Steven Kotler

The future is better

than you think
Enough with the pessimism: if we look at real data, we see that the human
race is making progress like never before. Four powerful forces are making
the difference: exponential growth in technology, do-it-yourself innovation,
technophilanthropy and the rise of the bottom billion. Humanitys ultimate objective no longer appears impossible: abundance for all is within
our grasp.
A quick glance at the headlines lets us know the score: dark days ahead. With growing
concerns about population size, economic meltdowns, energy shortages, water shortages, food shortages Alarmists are having a field day. So pervasive has our sense of
doom and gloom become that anyone telling a differSteven Kotler, an author and journalist, reent story can rarely be heard. But there is a very difcently published Abundance.
ferent story worth telling.
Currently, thanks to the exponential growth rate of
technology and three other emerging forces, we are teetering on the edge of a much
better tomorrow. Progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanotechnology, synthetic biology,
and many other revolutionary fields will enable us to make greater gains in the next
two decades than weve made 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 actually within our grasp.

THE AMYGDALA: OUR EARLY WARNING SYSTEM. Of course, now that

Ive made such a statement, theres another issue to consider: the fact that to many, it
just sounds like hogwash. There are good neurological reasons for this reaction, and

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before we turn our attention to where were going, lets first address why its so difficult
to believe we can ever get there. Every second of every day our senses are deluged
with data: more than we can possibly process. To deal with this overload, the brain is
continuously sifting and sorting, trying to tease apart the critical from the casual.
Since nothing is more critical to the brain than survival, the first filter most of this
incoming information encounters is the amygdala.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped portion of the temporal lobe, responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate, and fear. Its also our early warning system, an organ on
high alert, constantly scanning our environment for anything that could threaten survival. Anxious under normal conditions, once stimulated, the amygdala becomes hypervigilant. But so potent is this response that, once turned on, its difficult to shut off.
In the final analysis, this is a problem in the modern world.
These days, were media saturated. We have thousands of news outlets competing for
our mind share. And how do they compete? By vying for the amygdalas attention. The
old newspaper saw: If it bleeds, it leads, works because the first stop that all incoming information encounters is an organ already primed to look for danger. Bad news
sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.
Exacerbating this, our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when
threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Things have changed. Many of todays
dangers are probabilistic (terrorists might attack, the economy could nosedive) and
the amygdala cant tell the difference. Worse, the system is designed not to shut off
until the threat has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely. Add in an impossible-to-avoid media continuously scaring us in an attempt to
capture market share, and you have a brain convinced that its living in a state of siege
and no end in sight.

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THE REAL WORLD: NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL. In light of all of this, youve
got to wonder, what does the world really look like? Turns out, its not the nightmare
most suspect. Violence is at an all-time low, personal freedom at an historic high.
During the past century, child mortality decreased by 90%, maternal mortality by
99%, while average human lifespan increased by 100%. Food is cheaper and more
plentiful than ever before (groceries, for example, cost 13 times less today than in
1870). Poverty has declined more in the past 50 years than the previous 500. In fact,
adjusted for inflation, incomes have tripled in the past five decades. On top of that,
many of those living under the poverty line today still have access to a telephone,

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toilet, television, running water, air conditioning and even a car. Go back 150 years,
and the richest people in Europe could have never dreamed of such wealth.
Nor are these changes restricted to the developed world. In Africa today, a Masai warrior on a mobile phone has better mobile communications than the United States president did 25 years ago; if theyre on a phone with Google, then they have access to
more information than the president did even 15 years ago. And if its a smartphone,
consider the feast of features that now come standard: watch, stereo, camera, video
camera, voice recorder, gps tracker, videoteleconferencing equipment, a vast library
of books, films, games, music. Just 20 years ago, these same goods and services would
have cost over 1 million dollars.

FORCES OF CHANGE. Most importantly, four powerful forces are now starting to

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emerge, each with enormous world-changing potential and none more important than
the accelerating rate of technological progress. Right now, all information-based technologies are on exponential growth curves. This means that theyre doubling in power
for the same price every 12 to 24 months. This is why an $8 million dollar supercomputer from two decades ago now sits in your pocket and costs less than $200.
This same rate of change is also showing up in networks, sensors, cloud computing, 3d
printing, genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and dozens of other industries. Biotechnology has been on such a wild exponential ride that a state-of-the-art biotech lab,
complete with automation (what would have cost millions of dollars just ten years ago)
can now be had for under $10,000.
Our second force is the do-it-yourself (diy) innovator. A diy revolution has been
steadily brewing these past 50 years, but lately has begun to boil over. In todays
world, backyard tinkerers have moved from custom cars and homebrew computers
into once esoteric fields like neuroscience, biology, genetics and robotics. Whats
more, today, these small teams of motivated diyers can accomplish what was once the
sole province of large corporations and governments. To cite just a couple examples:
while the aerospace giants felt it was impossible, Burt Rutan flew into space. Craig
Venter tied (some say beat) the mighty us government in the race to sequence the
human genome. Right now, high school and college students are using the tools of
synthetic biology to complete real world projects that rival the output of major biopharmaceutical companies.
Whats more, as some of the greatest business opportunities lie in solving the worlds
grand challenges, diyers are now turning their attention in that direction. Take Dean

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Kamen. With 440 patents and a National Medal of Technology, Kamen is one of the
greatest diy innovators in history. Lately, hes turned his attention to the problem of
water scarcity which, until recently, was considered an impossible boondoggle. When
you talk to experts about water, he says, theyll tell you with four billion people
making less than two dollars a day theres no viable business model, no economic
model, and no way to finance development costs. But the 25 poorest countries already

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spend 20% of their gdp on water. Four billion people spending 30 cents a day is a $1.2
billion market every day. Thats $400 billion a year. I cant think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year.
Kamen, meanwhile, is sure to tap into this market, as hes now in beta trials with his
Slingshot, a water purifier that can turn anything wet (polluted water, sea water, even
latrine water) into the purest water on Earth, at a rate of 1000 liters per machine per day
for as little as two cents a liter and requiring less energy than it takes to run a hair dryer.
Our next force is money a lot of money being spent in a very particular way. The
high-tech revolution created an entirely new breed of wealthy technophilanthropists
who are using their fortunes to solve global, abundance-related challenges. Bill Gates
is focused on eliminating malaria; Naveen Jain is crusading against poverty in India;
Pierre and Pam Omidyar are determined to bring electricity to the developing world.
And this list goes on and on. Taken together, our third driver is a technophilanthropic
force unrivalled in history.

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And unlike the philanthropists of yesteryear, todays new breed is taking a much more
active approach. While the old model was to write a check and proceed to feel good
about oneself, the new model signifies much more: the check is merely the first step.
Todays technophilanthropists do a whole lot more than just bring fiscal capital to the
table: they bring human capital as well.
They bring networks, connections and the ability to get high-level meetings, says
Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Ventures Partners Seattle. When Gates
decided to fight for vaccines, he built a team and led them into meetings with world
leaders and the World Health Organization. Most organizations cant get into those
rooms, but Gates could, and it made a huge difference.
Lastly, there are the very poorest of the poor, the so-called bottom billion, who are
finally plugging into the global economy; they are poised to become the rising billion. The creation of a global transportation network was the initial step down this
path, but its the combination of the internet, microfinance and wireless communication technology thats truly transformational. Over the next decade, and for the first
time in history, three billion new voices will join the global conversation.
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THE PROMISE OF THE RISING BILLION. What will these people desire?
What will they create? If for no other reason than for their large numbers and for the
power of their potential, the rising billion belong in the same category as exponential
technology, the diyers and the technophilanthropists: they are a potent force for abundance. In fact, simply as a market force, the rising billion represents tens of trillions
of dollars flooding into the global economy on an annual basis. But thats merely the
start. Exponentially growing technology is starting to enhance the lives of the worlds
poor in radically new ways.
Take the Khan Academy. In 2006, a Boston-based hedge fund analyst named Salman
Khan began making online tutorial videos for his nieces. These videos covered basic
high school subjects. He posted them on YouTube (because he couldnt think of a
reason not to) and they quickly became a hit a huge hit.
There are now over 2,500 videos, covering everything from American history to quadratic equations to introductory neuroscience, and they are being downloaded by
over two million people a month. Even better, the Khan Academy is now translating
these videos into the ten most common languages (Google is driving the effort) with
plans to then crowdsource the results into hundreds of languages. With advances like
the Khan Academy, anyone who has access to a smartphone also has access to a

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world-class education. This means that the rising billion will also be better educated
than ever before.
Theyll also be healthier. Consider the recently announced Qualcomm Tricorder X
Prize. This prize bestows $10 million dollars on the top three teams able to design a
handheld device that can diagnose disease better than a certified doctor. The Tricorder will certainly help slash healthcare costs in places like the us and Europe, but in
parts of the world where doctors are in short supply, the Tricorder will radically reshape the quality of medical diagnostics.
All this means that the rising billion will continue to rise, becoming healthier and
better educated than ever before and, thus, beginning to contribute like never before.
Clearly, all of these forces have enormous potential. Indeed, even on their own, they
each have radically transformative power. But acting together, amplified by exponentially growing technologies, the once unimaginable becomes the now actually possible. Imagine: abundance for all.

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