Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think Hardcover – February 21, 2012

Very informative, but tons of Mr. Diamandis' self-promotion holds it back. From the beginning, you hear about Peter's Singularity University, you learn about all of it's founders, etc. It's like, for every bit of useful information that has to do with abundance, you get the equivalent of a commercial, about how this guy keeps founding companies to teach you how to impact the world. I'm sure he's great at what he does, but being reminded over, and over, and over again about how he will teach young minds to change the world sounds to start like you're reading a pop book. This book meets the all criteria: constant endorsement, a focus on third world countries, appealing to various "technophilanthropists". You will not go thirty pages without hearing something about 1) him and his university 2) the university cofounders 3) about how his university's graduates go on to make "bold impacts" in the world (which actually only refers to Africa) and 4) his XPRIZE.

The technologies mentioned in the book are amazing to learn about, but he never quite goes into enough detail for you to understand said technologies. It is a light read, definitely focused on looking pretty, scratching the surface, making sure you don't get bored.

I think he wanted to sound like an educator, but ended up just sounding like a used car salesman for "sustainable enterprises" and "abundance". You hear a lot of buzzwords in this book, way more than necessary.

Towards the end of the book, it gets more informative, and there are pages and pages of graphs, charts, and all that good stuff. In between, more writing, and you start to think that you got a break from being sold something. But of course, at the end of the book, you can find out where to go if you wanna be "coached" by Diamandis, or join his university, or find out about his xprize. There certainly is an "abundance" of mentions of his products and self advertisement.

Abundance is the most enjoyable, exciting and motivating book I have read in a long time. Over the years I have read many books about the future, particularly about the technology of the future and how it will affect our lives. 32 years ago I was sitting here under the skylight of my then unfinished home architectural office reading another book that got me excited about the future: Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave. He was telling me that in the near future, many of us would be working at home "telecommuting" and that there would be a personal mini-computer in most homes, as common as a refrigerator, I think he said. I was all charged up about this wonderful future, then realized it was the middle of a week day, I was in my home office, and there was a computer on my desk, very primitive by today's standards, but a "personal mini-computer" nevertheless.
But 1980 was quite a ways back on the still close to flat part of that exponential curve of technological progress that you may have seen in some of the magazine articles about Abundance, the book. I read it as a Kindle application on my iPad, PC, and iPhone seamlessly going from one to the other, depending on whether I was in my office, the kitchen, on the Stairmaster at my club, or in bed. On the PC or my iPad, I could click on any of the many highlighted references and be taken to the appendix and returned to where I had been reading with another click. On the PC, an internet reference in the text or appendix would take me to that external referenced article or graph or website. On the iPad, it would also take me back to where I was reading in the book when finished. This was the most elegant and useful integration of a book with Kindle technology that I have seen to date. Had the publisher chosen to allow Amazon's text to speech feature, I would have used my Kindle too.
That may seem a little off-point, but I include it to illustrate just one of the changes we have so adapted to in those 32 years that we just take them for granted. Dr. Diamandis makes a seemingly air-tight case for an exponential acceleration of change to solve the problems that face us now and in the future, whether it is in energy, scarcity of resources, health, education, and even freedom. He seems to share much of the vision of the future of his colleague Ray Kurzweil, who is referenced and quoted in the book, along with many, many other experts. Dr. Kurzweil and Dr. Diamandis are the co-founders of Singularity University. (singularityu.org) There are many excellent talks and other resources on the web by both of them, including a very recent fifteen minute or so talk by Dr. Diamandis at TED (ted.com). Just the existence of Singularity University and TED.com are confirmation of the rapid and impactful changes in communication and education discussed in the book. They include an interesting quote from The Rational Optimist where the author of that book, Matt Ridley compares the cross-pollination of ideas facilitated by communication to the mixing of genetic information in the natural world.
There were a couple of things in the book that I frankly wish were not there. Why the authors drag the name of Sarah Palin into a discussion of confirmation bias strikes me as inappropriate and more of an example of their own confirmation bias than hers - but then they would say that is just my confirmation bias. Less annoying but still a negative mark to me was a contradiction in two references to Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who sailed the raft Kon-Tiki across the Pacific in 1947. In the first they refer to Kon-Tiki as a raft, which it was, but in a reference a few pages later they describe the process of building it as if it were a dugout canoe, which it was not. Yes, I know - trivial, but it undermines the credibility, at least to me.
But I don't want to make too much of my small disagreements. This is a powerful, optimistic, well documented and well written look at our future. That future is coming, whether we like it or not, so we had better get our minds ready to recognize it as it occurs. I suppose the one concept that keeps reoccurring to me in the days since I finished the book is the thought that the ideas that may change my life in unforeseen ways may come from some kid in Nepal or Siberia or Somalia. He or she may be a part of the bottom billion now, but how many more potential Mozarts or Einsteins or Hawkings or Edisons or Whitneys or Fords or Kamens are out there to be discovered and allowed to blossom? How many will take their dirt-cheap laptop and connect up with the Kahn Academy or something like it and learn to create world-changing products or ideas?
As the creator of the X-prize and his many other accomplishments, Peter Diamandis has in my mind reserved a very honorable place in the future history of the world. With this current book, I think he has shown us how exciting and wonderful a history that is likely to be.

The world is going to be perfect. Technology will save us. Save the poorest to save the planet. That pretty much summarizes the book. Nothing technical here.

But it is refreshing to read a pop-science book on the issues facing humanity where things aren't all gloomy and we aren't all going to be cyborgs. Easy enough to read, so I'd buy the softcover or listen to the book-on-tape version (I bought both). It's worth it alone as an aide to help the despairing messages we are faced with continuously on the population problem, global warming, and other problems....perhaps there is a way out and we won't, gulp, go extinct - that's why I read the book cover to cover, as a counter-argument to all the doom and gloom. Yeah it's fluff, but at least its positive fluff instead of yet another doom and gloom book.