Abundance# summary

The world is made up of complex systems where changes in one area can have an impact elsewhere. Natural ecosystems are a great example: population changes in one species affect living and survival conditions for others.

Although the complexity of some systems may appear to exacerbate the problems we face, it also presents great opportunities. If progress is made in one area, it can create momentum and positive benefits in others.

Many people believe that big businesses across the globe exploit the world’s poorest people and exacerbate income inequality, with the people on top enjoying an ever-increasing share of the profits. However, this is increasingly not the case, as big businesses contribute more and more to the fight against global poverty.  

One of the ways they are doing so is by developing cheaper products for people at the bottom of the income pyramid. Due to the skewing of income equality across the world, a vastly greater proportion of the population is in this demographic – that’s around four billion people. This constitutes a huge potential market and the opportunity to make a profit, while raising the standard of living for the world’s poorest citizens.

Access to education is a major global problem. We’re millions of teachers short and lack infrastructure – and where it does exist, it’s falling into disrepair. Students fortunate enough to have access to education are following seriously outdated frameworks.

Business leaders agree that the educational system is not providing students with the skills needed to tackle the problems of the twenty-first century, particularly in areas such as critical thinking, creativity and problem solving.

We are generally uncomfortable with the word failure. There’s a certain stigma attached to it and, because of this, many people go out of their way to avoid it – even if it means not attempting something new. However, failure should not be viewed as the endpoint, but more as part of a longer learning curve and a vital stepping stone towards innovation.

In this respect, Apple’s early attempt to introduce a personal digital assistant called the Newton is a revealing example. Commercially speaking, it was a disaster. Development costs were very high and sales were disappointing, but the story doesn’t end there. Much of the development work on the Newton went into creating a handwriting recognition system, which became the foundation for the hugely successful iPhone.

Back in 1965, before the advent of home computing, Gordon Moore, an employee of Fairchild Semiconductor, made a bold prediction about the future of the computer industry. He predicted that the number of transistors on a computer chip, and therefore the processing speed, would continue to double every two years for the next ten years. Moore went on to become a co-founder of Intel, and his prediction wasn’t just right for the next ten years, but remains relevant today, and has since become known as Moore’s law.

Consider that today’s low-end laptops can perform around 10 to 11 (1011) calculations per second and the human brain is estimated to perform 10 to 16 (1016) calculations per second. So, if computer processors continue to progress in line with Moore’s law, the average laptop will surpass the speed of the human brain in the next fifteen years. This exponential increase in processing speed will have tremendous implications, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics.

From Star Wars to 2001: A Space Odyssey, many a science fiction film has envisioned an age where robots live among us in society, helping or hindering us – depending on the plot, of course. Technology programs have seduced us with the idea of robots helping us around the house but still these promises hardly seem to have been realized today – self-operating vacuum cleaners aside.

Now, however, there are good reasons to believe that the wait for intelligent robots may be coming to an end.

After witnessing the horrific problems created by the lack of access to clean water in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, Michael Pritchard, an English engineer and expert in water treatment, was motivated to do something about it. He set about creating a simple and portable solution and, just a few years later, in 2009 he created the simple design of the Lifesaver water bottle.

Lifesaver certainly doesn’t look high-tech, with a hand-pump on one end and a filter on the other. However, Pritchard realized early on in the design stage that conventional filters were able to  capture most bacteria but not viruses, which are far more microscopic, so he decided to look to nanotechnology.

Imagine you’ve just broken your last coffee cup. You could run to the store and buy a new one or order one online and wait for it to be delivered. But let’s imagine that, instead, you could browse designs online, download whatever cup design you like, hit “print” and a desktop device manufactures the item for you in minutes.

Far from science fiction, the above scenario is already possible. The device is a 3D printer, which can fabricate an object of any shape by laying down successive layers of material, one on top of the next.

Although biotechnological applications in food have created much controversy in recent years, the science itself is nothing new. The 12,000-year history of farming is characterized by farmers manipulating living systems, creating new strains of crops through cross-pollination and manipulating the plants’ DNA.

Technology may have moved on, but the principle of manipulating organisms remains the same. Today, advances in genetic engineering provide solutions that are proving to be a key weapon in the fight to feed an ever increasing population.

When Colombian computer engineer Oscar Morales created a Facebook group one morning in 2008, he could never have imagined the eventual consequences.

Morales created the group to make a stand against the terrorism and kidnapping by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC. By the end of the week, the group had one hundred thousand members and, as the numbers grew, this virtual protest turned into a real one.

If we want to talk about abundance in terms of energy sources, then we don’t really need to look much further than the sun. It’s estimated that the solar power in the deserts of North Africa is enough to supply forty times the world’s current usage.

With so much energy available from one source, why are we not capturing more of it?

As the proportion of the population living in cities continues to increase and the amount of land suitable for growing crops decreases, the distance we ship food continues to climb.

In the US, for example, the average distance foodstuffs travel is 1,500 miles, but a meal of different ingredients could easily be five times that amount. In a world of scarce resources, this kind of practice seems unsustainable, but it’s hard to resolve as we move further away from where our food is grown.

Optimizing production and capturing techniques is only one side of the coin in the battle towards efficient management of the world’s resources. We also need to ensure that delivery systems of resources and products are efficient in order to minimize waste.

Take water, for example: an estimated 20 percent of fresh water is lost through contamination or leaks in the network of pipes that delivers the water to taps. Such a high percentage of waste is alarming with such a vital resource, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

The main message of this book is:

Abundance provides a breathtaking tour of key technologies and the implications of their projected exponential growth, giving us a glimpse of how they may develop and discussing the ways in which this will impact society. From the potential role of robots and artificial intelligence in improving healthcare to the uses of nanotechnology and digital manufacturing in reducing waste and conserving natural resources, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic that the future is not just bright, but may well be one of abundance.