WSJ review of Abundance – the future is better than you think

Great review by Michael Shermer – Defying the Doomsayers.

Just got my Kindle copy of the book and have started reading it.  Superb.  I previously mentioned this book.

Here’s a few examples of the pace of change.

Accelerating change is happening in many areas. Information: A Masai warrior with a smartphone on Google has access to more information than the president of the United States did just 15 years ago. Technology: Today more people have access to a cellphone than to a toilet. Computing: In 15 years, the average $1,000 laptop is likely to be computing at the rate of the human brain. Education: The Khan Academy’s YouTube tutorial videos on more than 2,200 topics, from algebra to zoology, draw two million viewings a month from online students around the world.

We have good reason to be optimistic for the future:

Predictions of a rosy future have a way of sounding as unrealistic as end-is-nigh forecasts. But Messrs. Diamandis and Kotler are not just dreamers. They lay out a plausible road map, discussing, among other things, the benefits of do-it-yourself tinkering—like the work by geneticist J. Craig Venter in beating the U.S. government in the race to sequence the human genome—and the growing willingness of techno-philanthropists like Bill Gates to tackle real-world problems.

Check out the review.  Then check out the book.

One thought on “WSJ review of Abundance – the future is better than you think”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *