is that there are certain situations when our reliance on heuristics leads to what he calls “severe and systematic errors.

And confirmation bias is but only one of a litany of biases impacting abundance. The negativity bias—the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones—sure isn’t helping matters.

When people believe the world’s falling apart,” says Kahneman, “it’s often an anchoring problem. At the end of the nineteenth century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure. People were absolutely panicked. Because of anchoring, they couldn’t imagine any other possible solutions. No one had any idea the car was coming and soon they’d be worrying about dirty skies, not dirty streets.

“First, as anchoring shows, there’s a direct link between imagination and perception. Second, we’re control fiends and are significantly more optimistic about things we believe we can control.

As we shall see in future chapters, because of the growth of exponential technologies, small groups are now being empowered to do what only governments once could—including fighting famine.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped sliver of the temporal lobe responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate, and fear. It’s our early warning system, an organ always on high alert, whose job is to find anything in our environment that could threaten survival. Anxious under normal conditions, once stimulated, the amygdala becomes hypervigilant.

But the amygdala evolved long ago, in an era of immediacy, when reaction time was critical for survival. When there’s a tiger in the bush, there isn’t much time to think, so the brain takes a shortcut: it doesn

Over the past 150,000 years, Homo sapiens evolved in a world that was “local and linear,” but today’s environment is “global and exponential.

Five hundred years ago, technologies were not doubling in power and halving in price every eighteen months,” writes Kevin Kelly in his book What Technology Wants. “Waterwheels were not becoming cheaper every year. A hammer was not easier to use from one decade to the next. Iron was not increasing in strength. The yield of corn seed varied by the season’s climate, instead of improving each year. Every 12 months, you could not upgrade your oxen’s yoke to anything much better than what you already had.

About twenty years ago, Oxford University evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar discovered another problem with our local and linear perspectives. Dunbar was interested in the number of active interpersonal relationships that the human brain could process at one time.

The reason we care so much about what happens to the likes of Lady Gaga is not because her shenanigans will ever impact our lives; rather because our brain doesn’t realize there’s a difference between rock stars we know about and relatives we know.

Because of amygdala function and media competition, our airwaves are full of prophets of doom. Because of the negativity bias and the authority bias—our tendency to trust authority figures—we’re inclined to believe them. 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.

He fingers loss aversion—a tendency for people to regret a loss more than a similar gain—as the bias with the most impact on abundance.

This too is not the problem many suspect. Take India. On August 1, 2010, India’s National Council of Applied Economic Research estimated that the number of high-income middle-class households in India (46.7 million) now exceeds the number of low-income middle-class households (41 million) for the first time in history. Moreover, the gap between the two sides is also closing rapidly. In 1995 India had 4.5 million middle-class households. By 2009, that had risen to 29.4 million. Even better, the trend is accelerating. According to the World Bank, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has more than halved since the 1950s to below 18 percent of the world’s population. 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.

Moreover, it’s a pretty safe bet that these rates won’t start rising again. “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.

In a 2010 updated presentation, Rosling summarized these findings thus: “Despite the disparities today, we have seen two hundred years of enormous progress. That huge historical gap between the West and the rest is now closing. We have become an entirely new, converging world. And I see a clear trend into the future. With aid, trade, green technology, and peace, it’s fully possible that everyone can make it to the healthy, wealthy corner.

In the early 1950s, scientists began to suspect that there might be hidden patterns in technology’s rate of change and that by unearthing those patterns, they might be able to predict the future. One of the first official attempts to do just that was a 1953 US Air Force study that tracked the accelerating progress of flight from the Wright brothers forward. By creating that graph and extrapolating into the future, the Air Force came to what was then a shocking conclusion: a trip to the Moon should soon be possible.

A typical doctoral thesis focuses on a topic so insanely obscure that few can decipher its title, forget about content. While such extreme narrowness is important to specialization—which, as Ridley pointed out, has a huge upside—it has also created a world where the best universities rarely produce integrative, macroscopic thinkers.

The world doesn’t need another ultraspecialist-generating research university. We’ve got that covered. Places like MIT, Stanford, and the California Institute of Technology already do a fine job creating supergeniuses who can geek out in their nano-niche. What’s needed is a place where people can go to hear of the biggest and boldest ideas, those exponential possibilities that echo Archimedes: “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the world.

In 1990 the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) jointly launched the Human Genome Project, a fifteen-year program with the goal of sequencing the three billion base pairs making up the human genome. Some thought the project impossible; others predicted that it would take a half century to complete. Everyone agreed it would be expensive. A budget of $10 billion was set aside, but many felt it wasn’t enough. They might still be feeling this way too, except that in 2000 Venter decided to get into the race.

Fortunately, Cerf has been leading the charge for the next generation of Internet protocols (creatively called Ipv6), which has enough room for 3.4 × 1038 (340 trillion trillion trillion) unique addresses—roughly 50,000 trillion trillion addresses per person. “Ipv6 enables the Internet of things,” he says, “which in turn holds the promise for reinventing almost every industry. How we manufacture, how we control our environment, and how we distribute, use, and recycle resources. When the world around us becomes plugged in and effectively self-aware, it will drive efficiencies like never before. It’s a big step toward a world of abundance.

So when will we have true HAL-esque AI? It’s hard to say. But IBM recently unveiled two new chip technologies that move us in this direction. The first integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon. These chips communicate with light. Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second)—or one hundred times faster than the human brain.

In 2008 the WHO announced that a lack of trained physicians in Africa will threaten the continent’s future by the year 2015. In 2006 the Association of American Medical Colleges reported that America’s aging baby boomer population will create a massive shortage of 62,900 doctors by 2015, which will rise to 91,500 by 2020. The scarcity of nurses could be even worse. And these are just a few of the reasons why our dream of health care abundance cannot come from traditional wellness professionals.

Because LOC technology will likely be part of a wireless device, the data it collects for diagnostic purposes can be uploaded to a cloud and analyzed for deeper patterns. “For the first time,” says Dr. Anita Goel, a professor at MIT whose company Nanobiosym is working hard to commercialize LOC technology, “we’ll have the ability to provide real-time, worldwide disease information that can be uploaded to the cloud and used for detecting and combating the early phase of pandemics.

Dean Kamen is a self-taught physicist, multimillionaire entrepreneur, and—with his 440 patents and National Medal of Technology—one of the greatest DIY innovators of our time. Like most DIY-ers, Kamen loves solving problems. Back in the 1970s, while he was still in college, Kamen’s brother (then a medical student and now a renowned pediatric oncologist) mentioned there was no reliable way to give babies small and steady doses of drugs. Without such technology, infants were stuck with extended hospital stays, and nurses were stuck with inflexible time schedules.

Malthusians often use the word cornucopians to describe people lobbying for abundance. It’s not meant as a term of endearment. Central to their stance is the issue of population growth. Cornucopians feel that the rate of technological growth will outpace the rate of population growth, and that will solve all our problems. Malthusians believe that we’ve already exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity, and if population growth continues unchecked, nothing we invent will be powerful enough to reverse those effects. But Kamen’s technology provides a much-needed middle path.

Two thirds of all growth takes place in cities because, by simple fact of population density, our urban spaces are perfect innovation labs.

And the more complicated, multilingual, multicultural, wildly diverse the city, the greater its output of new ideas. “What drives a city’s innovation engine, then—and thus its wealth engine—is its multitude of differences,” says Stewart Brand. In fact, Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West found that when a city’s population doubles, there is a 15 percent increase in income, wealth, and innovation. (He measured innovation by counting the number of new patents.)

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.

Mitra has since taken a job as a professor of education technology at the University of Newcastle in England, where he’s developing a new model of primary school education he calls “minimally invasive education.

One of the first people to recognize the educational potential of computers was Seymour Papert. Originally trained as a mathematician, Papert spent many years working with famed child psychologist Jean Piaget before moving to MIT, where he and Marvin Minsky cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Lab. 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.

Truancy isn’t exclusive to the Third World. On average, only two-thirds of American public school students finish high school—the lowest graduation rate in the industrialized world.

In some areas, the dropout rate is over 50 percent; in Native American communities, it’s higher than 80 percent.

Even teaching, as Sir Ken Robinson put it in his excellent book Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, was subject to the division of labor: “Like an assembly line, students progressed from room to room to be taught by different teachers specializing in separate disciplines.