Abundance peter diamandis pdf free download

Technology matters only insofar as it enables the people solving their own problems to outpace the people creating them. His main concern is that entrepreneurs, a term he uses quite expansively, are not receiving enough attention from policymakers, economists, political scientists, and philanthropists.

These groups all come in for criticism for their habits of patting entrepreneurs on the head before getting back to the serious business of picking winners and driving policy from the top down. Ultimately though, he argues, this habit is irrelevant. This is a message that needs to be delivered. The best way to read the book is probably to read the last page of each chapter first. There are now enough smart people in every corner of the world with access to the ideas, tools, and resources necessary to ensure the coming of a new and truly global prosperity no matter what the 1 percent or anyone else does.

There are two library systems whose virtual spaces overlap in my area. Both carry this title as an OverDrive eBook. Since most, though not There has actually never been a better time to bring a child into the world. In Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's bestseller "Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think", an author and engineer review historical data and trends that show how technology is achieving exponential improvements in computing, energy, and medicine.

Diamandis and Steven Kotler that was published in The writers refer to the book's title as being a future where nine billion people have access to clean water, food, energy, health care, education, and everything else that is necessary for a first world standard of. Diamandis, Steven Kotler. Page 2. The first edition of this novel was published in February 21st , and was written by Peter H.

The book was published in multiple languages including English language, consists of pages and is available in Hardcover format. The main. 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. Peter H. Diamandis YouTube. Description Abundance 4. Diamandis and Steven Kotler recently, and I thought it was a really great.

The reason is one that I don't fully understand, but it is a demonstrable phenomenon no less. And it has nothing to do with wasteful governments. I am hopeful that the future will turn out the way Diamandis describes. But there is one reason why dystopian fiction prevails--it is really more about people than technology. If, as J-P Sartre said, hell is other people, so might we say the same about the future.

View 2 comments. Mar 30, Shirley Freeman rated it it was amazing. This is an amazing book! The authors define abundance as 'providing all people with a life of possibility. The authors not only imagine it, but think it is possible within the next 25 years. Yes, it seems overly optimistic but their argument with supporting data and their energy and enthusiasm are contagious.

They outline the incredible technological advances that are occurring in ps This is an amazing book! They outline the incredible technological advances that are occurring in psychology and biology and therefore in health care and food production, in education, in energy development, in every field of human endeavor.

They tell the story in a readable format, but more than half the book is notes and data supporting their argument. I would highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in entrepreneurship, technology, improving the world, helping others live a fulfilling life, you name it.

If you read it, I'd love to know what you think. This is an optimistic non-fic from , written mainly in , that is a great alternative to doom and gloom of todays and even earlier near-future prediction literature.

This allowed us to survive, while more happy-marry cousins were eaten by predators or died from hunger. The same bias shaped our media, which much more likely will talk about disasters than about happier happenings. In no way this suggests that the are no disasters, for there are a lot, but more that nevertheless for the majority of Earth population the life is longer, happier, more diverse and fulfilling lives despite worsening environmental situation or growing income disparity in many countries.

The fact that it was mostly written 10 years ago gives a unique perspective on what has been realized and what still lags behind, so that we, the readers, can look deeper to answer why this is so. I see that a lot of reviewer see this book as one-sided, but doom-and-gloom books are one-sided as well, so if seen in a larger context, it is ok.

As a person from the formerly socialist country, I actually support the view that the newly self-made wo- men from the western world that quite actively spend their wealth — say Bill Gates or George Soros — to improve the livelihood of many, actually do a better job than the governments, to which they ought to give their money via taxes according to some.

Mar 07, Adam Ford rated it really liked it. Abundance is one of the better books about the modern world that I have read. A very informative and well written book that flowed quickly. I highly recommend it. A few things that stood out to me: 1.

The main forces pushing us forward are the buying power of the bottom billion the poorest billion people on the planet , the exponential growth of technology, the rise of the super-smart techno philanthropist and the do-it-your-selfers. We are heading into a significant shortage of doctors as the Abundance is one of the better books about the modern world that I have read.

We are heading into a significant shortage of doctors as the baby-boomers retire. There have never been enough doctors worldwide, but we are about to experience a major shortage in the first world. The best hope for dealing with the crisis will be technology. Health scans will engage in direct biocommunication and diagnostics with greater accuracy than possible with a live doctor.

Exciting times lie ahead in medical technology. More people should be working on things that are significant. The book quotes one of Google's founders saying that something is significant if it has the potential to affect the lives of 1 billion people in the next decade. This is thinking big. If more people stretched towards this goal, the world would be a much better place.

I like this a lot and think I need to broaden my horizons significantly. I spend far too much time obsessing over the tiny religious sect I happened to be born into. It is a long-term historical irrelevancy and has distracted me for most of my life from applying my skills towards accomplishing great things.

If your audience size is less than a million people, you are wasting your gift. The bottom billion are a massive market with amazing growth potential for businesses and will not be ignored much longer. As these consumers are understood and targeted engineers and businessmen will be forced to lower the cost of their products. Nearly every household in the Philippines or Kenya or Nigeria or Pakistan have cell phones today. In a decade they will all have more than the average first world household has today due to advances in technology.

The 3rd world is disappearing. The next decade will see an explosion in game-based learning. Video games are not harmful and in fact can be a very powerful tool in teaching. We are just figuring out how to use the video game format to revolutionize teaching and learning. It will be exciting to watch this happen. Oct 02, Mehrsa rated it liked it. You should probably read this in tandem with Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" because they come to exact opposite conclusions.

I hope these guys are right, but since their claim is based on a few cool tricks and the other one is based on rigorous data, I doubt it.

Still, this is worth reading because I think half the premise is sound: technological answers to intractable problems are in the wings. The future will not be as anticipated. However, there are several broad econo You should probably read this in tandem with Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" because they come to exact opposite conclusions. However, there are several broad economic and political trends that make me think that we need more than technology and their cool X project to make the world a better place.

I also worry that so many people look to tech as the answer to problems that actually need policy to change. Like poverty for example. Technology may be able to make drinking water more accessible, and that should be celebrated, but that doesn't eliminate the other factors. Apr 01, Carl rated it it was ok.

If you live in a rich abundant area and avoid the poor hungry and desolate then you might buy into this one but in the real world these guys are out of touch with the real world. Jul 26, Amber rated it liked it Shelves: , non-fiction , audio , dude-lit. In certain very limited ways, this book is really exciting and full of great news. The incredible technologies that have the potential to virtually eliminate problems of water scarcity, food scarcity, energy scarcity, healthcare scarcity, and education scarcity will make your jaw drop.

The answer seems to be NO, and it's looking a lot like it was nothing but a giant boondoggle. If we're this close to solving the global scarcity of potable water, why have residents of Flint, Michigan, a city in the richest country in the world, spent five years fighting for safe, reliable access to this basic essential for human life? For that matter, what's your proposed solution to plastic waste generally, and the already-wealthy petroleum companies who have big plans for more fracking so they can flood the world with even more cheap plastic?

If exponentially improving technology is the solution to so many of humanity's problems, what's the solution to the next problem that solution creates — the exponentially-increasing mountains of toxic e-waste? If aquaculture is such a great solution to providing protein to 9 billion people, what's the solution to the appalling water pollution aquaculture creates?

What's the solution to the fact that very few of your proposed solutions close the loop, and appear likely to create a new environmental problem for every humanitarian problem they solve?

And how many did Coca-Cola actually deploy in remote locations around the world? The answer appears to be no, and very few. I had more, but this is where I stopped listing them individually. In short, this book is interesting and even exciting as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough, it's full of holes, and it has some larger overarching problems: It's relentlessly anthropocentric. If you're feeling angry, sad, depressed, and helpless about things like whales dying with bellies full of plastic waste, or Bornean jungles being burned so Americans can have convenient snack foods made with palm oil, or Amazon rain forest disappearing faster than ever under the policies of President Jair Bolsonaro, "the Brazilian Trump," or anything of that sort, this book has only very a limited sort of solace to offer.

Yes, Diamandis and Kotler say, we're in the midst of an unprecedented mammalian extinction, and it's definitely our fault. But don't worry, it's not as bad as you think.

Your brain is just hard-wired to focus on the negative, the media is biased in favor of alarmist news, and anyway, you're one of the billion lucky people whose more basic needs are being sufficiently met so that you can spend time and energy worrying about next-level issues like the survival of other Earthlings. And there's great news - we're getting closer and closer to the point where we can meet the needs of the other 8 billion humans who will probably be on this planet by , so that they will also be free to worry about things like whales and orangutans and rain forests.

The only question is, can we get a critical mass of humans to the point where they can care about the rest of the planet before the rain forests, orangutans, and whales are gone? Of the many resources Diamandis and Kotler discuss, the sheer amount of ecological space humanity takes up on this planet is not one of them. We have to use less.

A lot less. Some scientists, E. Unless technological tinkering can make arcologies and floating cities real and allow 9 billion people to live fulfilled, happy lives in carbon-neutral, waste-neutral, self-contained megacities and happily conduct all of their activities on just half of a landmass that is shrinking due to rising ocean levels, and do it quickly, technology simply can't make ecological space a bigger pie.

And the authors have very little to say about any environmental problem beyond population, except to tell you you're probably overreacting, because after all, 40 years ago, scientists and policymakers thought acid rain was our biggest environmental problem, and it turned out all we needed was sulfur-scrubbing technology to solve it.

Where Are the Women? While vreading this book, I noticed a variant of my usual gripe. In this case, it's not a direct criticism of Diamandis and Kotler — after all, their writing on the subject is descriptive, not prescriptive.

There are exactly 14 women mentioned in the text, and I know this because once I noticed their absence, I started paying attention anytime a woman's name went by. This is compared to probably a solid men. This leads me to think about the much-discussed problem of the lack of women in the top tiers of science and technology. It seems to me that one fairly obvious explanation that doesn't get talked about much is the simple fact that women are still recovering from centuries of cultural conditioning that tells us significant chunks of our attention must first be devoted to a making ourselves attractive and amenable to men, b birthing and raising children, and c maintaining the home.

And the din of that cultural conditioning hasn't been shut off in the last years, but only gradually lessened.

Diamandis and Kotler openly acknowledge a variant of this problem when they discuss the concept of attention as a finite and even scarce resource, mention the hundreds of billions of attention-hours Americans devote to watching TV annually, and ponder what cognitive miracles we could accomplish if we all quit our TV addictions for a year. The same principle applies to women and the things that monopolize our finite ration of daily attention, only the things that demand our attention aren't as easily shut off as a TV, and tend to demand active responses from us, rather than passive absorption of entertainment.

How many hundreds of billions of attention-hours do American women not to mention women worldwide devote to domestic tasks that the men in their lives are freed from?

What could American women be accomplishing creatively and professionally right now if in , when we won the vote, we had also been unshackled en masse from a the physical labor of beauty and fashion regimens, housework, and child care; b the mental labor of staying aware of a truckload of daily minutiae ranging from your mother-in-law's birthday, to which kid has soccer practice what days, to the need to pick up the mail and replace the toilet paper roll; and c the emotional labor of managing the often destructive moods and egos of the men around us?

We're still trying to get out from under all those burdens, and even now, in , American women are being forced to choose between professional success, a domestic life that isn't littered with old take-out cartons, and sleep.

Of course, I could be wrong about all this — it's entirely possible that women really are achieving great things in the important fields discussed in this book, and as a result of their own social conditioning, Diamandis and Kotler simply neglected to interview or mention more than 14 of them. I'll never know, and I can't be arsed to find out because every day after my first job, I work the unpaid second shift.

It's seven years old. Published in , and with a lot of research and writing presumably done well before that publication date, some of the book suffers from the problem of being at least seven years out of date in fields like technology, where seven years is an eternity. And once the manufacturer bricks it, it becomes another piece of e-waste.

Diamandis and Kotler's praise for the man who came up with the idea of Ethos bottled water is a prime example of so much that's wrong with this book. The authors seem to think this is a genius combination of entrepreneurship and humanitarianism. That's bullshit. This is nothing but self-serving greenwashing. And China has told the world, "We're tired of recycling your plastic for you," so every bottle of Ethos sold is just adding to the plastic waste problem as well as this douchebag's bank account.

Starbucks ought to remove all bottled water, including Ethos, from its shelves, install drinking fountains with filtered tap water, charge customers a quarter to use the fountains, and give all that money to the water projects. This book was recommended by a friend, and I certainly enjoyed reading it. Much of this makes sense to me - certainly there is a tendency to focus on the negative, and it's good to see a book which catalogues some of the good inventions which do have the potential to change our lives in the This book was recommended by a friend, and I certainly enjoyed reading it.

Much of this makes sense to me - certainly there is a tendency to focus on the negative, and it's good to see a book which catalogues some of the good inventions which do have the potential to change our lives in the foreseeable future. As far as how believable some of their predictions are - well I think they vary. I found the section on water quite interesting, and some of the technologies discussed around the provision of clean water are very exciting. Also the education section is worth a read, as I think the authors are onto something with the profound way the internet has penetrated our lives and made so much information accessible, and the availability of mobile apps replacing many devices.

I'm a little more skeptical about their claims on energy generation and health care - claiming that there are trends for both of these becoming much cheaper and affordable which seems to be exactly the opposite of what we're seeing in the real world at the moment both electricity and health care costs increasing rapidly. At times it seems to be a little too self-promoting, with many passages little more than ads for the authors' companies eg. There is also a lot of faith placed on continued exponential growth, almost to the point of it being a religion - eg.

Moore's Law will continue to apply indefinitely - not considering things like quantum limits where it starts to break down. Just because something has grown exponentially in the past doesn't mean it will continue to do so in the future. In the end, the book is a good read and quite easy to read if you want to know about some of the more exciting technologies which are being developed and appearing on the horizon, and how they might affect our lives.

I certainly found it engrossing and wanted to read more. In terms of providing an overarching view of argument in the title that "the future is better than you think" I think it falls a little short, and didn't leave me convinced of the broader view but predicting the future is a difficult game and I'm looking forward to a follow-up in a few years where the same authors evaluate their own predictions against reality.

Nov 05, Kater Cheek rated it liked it. The cover of this book, which you can't really see from the snapshot, has been done to look like it's wrapped in aluminum foil. Aluminum was once the most precious metal on earth, and now technology has made it so cheap it's ubiquitous. That's basically the premise of the book; technology brings about abundance. Diamandis has oodles of examples, and he backs them up with a thick selection of charts and graphs in the back. For every doom-and-gloom prophecy that journalists have brought up to frig The cover of this book, which you can't really see from the snapshot, has been done to look like it's wrapped in aluminum foil.

For every doom-and-gloom prophecy that journalists have brought up to frighten us with, Diamandis proposes a technologically feasible solution. Some of the book deals with the psychology of why people are predisposed to believe the worst about the future, and some of it deals with how typical economic models of helping developing countries are flawed.

He seems to be a big fan of capitalism. This tome of Gee Whizzery feels a little like reading the transcript of a couple hours of TED talks, edited into a single optimistic book. I recommend it for people who like pop science books and want to read one that doesn't leave them feeling like the end of the world is upon us.

I love tomorrow and its potential. I have no nostalgia for the past. So this is a perfect book for me. I want to hear the message that this book presents and I got what I was looking for. Lots of it. No wasted words here and never over my head.

Some examples: "We used to think that healthy and wealthy meant you had to be fat. We don't think that anymore. Today, we think that to be healthy and wealthy we need a ton of things, but maybe that too will become old thinking. Technology can replace much I love tomorrow and its potential. Technology can replace much "stuff" without reducing our standard of living.

We must expand our notions of the possible. The "bottom billion" in the developing world are about to come online. Aug 05, Siah rated it it was ok. This book trivializes the magnitude of some of our greatest existential challenges as humans. The authors use simplistic analogies and argue that technology fixes all of our problems.

From climate change to war. Some of the problems that they enumerate have nothing to with technology and that is my primary problem with this book. For instance, take the problem of excess green house gases in the atmosphere, this has become a political and policy challenge rather than a technology challenge.

One c This book trivializes the magnitude of some of our greatest existential challenges as humans. One can realize the childish view when the authors talk about 3D printing as a paradigm shift technology. A few years after the writing we all know these ideas did not pan out.

Having drinkable water is a much bigger problem than funding open source robotics projects. I find the message in this book to possibly appeal to folks who believe in a creator who magically takes care of our future. Everyone else should look at this as just one side of a very complex story.

Nov 13, Andy rated it it was amazing. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It holds an excellent analysis of what the future holds. It changed my opinion about a lot of technologies solar and medical for the better. The section on the future of power collection was very interesting. I do hope their predictions about robots come true My favorite part of the book dealt with people who are attempting to reform the educational process throughout the worl This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

My favorite part of the book dealt with people who are attempting to reform the educational process throughout the world. Khan Academy is an excellent tool and is being utilized by many people. If you want a book that takes a look at the future and doesn't leave you feeling scared, this is the book to read. Apr 21, Shahrazad rated it liked it. There are enough resources in the world for everyone , the world is better and quality of life is higher than any other time in history , we can solve modern day problems like we have solved other problems in the past to ensure more prosperity.

These are the main themes in the book demonstrated with stories from different domains. Oct 11, Abby Smith rated it it was ok. Not at all what I thought it would be. Seems like a lot of hype for a lot of theories. Change is hard. May 27, J. Penn rated it it was amazing Shelves: entrepreneur , non-fiction , self-help.

Stop reading the papers and listening to the negative media. Read this book and marvel at the amazing things happening in the world! Nov 29, posthuman rated it really liked it Shelves: business , favorites , ai , inspirational , non-fiction , economics. Despite the authors getting lost on rabbit trails in a couple of chapters, this was a rather memorable and enjoyable read by the founders of the X Prize.

An invaluable dose of rational optimism in the face of our daily barrage of irrational doom and gloom. The premise is that humanity's evolutionary adaptations for surviving in the Pleistocene are holding most of us back from realizing scarcity is entirely contextual. Instead of responding to scarcity by slicing our pie thinner or redistributing Despite the authors getting lost on rabbit trails in a couple of chapters, this was a rather memorable and enjoyable read by the founders of the X Prize.

Instead of responding to scarcity by slicing our pie thinner or redistributing pieces of pie around, the only viable solution is to make more pies. We are no longer living in world of competing for zero-sum resources, but a world where new pies are being made, entirely new ways to access to resources that make the previous scarcity obsolete.

These days, we are saturated with information. Millions of news sources compete for our mind share. And how do they compete? By vying for the amygdala's attention. The old journalism adage "If it bleeds, it leads" works because the first stop that all incoming information encounters is an organ already primed to look for danger.

We're feeding a fiend. Quite simply, good news doesn't catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear Our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Even worse, this system is designed not to shut off until the potential danger has completely vanished.