An Abundance of Abundance

This week – and from the look of the thing, for a few weeks yet to come – I am reading Abundance, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.  Diamandis – a physician amongst other things, is the man who gave us the X Prize, the award for private space flight that Space Ship One won a few years back.

The book is about the many forces, technological and social, that are colluding to improve the lot of all humanity.  Diamandis believes that by the end of this century all people everywhere – which he estimates will be nine billion – will enjoy a standard of living greater than Western civilization enjoys right now.  Energy costs will drop, smart machines will make many impossible things possible, new methods of making food will arrive, and health care will get much, much better.

It is, as I said, a long book and it has a few lefty-trendy ideas woven in, probably a knee-jerk sort of writing by the author, but nothing that really affects the main outcomes he talks about.  I am only about a third of the way through, so unless it is full of appendices and footnotes, I have no idea what else is to come.

By coincidence, Kristine Kathryn Rusch last week also wrote about abundance, but this article was about the publishing industry.  Her point was that the old guard publishing companies have always worked in an environment of scarcity, with limited options to sell a limited number of books from a limited number of authors.  They still act this way today, even though their world has changed and the entire publishing industry is now one of abundance.  Go ahead, read it if you have time.

http://kriswrites.com/2012/03/14/the-business-rusch-scarcity-and-abundance/