Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
98% positive over last 12 months
+ $10.64 shipping
95% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
100% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Follow the Authors
OK
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Exponential Technology Series) Hardcover – February 21, 2012
Peter H. Diamandis (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Steven Kotler (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Price | New from | Used from |
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial |
Audio CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $29.99 | — |
Digital
"Please retry" |
—
| — | — |
Enhance your purchase
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
- ISBN-101451614217
- ISBN-13978-1451614213
Inspire a love of reading with Amazon Book Box for Kids
Discover delightful children's books with Amazon Book Box, a subscription that delivers new books every 1, 2, or 3 months — new Amazon Book Box Prime customers receive 15% off your first box. Sign up now
Frequently bought together
- +
- +
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
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.
Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
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
- Best Sellers Rank: #381,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #20 in Engineering Research
- #175 in Philanthropy & Charity (Books)
- #226 in Income Inequality
- 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!”
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2020
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
But I had issues with the book I couldn't ignore, and I felt these lowered its value. One was the lengthy section at the start of the book that states negative outlooks are the result of evolution. It felt like a built in response to critics, where people who disagree with the author don't have valid reasons or concerns. Instead their opinions are the result of biology.
Another big concern was how some technologies listed in the book haven't come to fruition in the years since it was printed. A good example is the water purification system Slingshot. I'd read about this invention in Popular Science many years ago and marveled at how it could change the world. Since then there have been new desalination plants built in arid parts of the world, but using membrane filters, not Slingshot. This wonder technology never reached the open market. Other developments in this book are also not yet available.
This isn't a new phenomenon. I was a freshman in high school in 1990 when I first heard of embryonic stem cells, and how one day they would make the blind see, the crippled walk and cure all manner of diseases. All it would take is 5-10 years and adequate funding. In the year 2000 the story was the same, with hope being 5-10 years out, provided there was funding. 2010 brought the same claims, and today after nearly 30 years the blind do not see, the crippled do not walk, and diseases this wonder cure was supposed to fix remain as bad as they were in 1990. Many new technologies fail to pan out like this, so promising a better future based on today's lab work is speculative.
The author stated we must be more open to risk, and used the X Prize as proof how incentives can bring about leaps in technology. This may be the case, but the author didn't risk anything by making the X Prize. He borrowed other men's reputations to promote it and other men's wealth to fund it. Nor did he help in any of the competing research team's work or funding. The author threw down the gauntlet and waited for good things to happen from other people taking risks with their time, money, reputations, and potentially with their lives.
Near the end of the book is a section on what could go wrong in the rapidly advancing society the author seeks. I respect him for mentioning potential downsides to his vision of the future. I believe, though, that he minimizes some of these risks, especially in regards to biological attacks. He stated viruses can only spread as fast as men can travel, as if it was a limiting factor regarding the spread of disease. Air travel means a man can cross the world in less than a day, bringing with him any disease he carries and spreading it to millions of new hosts. If a bio terror attack occurred in Midway Airport in Chicago and infected passengers in the main terminal with a disease like the 1918 flu, it would spread to every inhabited continent within a day's time, and the 50 million death toll from 1918 could be dwarfed by the resulting loss of life. The author claimed in the same section that we could provide rapid and effective treatment if a pandemic occurred, yet stated a few pages earlier that the bird flu vaccine rushed into service was ineffective. Both statements cannot be true, and when the second one is a fact we must assume the first is blind optimism.
I am an optimist, although I can see why you wouldn't think so by reading this review, but I am not blindly optimistic. There is ample evidence that technology will continue to advance, but there are plenty of cases like embryonic stem cells where money and hard work don't lead to the kind of breakthroughs predicted in this book. I believe we as a people will continue to advance, but some of the claims in this book are no different than people in the 1950s thinking we'd have flying cars in the 1980s.
The theme is a good reminder not to take the media bait of going down the rabbit hole of despair because more good is around us than bad, and this is proven with fact. All startup founders and generally anyone interested to balancing what is viewed on the news should read this book.
It also doesn't hurt that a down to earth rocket scientist wrote this book.
Gives you so much optimism about the future
- and makes you think about opportunities for
yourself.
It is an excellent place to start for anyone
interested in exponential technologies, the
future, artificial intelligence, global social
issues or business.
I had actually already read 'The Singularity is
Near' by Ray Kurzweil and some other books
in the field which covers much of the same
material.
Kurwzweil's is more in depth but for
a clear summary of the bottom line impacts
and opportunities this is the better choice.
Basically, the best starting point.
Just as times of peace and prosperity lull us into a false sense of optimism and complacency, troubled times drown us in an ocean of pessimism. We expect the troubles to last forever. In 1945 our government assumed that as soon as the 12 million service men and women were demobilized that the U.S. and the ruined economies of Europe would take us right back into the Great Depression. Instead the opposite happened. The central tendency of the world between 1945 and 2008 was a vast expansion of peace, prosperity, and freedom. The Nazis, Communists, and Fascists, and ultra-nationalists were replaced by democracies with a sense of shared global interests. The USA and Europe returned to sustainable full employment. Many countries, including the defeated Axis powers of Germany and Japan, and the former Communist countries like China joined together with the Western Democracies to promote global peace and prosperity.
After a similar period of complacency, the economy came tumbling down in 2008 when the Great Recession nearly sent the entire world back into the Stone Age. Since then we've muddled along in an ocean of pessimism of high unemployment, foreclosures, budget deficits, collapsing currencies, and social welfare systems collapsing under the demographics of an aging population. Is it EVER going to get better? Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis say that not only will it get better, but that we are on the cusp of a new golden age of abundance of material and intellectual wealth.
They say that the new golden age of peace and prosperity will be created by the power of the human mind unleashed in a free economy.
This will result in:
* An abundance of the material necessities of clean water, nutritious food, ample housing, and medical care.
* An abundance of freedom to pursue opportunities. The advancing state of computer and communications technologies enables individuals to nowadays accomplish what formerly could only be accomplished by huge combinations of capital and labor organized as corporations. The advance of free market economies around the world will provide the economic freedom that speeds the process of wealth creation.
The central premise of the book is:
============================================================
The advancement of new, transformational technologies--computational systems, networks and sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, bioinformatics, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, human-machine interfaces, and biomedical engineering--will soon enable the vast majority of humanity to experience what only the affluent have access to today. Even better, these technologies aren't the only change agents in play.
A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) revolution has been brewing for the past fifty years, but lately it's begun to bubble over. In today's world, the purview of backyard tinkerers has extended far beyond custom cars and homebrew computers, and now reaches into once-esoteric fields like genetics and robotics...Small groups of motivated DIY-ers can accomplish what was once the sole province of large corporations and governments....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."
The final element in our pyramid of abundance is freedom.
=========================================================
I believe Kotler and Diamandis have nailed it on the head. In the realm of material wealth, for the first time Mankind has the capacity to provide the necessities of clean water, nutritious food, ample housing, and medical care to all. Indeed the number of people who don't have luxuries like electricity, TV's, and phones is shrinking. The authors are not talking a pipedream. They specifically explain how emerging new technologies of agriculture, energy, information, and production will create material abundance for all peoples.
In the realm of expanding freedom the authors' thesis has been validated by the Internet and Facebook that have proven to more powerful than the police states of tyrants. Facebook has enabled people to organize to bring down repressive regimes in the Middle East and Russia. The peoples of all nations demand represenation in their governments, and they will have it.
I see evidence of Kotler's and Diamandis' thesis at work right here in the USA. In times of economic crisis you might expect the people to lurch to the political left in demanding a larger role of government centralized planning in the economy. I notice that this sentiment is remarkably absent not only from Conservatives but also from traditional Liberals. The mainstream view of both camps is that "New ideas and new technologies working in the free marketplace will restore prosperity." I never thought I would hear political Liberals argue this way, but most that I know do have faith that new technologies operating in free markets is the correct path to prosperity.
So we have every reason to believe that human ingenuity combined with economic freedom will indeed bring us to the cusp of unimagined prosperity, just as it happened after 1945. The picture they paint of the future resembles the high-tech, antiseptic, pacific world of the "Star Trek" series. They also point out that the world will not be perfect. Terrorists or mad scientists will have the ability to use do-it-yourself genetic engineering to create artificial plague germs that could render humanity extinct. Our ability to destroy ourselves will have to be controlled as we move into a world of unimagined prosperity.
The authors also depict a certain spirit of innovation that will prevail in the future. The future world they are describing sounds a lot like the exciting time of the 1960s when the Space Race thrilled us with the quest to develop the manned rockets to carry us to the moon and the unmanned probes that gave us our first close up look at the other planets. The authors depict an era of exciting innovations in many dimensions of material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth.
This book is non-political. Its elements will appeal to people of almost all ideologies. The economic and sociological theories also seem to be spot on. This book is a COMPLETE encapsulation of the future in regard to economics and sociology.
I looked hard to find any flaws in this book that might degrade it from fire-star and couldn't find any. This is exactly the right book at exactly the right time with exactly the right message: hang on for a couple more years; the best days are ahead!
Top reviews from other countries




