Abundance! FastForward Radio

By | March 14, 2012
2 Comments

Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s amazing new book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than Yout Think. How close are we to solving some of the oldest and most intractable problems we have faced — including poverty, hunger, disease, and violence?

We might be closer than you think. Tune in and find out.

About the Book

“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.In Abundance, space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology, and many other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous two hundred years. We will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp.”

Join us

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  • Max

    So if I understand you correctly, you are comforted by the fact that aluminum’s value eventually came to be recognized and put to good use, if only some 1800 years after the secret of its production was first discovered?! Do you believe that that aluminum would not have been especially useful to pre-industrial societies… or are you trying to exemplify a new kind of Pollyanna Principle for the exponential age? If the glass is bone dry today, but you are certain that it will be completely full in two millennia — assuming that it still exists at that time — how full is it for all practical purposes?

    I’ve been listening to FFR on and off for a year or two now, and was pleased to see that the new Diamandis & Kotler book would be covered. I was hoping for (though not really expecting) a more balanced reading. Alas it still remains for someone to seriously address the glaring, critical hole in Diamandis & Kotler story — which Kotler himself acknowledged in another podcast (Singularity 1-on-1?) last month — namely how the technological potential for abundance might actually be fulfilled in an economic environment that only rewards scarcity consistently, and that consistently produces nothing more than the scarcity-preserving minimum except as an absolute last resort, when no other form of competition is possible.

    Aluminum is a great historical example, but not I think in the way that you suggested in the podcast. Nor is the possibility of another, present-day “Aluminum in absentia age” all that remote — just Google “IPv6″ from time to time over the next few years…

  • Phil Bowermaster

    No, we certainly don’t think that having aluminum disappear for two millennia years was a “good thing.” Tiberius was a beneficiary of material scarcity and an advocate of it. he didn’t get the big picture.

    One of the themes that we come back to on FFR (perhaps shows you’ve missed as you listen off and on) is the difficulty of the transition you’re describing. We discussed this at length in our shows with guest Martin Ford both in 2010 and more recently last summer as part of The World Transformed, and on other occasions. As we have framed the discussion up to this point, it has generally been about the challenge arising from abundance of productivity — which takes the form of increasingly pervasive and sophisticated automation replacing human beings in the workforce.

    The good news is that we get more productivity and everything becomes cheaper. The bad news is that the scarcity of labor, which has made individual human workers valuable in the economy, is eliminated. That is to say, people don’t have jobs and don’t have any way of participating in the economy.

    There are numerous scenarios for how this is addressed. Ford talks about wide-ranging redistributionist government programs. On another show with guest Alvis Brigis we discussed how the economy may shift towards prosumerism, with consumers earning back a portion of their economic life by producing content. (I blogged about that here just last week.) Other models include shifts towards towards information-based productivity (with or without the prosumer idea), shifts towards individual personal services, and more radical ideas like an economy based on reputation or influence.

    I don’t know which of these ideas will win out. My suspicion is that it will be a combination of things — certainly prosumerism alone won’t do it. And it could very well be an approach that we just haven’t thought of yet: an economic singularity, if you will. It’s interesting to note that all of the ideas listed here continue to rely on scarcity in one form or another; it’s just not the scarcity of energy or material resources that we’ve faced in the past.

    The transition may well be bumpy. Ford thinks that economic catastrophe is imminent if we don’t take huge steps now. Stephen is on the record predicting that things will get worse before they get better. (In fact, I’m pretty sure he reiterated that last week.)

    So I may be the “Pollyanna,” believing that the economy is likely to evolve fairly smoothly in response to these changes. In fact we’ll be talking about this on tomorrow’s show as we look at how dematerialization drives abundance and the challenges it brings for economic transition.