Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (English Edition)

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		Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (English Edition)
		Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (English Edition)

Providing abundance is humanity’s grandest challenge—this is a book about how we rise to meet it.

 

We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions. An antidote to pessimism by tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist, Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler. 

Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing—fast. The authors document how four forces—exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion—are conspiring to solve our biggest problems. Abundance establishes hard targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs, giving us plenty of reason for optimism.

Examining human need by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, freedom—Diamandis and Kotler introduce dozens of innovators making great strides in each area: Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, Craig Venter, among many, many others. 

网友对Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (English Edition)的评论

看起来还是很不错的，这本书本身的内容很好

*A full summary of this book is available here: An Executive Summary of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think'

In their new book `Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think', Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue that, despite the problems that our technology has recently created (including dwindling resources, global warming, and a population explosion that threatens to confound [and in some cases already does confound] our advances in agricultural production and medicine), we needn't discard our techno-optimism after all. Indeed, according to Diamandis, the world is on the precipice of another explosion in technology that will soon bring refuge from many of our current problems, and abundance to our doorstep. Not content to let the goal or the timeline remain vague, Diamandis is happy to hang a more precise definition on each. When it comes to abundance, Diamandis defines it as "a world of nine billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, and non-polluting, ubiquitous energy" (loc. 317), and, to top it all off, the freedom to pursue their goals and aspirations unhindered by political repression. With regards to the timeline, Diamandis claims that it "should be achievable within twenty-five years, with noticeable change possible within the next decade" (loc. 580).

In an attempt to convince us that this goal is achievable (and convincing he is), Diamandis takes us through the latest technological developments (and those that will soon be coming down the pipe) in numerous fields such as water filtration and sanitation (including advancements in water desalination, nano-filtering, sewage recycling, and the smart-water-grid); food production (including the next generation of genetically modified foods, vertical farming, in-vitro meat, and agroecology); education (including personalized education, the OLPC [One Laptop Per Child program], AI education programs, and advancements in educational games, video-games and computer programs); energy (including solar and wind power, the next generation of nuclear energy and algal biofuel, the smart-energy-grid, and battery-encapsulated energy storage); healthcare (including stem cell therapy and organ creation, robotic medical care-givers and surgeons, genomic medicine [based on your individual genome], and Lab-on-a-Chip technology [a diagnostic tool compatible with your cell phone that can instantly analyze samples of saliva, urine and blood]), and many, many more.

According to Diamandis, the technological innovations mentioned above are being spurred on by 3 forces in particular these days that are likely to bring us to a state of abundance even quicker than we might otherwise expect, and one that extends to all parts of the world. The 3 forces are (in reverse order as to how they are presented), 1) the rise of the bottom billion--which consists in the fact that the world's poorest have recently begun plugging into the world economy in a very substantial way, both as a consumer and as a producer of goods (largely as a result of the communications revolution, and the fact that cell phones are now spreading even to the world's poorest populations); 2) the rising phenomenon of the tech-philanthropists--a new breed of wealthy individuals who are more philanthropic than ever, and who are applying their efforts to global solutions (and particularly in the developing world); and 3) the rising phenomenon of DIY innovation--which includes the ability of small organizations, and even individuals to make contributions even in the most advanced technological domains (such as computing, biotechnology, and even space travel).

With regards to this last force, part of Diamandis' purpose here is to inspire the layperson to enter the fray with their own contributions towards abundance by way of joining one of the numerous open-source innovation projects available on line, or throwing their hand into one of the many incentivized technological prizes in existence, or in some other manner of their own devising. In this regard, the authors are very successful, as the work is both invigorating and inspiring, and I highly recommend it. A full summary of the book is available here: An Executive Summary of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's 'Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think'

This book has changed my life. I have suffered from a relatively negative attitude despite varied attempts to change it. I now have such great hope and positivity for the future. Well written and factual. The author has been quite honest about the challenges and potential issues but regardless of this it is a book of realistic achievable potential for our world. A book of great hope. Peter Diamandis is the first ever person in my life I consider to be my idol. At 53yo I can honestly say there is no famous or acclaimed individual that I have ever genuinely desired to meet. Until this book. To meet Mr Diamandis would be a bigger buzz than the thrill of a midnight skydive where I was one of only 8 people to be the first to skydive onto this planet in this millennium! An absolute MUST READ!

The authors are totally right: attitude is everything. We can get through this mess we've created, and we probably will.

But the zealous, uncritical celebration of all things technological and disruptive takes it too far. As a graduate of the MIT Media Lab I am familiar with a brand of pumped-up utopianism surrounding world-changing technologies. This is the familiar voice of highly-funded technology institutions.

When the authors launched into a semi-politicized, whole-hearted acceptance of genetically-modified foods, my opinion of the book took a nose dive. This is a controversial subject; highly debated by people all over the world. Our 3-billion-year-old biosphere has refined the code of life in ways that we barely understand yet. We arose from it, and we rely on it for our survival. It deserves our reverence as we fiddle with it to fuel our insane population growth. The authors should not have taken a partisan stand on this issue.

The book also emphasizes celebrities like Ray Kurzweil and Craig Venter in a predictable way. The story of abundance involves more than the obvious line up of Hollywood stars.

Overall, I think this is a worthy book, full of good factoids, observations. It has a good overall message.

We will get through this mess, and technology will be an important factor. But a little more reverence for the natural balance of things would have been appreciated. For instance, I think the solution to most of these problems would be for us to keep our population low. Not easy to implement, I know...but easy to understand, and logically a no-brainer. I think Earth would prefer that.
-J

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