Abundance by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis
The authors begin discussing the difference between how humans evolved thousands of years ago in a world that was local and linear as compared to the present day that is global and exponential. For instance, the authors point out that a person today who reads the New York Times for one week encounters more information than a seventeenth-century citizen would have seen in their entire lifetime. Abundance is full of those types of fascinating facts. The authors assert that our predisposition to the local and linear clashing with today’s global and exponential world creates what they call disruptive convergence.
Abundance in the context of this book is about having enough of life’s essential needs to eliminate poverty in the world. Enough food, shelter, and water to provide for at least a basically comfortable and healthy life surmounting the ills currently plaguing the third world. The authors examine many real-life examples involving getting products into the third world in innovative ways that improve and transform the lives of the people there. For example the Ruf & Tuf jeans discussed on p 141. People in India could not afford forty dollars for a pair of jeans so Arvind Mills produced an innovative kit of jean components for a fraction of the cost. These are now the top sellers in India.
What is more earth shattering in my view is how access to cell phones have transformed life in the third world. Page 142 notes 10 phones added per 100 people adds .6% GDP cutting poverty by 2% which equals to 48 million people rising out of poverty. Astounding! The way that simply owning a mobile phone is transforming peoples lives enabling them to open bank accounts and obtain loans and place orders for necessities.
The concept of SOLES self organized learning environments where groups of four kids sit at a computer and teach each other along with the “granny cloud” strikes me as an example of one area where no innovation has been allowed to permeate yet better ideas are available. Despite continued decline of our education system we insist on doing business the same way we have for a hundred years. Rooms with 30 or 40 kids sitting in front of a teacher all day being lectured and then tested. All we’ve done differently is to throw more and more money and standardization. Standardization of mediocrity it would seem. We continue to conduct education using a system based on the era of industrialization and fail to acknowledge we are in the era of big data.
Read this book! It will transform the way you view the world and inform you as to how disruptive convergence is effects our lives.
