Abundance

Diamandis, who founded the XPRIZE Foundation, and Kotler argue that exponentially improving technologies will make the resources humans need cheap enough that scarcity ceases to be the organising economic problem. Their claim is that this is achievable within a few decades for the basic requirements of water, food, energy, healthcare, education and freedom.

The argument rests on several components. Exponential technologies including computing, networks, sensors, robotics, biotechnology, nanomaterials and artificial intelligence improve at rates that compound and that human intuition consistently underestimates. Scarcity is frequently a function of access and technology rather than of physical availability, which they illustrate with aluminium, once more precious than gold and now trivially cheap because electrolysis made extraction possible. Three additional forces contribute: what they call do-it-yourself innovators working with cheap tools, technophilanthropists directing large fortunes at specific problems, and the rising billion, meaning people entering the connected economy who represent both a market and a source of solutions.

They cover specific domains with the technologies they expect to solve each, including desalination and water purification, vertical farming and cultured meat, solar and storage, diagnostics and telemedicine, and online education.

The book is unrelentingly optimistic and gives limited weight to political economy, distribution or the possibility that technologies fail to arrive. Published in 2012, several of its specific predictions have not materialised on the stated timelines. The aluminium example and the argument that scarcity is often a technology problem are the durable contributions.