Why Our Future Will be Amazing
April 21, 2012 in Daily Bulletin
Ronald Bailey had the chance to sit down with the authors of Abundance: Why The Future Will Be Much Better Than You Think. Some of the things they talked about included:
- Our future looks set to be pretty amazing with technology improving the standard of living for everybody.
- The reason why we’re so often pessimistic and afraid of the future is because we’ve evolutionary evolved to be scared and focus on negative information.
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There are three tiers of challenges that have to be overcome before we enter a period of global abundance. They are:
- Water, food, and shelter.
- Energy, education, and information.
- Freedom and healthcare
- Luckily the solutions to these problems multiply – providing clean water, for example, helps solve a lot of diseases.
- Technology spreads exponentially. From being a luxury product in the 90s, there are 5.6 billion mobile phones in the world today.
To read about the way to overcome the three tiers of obstacles, a take on the Green Revolution, and the role that entrepreneurship has to play, click here.
Source: Reason
Via: Newmark’s Door
Good post.
1. Water is tricky, but the majority of water used (particularly in Developed Nations) goes towards agriculture. Switch to more water-efficient ways of agriculture (such as “drip irrigation” and indoor farming), and you’ll solve a lot of the water supply issues.
2. Shelter’s main issue is regulatory. There’s a lot of demand in most cities for housing, which would usually result in the building of more skyscrapers and denser housing (such as in some of the coastal Chinese cities). Regulatory barriers often block or slow this down.
The nice thing about more efficient ways of agriculture is that it can also go towards solving the food problem – since it means greater output.