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Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series) Hardcover – February 21, 2012
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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.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFree Press
- Publication dateFebruary 21, 2012
- Dimensions6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101451614217
- ISBN-13978-1451614213
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“This brilliant must-read book provides the key to the coming era of abundance replacing eons of scarcity, a powerful antidote to today’s malaise and pessimism.”—Ray Kurzweil, inventor, author and futurist, author of The Singularity is Near
"Now that human beings communicate so easily, I suspect that nothing can stop the inevitable torrent of new technologies, new ideas and new arrangements that will transform the lives of our children. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler give us a blinding glimpse of the innovations that are coming our way — and that they are helping to create. This is a vital book."—Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
“Diamandis and Kotler challenge us all to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Innovative small teams are now empowered to accomplish what only governments and large corporations could once achieve. The result is nothing less than the most transformative and thrilling period in human history.”––Timothy Ferriss, #1 NY Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek
“Today, philanthropists, innovators and passionate entrepreneurs are more empowered than ever before to solve humanity’s grand challenges. Abundance chronicles many of these stories and the emerging tools driving us towards an age of abundance. This is an audacious and powerful read!”—Jeff Skoll
“Abundance provides proof that the proper combination of technology, people and capital can meet any grand challenge.”—Sir Richard Branson, Chairman of the Virgin Group
"Our future depends on optimists like Diamandis...even the most skeptical readers will come away from Abundance feeling less gloomy." --New York Times Book Review
"A manifesto for the future that is grounded in practical solutions addressing the world's most pressing concerns: overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom. " --The Wall Street Journal
"A breezy case for optimism... Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think...[is] a godsend for those who suffer from Armageddon fatigue." --The Economist
“In Abundance: Why the Future is Better Than You Think, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler offer a vision of the future that’s truly awesome in both the most traditional and modern understandings of the word; it’s as big as it as awe inspiring.” –The Futurist
"Abundance is not fantasy. It is a tale, say authors Diamandis and Kotler, of “good news;” a spritely and exciting collection of reasons why, despite the ever-constant refrain that Earth is on the verge of disaster, we must stay positive." --Christian Science Monitor
" Enough with the dystopian fiction and Mayan end-of-the-world predictions! According to tech entrepeneur and philanthropist Peter Diamandis and science writer Steven Kotler, things are getting better, not worse. " --USA Today
"[Abundance is] fascinating and inspirational -- every politician should read it (but sadly that may be too much to hope for!)" --Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, UK
"Welcome to the feel good future." -Smithsonian
"A nice reminder of how far we’ve come." --The New York Times Book Review
“Curious what the future will look like? This books talks about what lies ahead, providing practical solutions for concerns like overpopulation, food, water, energy, freedom and health care.”-Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and the founder and executive director of the Flow Research Collective. His books include Stealing Fire, Bold, The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, West of Jesus, and Last Tango in Cyberspace. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, has been translated into more than forty languages, and has appeared in over a hundred publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, Forbes, and Time.
Product details
- Publisher : Free Press; 0 edition (February 21, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1451614217
- ISBN-13 : 978-1451614213
- Item Weight : 1.24 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.3 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #177,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Engineering Research
- #30 in Income Inequality
- #60 in Philanthropy & Charity (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Steven Kotler is a New York Times-bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of nine bestsellers (out of thirteen books total), including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, TIME and the Harvard Business Review. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Along with his wife, author Joy Nicholson, he is the cofounder of the Rancho de Chihuahua, a hospice and special needs dog sanctuary.

Dr. Peter Diamandis is the Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and launching large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. Best known for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private spaceflight and the $10 million Progressive Automotive X PRIZE for 100 mile-per-gallon equivalent cars, the Foundation is now launching prizes in Exploration, Life Sciences, Energy, and Education.
Diamandis is also an international leader in the commercial space arena, having founded and run many of the leading entrepreneurial companies in this sector including Zero Gravity Corporation, the Rocket Racing League and Space Adventures.
As co-Founder & Chairman of the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley based institution partnered with NASA, Google, Autodesk and Nokia, Diamandis counsels the world’s top enterprises on how to utilize exponential technologies and incentivized innovation to dramatically accelerate their business objectives.
Dr. Diamandis attended the MIT where he received his degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, as well as Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D. Diamandis’ personal motto is: “The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself!”
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To read books like these is to improve your ability to think, to see viable futures, to create and take control of your life's path, and to live in a way that best advances society as a whole. In short, they upgrade your world view, by addressing the most important questions and conversations of our era. How do we best steer our accelerating technologies to create social progress? What are the great human problems our technologies create? What greater problems can they solve? How and why does technology improve itself even in spite of human failings? What is technology becoming, and how is it changing us?
Abundance helps us understand that we are not entering a "post-scarcity" world, but rather an abundance world. Scarcities and competitions will persist at the leading edge of civilization, and the winners will profit more than everyone else. But at the same time, our accelerating technologies are creating vast new abundance in living standards, and so much capability to take care of our environment, that the scarcities of today will be distant memories just a few generations from now. As long as we rise to the challenges.
Peter Diamandis, Founder and Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, Co-Founder and Chairman of Singularity University, and pioneer of the personal spaceflight industry, is eminently qualified to write this book. He is both a visionary and an accomplished entrepreneur, with a passion for new horizons, and a deep ethical interest in global development. His practical, results-oriented perspective permeates the book, and frankly, it jumps right into the reader's psyche long before the end. His co-author, Steven Kotler, is a writer of vast experience, and it shows. Of all the books listed above, Abundance is perhaps the easiest to read, and digest. The writing is amazingly straightforward and clear. You can finish it in just a few evenings. If you are an influence leader with your family and friends I recommend getting a copy for them as well. If they are reading- or time-challenged, get them the MP3 audiobook. For special books like this, I recommend listening to the audiobook first in your car, then reading and annotating the book a week later. There's no better way to deeply understand important ideas than to hear them more than once by different modes, then to summarize them when done. If you can, post your thoughts on the book in an Amazon Review, and discuss and debate it with others when you are done.
If Diamandis and Kotler don't do a video documentary to follow up this achievement, that would be a shame. The images and themes in this book are so well chosen, I'm convinced that Abundance: The Movie would change millions of lives and minds. The book shows how to get beyond hand-wringing and finger pointing for those who want to create a better world. Instead, we can actively seek out and celebrate examples of what works, incentivize innovation, aggressively back the best of the innovators and disruptors, and help clear the many roadblocks out of their way. I found Abundance to strike a realistic balance between sustainability and innovation. It makes clear we aren't just here to be change-averse stewards of the past, or the status quo. Humanity craves more freedom, intelligence, ethics, and ability, not just for us, but for every living creature. Increasingly, we're figuring out how to achieve what we dream.
Singularity University, co-founded by Peter and the eminent futurist and innovator Ray Kurzweil, is an educational and entrepreneurship organization dedicated to defining and addressing the grand challenges of human development. I am an advisor at SU. Every year I'm privileged to meet the 80 students of their Graduate Studies Program, and every year I'm blown away by the vision, drive, ethics, and creativity of these students. I've also known several of them before they attended SU, and it's magical to see how much more practical and effective they become once they're part of the SU network. Peter and Ray have created an amazing environment, and it begins with the right mindset, the right world view. Unless you can afford to attend their GSP or their shorter Executive Program, reading this book is the closest you'll get to creating the Singularity University mindset for yourself. I have been thinking about these issues as a technology foresight professional since 2000, going on 12 years now. This book left me significantly more optimistic, practical, and empowered than when I began, and I've got several friends now reading it as well.
Abundance, as I see it, has four main themes: 1. Mental blocks that keep us from seeing the world as it really is, 2. Grand challenges of global development, 3. Accelerating technological progress, and 4. Accelerating human ingenuity. Part One tackles the mental blocks that keep us from seeing accelerating change, and challenges us to improve our perspective. I think these 48 pages are the most important, for most people. If you have time for nothing else, just read this section. Part One helps us see how our culture and our human biases conspire to keep us cynical, passive, fear-driven, selfish, ignorant, and disconnected. Meanwhile planetary acceleration continues faster every year, with or without any individual nation, and it's a strongly positive sum game. The Chinese researcher who discovers the cure to the cancer your partner will get in twenty years will soon be your hero, or he should be. The more innovative, wealthy, and intelligent the world gets, the more human conflict migrates to where it belongs, at the leading edge, in the world of ideas, not in the realm of human rights, securities, and freedoms, which become increasingly clearly protected and defined.
Parts Two through Six alternate the last three themes. We're introduced next to Exponential Technologies, and we begin to appreciate the disruptions to come, and the special tools that every wise society needs to employ. The reader considers a special set of Grand Challenge problems, and their looming solutions: The final spurt of Population Growth (in Africa and Asia only, it's pretty much over everywhere else). Sanitation. Water. Food. Energy. Education. Health Care. Freedom. Potential pitfalls of exponential technology like the growing rich poor divide, corruption, pandemics, military conflict, and terrorism are relegated to the Appendix. This is nervy yet ultimately a smart call. Abundance focuses our attention on all the problems that can be noticeably improved or eliminated in the next ten to twenty five years. The problems in the Appendix can and will be solved as well, but likely not nearly as fast.
The fourth theme, rising human ingenuity, cooperation and collective intelligence, is treated in two groups of three chapters, so in essence it's the largest theme of the book. While Diamandis and Kotler make an excellent case that our Grand Challenge problems can be solved. They also make it very clear that these solutions won't happen if we don't keep striving. As always, a subset of motivated, visionary, talented, and practical entrepreneurs, innovators, policymakers, and philanthopists will lead the way, and the billions who are presently marginalized will do most of the heavy lifting, in pursuit of a decent quality of life, not the diversions of luxury.
Books like Abundance help us to get our bearings in a sea of change. They remind us where we are, and where we are going. The more people read them, the more purposeful and effective we all become. We've got big problems to solve, and Abundance is one of the best guides to the near future that you could ever ask for. I hope you'll read it, learn it, and share it far and wide.
The authors give an excellent case for optimism. The book covers some interesting scenarios where humans working together are likely to solve the pressing problems we face in providing clean water, food, energy, medical care and education in abundance for the over nine billion people we can expect to have alive on our planet in this century.
While the authors do an excellent job of giving the overview of how people are working to solve these problems, I am disturbed more by what they don't say. I can tell that they shy away from controversy so as not to alienate large segments of readers. I suspect that these guys are secular humanists who tend to be shills for the Obama Administration. That's OK but I like writers to be up front and with full disclosure about where they stand. Here are some examples of major omissions by the authors:
1. Energy - The book says some great things about the future of solar energy without saying how long it will take before solar energy becomes economically viable and effective. Solar still has a future but that future is a good 15-20 years away at best. No mention is made of massive government failures such as Solyndra and the even bigger fiascos with wind energy, which is neither cost effective nor environmentally sound. You won't find out about the over 1,000 birds a day that are killed in the US by wind turbines. Not much is said about new safer forms of nuclear power such as pebble bed reactors which are show more promise than wind or solar right now. I couldn't find anything about the most promising energy revolution of the past decade - shale oil and gas. Fracking, which is safer than nuclear or wind turbines and has a history of 50 years, is not just being done in the US but all over the world. In the US it has already reduced electricity costs and has also reduced greenhouse gas emissions to the lowest level in about 20 years. The US may reach energy independence which will contribute greatly to Mideast peace.
2. Health Care - There some great descriptions of new break-throughs resulting from stem cell research. The authors neglect to say that all of these improvements are from ADULT stem cells, not embryonic cells. They also err in saying that George Bush banned research on stem cells. That is not true; the Bush administration banned funding of any new research on EMBRYONIC stem cells, not on adult stem cells or existing embryonic cell lines that were in progress. They were also unfair in their criticism of Sarah Palin's comment about Obamacare and "death panels". The term was used to describe how some of the many new agencies would behave when rationing health care. This is something that has been known to happen in other countries with socialized medicine and has been a long time concern of ethical experts. Interesting, no shots were taken at the incredible waste and stupidity rampant in healthcare bureaucracies established by governments all over the world, including the US. The authors obviously haven't enrolled in Medicare yet!
3. Education - I really love what the book covers about the revolutions in how students of all ages will be educated all over the world. They even broach the controversial topic of the future of most established collegiate institutions in the US - and that future is not good at all. However, they completely avoid the more controversial topic of the dismal failure of the government and union-dominated public education establishment in the US.
4. Human Psychology - The authors display their excellent technical and educational credentials in this book but they seem to be naïve about human nature. They actually believe that most war and strife stems from a lack of abundance and that once humans get to a high level of prosperity they will beat their swords into plowshares and concentrate on the arts and sciences to make the human race even better. I don't think the authors have thought this concept through. The terrorists of 9/11 were all well educated and from good families. Most came from a part of the world known for its fabulous oil wealth. What drove them was not a desire for wealth but an insane hatred of "infidels" and a distorted belief that they would attain eternal glory from their actions. While I agree with the authors' optimism, I don't think that humans are capable of perfecting themselves through technology. That will take something beyond what this book covers.
Despite some objections, this book is an excellent read. You should buy it, read it and then read it again in ten years to see how things are progressing.
Top reviews from other countries
地球規模で豊かになれるのか、について広い視野で書かれている良書だと思います。
ここで言う豊かさとは水、食料、エネルギーと言った資源が、人口が増えた世界で足りるのか?という内容です。このまま世界全体が北米並みの消費を続けると、地球5個分の資源が必要だそうです。
てことは節約しないと駄目じゃね?とならないと書いてあるのがこの本です。
人口は増えますが、技術もムーアの法則で指数関数的に進歩するので、バイオ技術で植物を必要な場所で効率良く作ったり、ナノ技術で水を安価に濾過したり、スマホで知識を共有したり、通販でを個人でも僻地でもハイテク機器を買ってみんなが発明家になれたり、価格も数年で何分の一になって性能は上がって… と詳細は読んでのお楽しみですが、地球1個で賄うにはどうするべきかがたくさん書いてあります。
日本語タイトルの『未来予測』という受動的な感じよりも、そういう未来を作るための考え方を学ぶ能動的な内容だと感じました。単なるボランティアとか人道支援とかでは無く、自立して持続可能な仕組みを目指しているのも素晴らしいと思います。
第四世代の原子力発電のホープとして、2016年末に話題になった日本の某家電メーカーが記載されていて、感慨深いです。
大切なのは、センサをどのように使って、何を作るかである。その際にどのような問題があって、どう解決するのか、解決策があるのかどうかである。ここが明らかになっていないと、専門家にとっては説得力は生まれない。しかしながら、この部分は、本当の専門家を集めないと出来ないし、そのような分析は、各社にとってはまさに戦略であるので、商品開発に近い部分は秘密にしたいであろう。アメリカ人が、共通部分で集まって規制を上げて、何らかの成果を出してこうとするある意味での楽天性には、学ぶところもあるであろうが、かつての日本のMEMSを持ち上げた人々のなかでは世代交代が不十分で、日本でこのような動きが爆発するかどうかは、産業界と霞が関の意向に依存していると思う。さらに言えば、1兆個の内訳はどうなるのか、等の分析も必要であろう。
この本を、成功した技術開発成功物語のコアを集めた話とみなせば、それなりに面白いとはいえる。範囲は非常に広い。問題は、アメリカとアフリカのみが対象であることである。欧州やアジアには、著者のおめがねにかなう開発物語は、なかったのであろうか。
この本には豊富なグラフがあり、それらの分析も、意味があることと思われる。















