Abundance (Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler

In May 1996, Peter Diamandis announced to the world a $10 million prize for the company first able to achieve private space flight, without having yet secured the funds needed, were such a company to succeed. He leveraged the subsequent publicity to raise those funds, and in 2004 made good on his promise, paying up when Mojave Aerospace Ventures achieved piloted space flight. In Abundance, he and coauthor Steven Kotler ask you, the reader, to take another leap of faith. The world say they, is dominated by pessimism, when in fact the future is a rosy one, one where our technological prowess will at last be able to outpace our obstacles to prosperity. 

Partly a prescriptive book on development economics, partly an ode to Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, Abundance screams of the everything-looks-like-a-nail-to-a-hammer approach to the world’s problems - and this particular hammer is technology. Filled with grand predictions for ‘the next 20-30 years’, Abundance was all the more enjoyable in 2020, 8 years after first publication. Predictions of robots that look after the elderly, and cheap, universal converters of sea water and cow dung to drinking water are yet to come to fruition; but discussion of private space companies and techno-philanthropy seem retrospectively prescient.

Whilst Abundance can at times read like a laundry list of all potential technological breakthroughs, paired against the world’s most urgent needs (clean water, education, abundant energy, sufficient calories and rather starkly, freedom), there is a potent logical argument being made here. Further, critics of the book appear to have attributed to Diamandis a faith in future progress that exceeds the narrow domain in which his faith resides. 

Many modern thinkers, carried away with an enlightenment infatuation with modern science (and often evangelical atheists), have replaced religion with science as a form of faith in ongoing progress in society. Pushing back against the pseudo-Christian idea that progress is cumulative, are thinkers led by British philosopher John Gray. Gray’s ongoing quarrel with Harvard’s Steven Pinker, author of Better Angels Of Our Nature (arguing that human violence is decreasing with time) exemplifies this debate. Critics of Abundance take Gray’s position that human morality is unchanging and progress is cyclical - citing U.S. torture in Iraq and the existence of modern slavery as evidence of the illusion of progress. 

The accusation of ‘techno utopianism’ - here meant as a slur - is somewhat of a strawman. Diamandis’ reasoning in his claims follows a number of logical steps, some more persuasive than others, and his optimism is largely confined to the material realm. Beginning with Thomas Malthus, many have believed for two centuries that the explosion of human population and consumption would lead to the depletion, and eventual exhaustion of natural resources on earth, and to the starvation or ruin of humanity and the planet. This claim gained momentum in 1972 with the publication of The Limits To Growth, and the burgeoning environmental movement. With world population expected to reach as much as 10 billion by 2050, and mounting evidence of environmental devastation, from fisheries to forestry to CO2 emissions, there seems little cause for optimism. Here is where the identification of a number of trends by Diamandis paint an altogether different picture. 

In short, it is the authors’ belief that the improvement of technology will be at such a rate as to bring widespread prosperity to the planet, and negate concerns of scarcity. This is based on the concept of exponential growth - Moore’s Law across multiple categories - the ability of smaller groups to achieve breakthroughs previously confined to governments and large corporations, the rise of the techno-philanthropist, and the immense potential of what has been called the ‘bottom billion’. 

First the weaker arguments. The short chapter on ‘techno-philanthropists’, yes, Bill Gates and co, seem like padding, or perhaps even a nod to some friends and benefactors. Yes, the money pledged to be given away by Gates, Zuckerberg, Buffet and others is colossal, but can it really be significant in actually changing world history? Perhaps Diamandis is right, but the arguments here are not persuasive, and the record since publication is mixed. 

Secondly, the DIY Innovator. Diamandis cites the rise of the individual and small group as a force for technological change in the future. This rings true, insofar as innovation often dislodges an incumbent (or to use the hackneyed term ‘disrupts’). Thus the more new entrants in a market, the more likely advancement to new and useful technologies will be as competition dislodges larger, older companies. Matt Ridley identifies increasing specialisation as the driver behind innovation, as it leads to the invention of ‘tool-making tools’ (eg those used by blacksmiths), and one can see how in a digital world this can become a self-perpetuating process. If programming becomes a meta-skill required to invent new businesses, if apps become an eco-system for solving day to day problems, if 3D printers are able to democratise industrial design, new invention will beget new invention, at an increasing rate. Perhaps the book neglects to predict the rise of the Silicon Valley giants - Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google - and their immense market power, but all those companies acquire multiple start-ups annually, and so are clearly affected by the constant influx of DIY innovators. Silicon Valley aside, the real impact of the DIY Innovator should come from the developing world. As internet access becomes near universal, we can expect an explosion of new ideas from problem solvers with diverse problems, needs and means across the globe. 

The most persuasive arguments for Abundance lie in the exponential growth of technology, and the ‘bottom billion’; that is, the four billion members of the human race currently (in 2012) on roughly $2 per day.  Firstly, exponentials. Moore’s Law speculated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, essentially doubling computing power each cycle. This has held to be roughly true over an extraordinary period of time, even extrapolating backwards. Diamandis and his collaborator Ray Kurtzweil (author of The Singularity) contend that exponential growth is taking place over a large number of domains, beyond computing power. Exponential growth, whilst a number is below one, is difficult to notice. But it will soon explode in a way that humans find difficult to comprehend, because we are so used to linear growth in the natural world. This difficulty is part of the explanation for what the authors perceive to be our undue pessimism, when simply extrapolating an exponential growth rate will show how quickly we will have almost unimaginable computing power at our fingertips in a short space of time. 

Second, the ‘bottom billion’. In 2012 there were approximately 4 billion people living on less than $2 per day, essentially at subsistence level. Insofar as that can be called a ‘market’, it has been largely ignored by corporations and innovators who were in a position to create suitable products for profit. The argument here is that aggregated together, this is an enormous market, worth $13 trillion dollars annually, and if catered for can be extremely fruitful for innovative firms. For example, Arvind Mills, the world’s fifth-largest denim manufacturer was unable to penetrate rural India with it’s $50 jeans, so instead introduced 'Ruf & Tuf Jeans', a ready to make kit of jean components, costing about $6 - now easily the best selling jeans in all of India. 

Taking together the advancement of technology and the bottom billion, one can begin to see previously unavailable opportunities for rapid escape from poverty. It helps to view economic growth as falling under two categories - innovation, for the nations at the forefront of technology, and ‘catch up’ for those who are not. China’s extraordinary and historically unprecedented growth can be explained by the latter. Since Steve Jobs had already brought the smartphone to the masses in developed countries, China could skip the step by step process of developments in telephony and move immediately onto apps and online payment systems. It is hard to overstate the importance of this process in development economics. Now, consider the specific attribute of digital technologies that is zero marginal cost of production. If I write a book and release it in paperback form, each additional book costs money to produce. If it is released in audiobook form and sent to a mobile phone, each additional book costs me zero. So selling the book for even 10p is profitable - and there are 4 billion people previously unable to but potentially desirous of reading it. Herein lies the secret sauce to rapid catch-up development of the poorest nations on the planet. The ability to get credit, transfer money without walking to the next village, obtain reliable weather forecasts, commodity price information, farming and manufacturing knowledge and so much more can be transformative for the bottom billion. All of this is information costs zero to obtain once the means of getting information (the internet) is available. This is also true for medical and disease-prevention advice, which leads to a further effect of development. It is a demographic truth that birth rates fall as child mortality falls. In other words, high birth rates, tragically, factor in the potential loss of children, in places where such loss is a fact of everyday life. China’s fall in birth rate, whilst attributed to the one-child policy, mirrored that of India at similar levels of development. Falling birth rates give fewer children better nourishment, education and ultimately, prospects. 

When viewed through this lens, development can accelerate and become a self-perpetuating process. Whilst this has been derided as the view of an optimist, there is some obvious evidence in favour of the argument. Malthus is often mocked for how wrong he was, but the predictions made in 1972 were no less wrong, as we continue to innovate our way out of resource scarcity. Most intriguing is the concept of dematerialisation. This is the idea that markets will innovate to use fewer physical resources simply as a cost saving measure, whilst technology will always reduce the number of physical objects we use by combination. A smartphone for example, negates the need for a camera, a watch, a radio, a pedometer, a map, a GPS and more. The actual quantity of materials being used in many domains falls year on year with higher output, as farming uses technology to require less water, fertiliser and land, and day to day goods like a drink can use less than 10% of aluminium compared to 1970 (this argument is given a fuller treatment in Andrew Mcafee’s excellent More From Less). 

These trends bode well for the environment, as do the demographic trends discussed above. Most significant is the argument that whilst we may have limited fossil fuels, we have more energy from sunlight than could be ever used practically by the human race. We have more water in the sea than all of our present and future consumption needs, by far. It is not the quantity of physical resources that restricts us as a race, but our ability to harness these resources. Our knowledge is growing exponentially, and that knowledge is diffusing to an increasingly large proportion of the population at an ever-increasing rate. This is the crux of the argument found in Abundance. Abundance does not imply luxury - multiple Mercedes in every garage - but the ability to give good lives to everyone without the hasty destruction of the planet as a necessary consequence.

There is a short chapter early in Abundance, where the work of Nobel Prize (in economics)-winning psychologist Daniel Khaneman is invoked, as seems to be compulsory in all social science books from this period. His work on cognitive biases is used by way of explanation for the general pessimistic view of the future taken by most commentators, to which Diamandis and Kotler clearly do not subscribe. Not mentioned in the book is Khaneman’s contention that optimism, and indeed overconfidence are evolutionarily-useful traits. These traits compel us to take risks whose positive outcome is unsure or unlikely, but cumulatively benefit humanity. This optimism and its consequences ought to be the legacy of Abundance, with the self-fulfilling prophecy of the world being a better place its (hopeful) outcome.