Design your Thinking

Abundance – The future is better than you think

              -          By Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler.

Imagine a giant orange tree full of fruits. If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches I am effectively out of accessible fruits. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called Ladder, I have suddenly got new reach. Problem solved!

Technology is a resource liberating mechanism. It can make once scarce the now abundant. Taken together, people like Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Ratan Tata and few more, are a group whose track record shows that one of the better responses to the threat of scarcity is not to try to slice our pie thinner – rather it’s to figure out how to make more pies.

The solution to all the negative feelings in our daily life isn't complicated. All we need to do is bring gradual changes in the redundant lifestyle. Three Facts about the standard of living we have. Fact one- Currently humanity uses 30% more of our planet’s natural resources than we can replace. Fact two: If everyone on this planet decides to live the lifestyle that an average European lives, we would three planet’s worth of resources to pull it off. Fact three: If everyone on this planet decides to live the lifestyle that an average North American lives, we’d need five planet’s to pull it off.


Solar energy in abundance.
The amount of solar energy that hits our atmosphere has been 174 petawatts (174 x 10¹⁵ watts). 30%  of it is reflected back to the space. Out of this solar flux, half reaches the earth’s surface. Since humanity currently consumes 16 terawatts ( 16 x 10¹² watts). There is more than 5000 times unused solar energy falling on planet’s surface than we use it in a year. Once again it’s not an issue of scarcity it’s an issue of accessibility.


Is the benchmark appropriate?
Today 99% of the Americans living below poverty line have electricity, water, Fridge, T.V.  71% of these have a car. In fact a century ago Henry ford the richest person on the planet enjoyed few of these luxuries. Abundance is not about luxury but providing everyone a life of possibility. It is providing access to clean water, feeding hungry, controlling indoor pollution and eradicating life threatening diseases.

P.C. kakkar in his book, “The fortune at the base of the pyramid’, also wants us to focus on the low price products and services to open the dead end. Understand the roots of cynicism and reason why it’s this reaction – the inability of the people to see positive trends through the sea of bad news – that may be the biggest stumbling block on the road towards abundance.  


Seeing the forests through the Trees.
Abundance is a big vision compressed into small frames. In the various psychological prototypes of thinking as stated by Danilel Kahneman in his study, we’ve adopted the conventional behaviors like ‘The illusion of validity’, ‘Cognitive biases’, ‘availability heuristics’, ‘Loss aversion’ that keeps us away from the search of new way. One of the behavior, ‘Band wagon effect’ is a common hindrance in our Indian practice. The tendency to do or believe things because others do- even if we suspect there’s a real cause for optimism, these two biases will team up and make us doubt our own opinion.


If it bleeds, it leads
Pick up today’s newspaper and see all the news to notice that 90% of them are pessimistic. Why? Our brain is constantly looking for something to fear. It has a silver almond-shaped lobe responsible for primary emotions like rage, hate and fear called amygdala. “If it bleeds, it leads” works for the Amygdala’s attention because the first stop that all the incoming information encounters is this organ already primed to look for danger.


Dunbar’s Number
Robin Dunbar, an oxford university anthropologist found out that human beings self-organize in group of 150. This includes the celebrities we follow. Robin says the upper limit to the interpersonal relationship that our brain can process is 150. Even if a person has 1000 FB friends, she interacts with maximum 150 of them. So every increase in an online friend reduces your distant offline friend who isn't online. Which is why Americans do not have more than 150 soldiers in one unit.


Technology:
In 1950 the global product (equivalent of GDP) was $4 tn. In 2008 it became $61tn. Where did this 15 fold increase come in 58 years? The answer is automation. Toyota plant in Japan, manages to produce 500 cars daily with the help of mere 400 employees. AI, 3-D printing and Robotics entering in all aspects of life will ensure the exponential growth through technology.
Google on the Brain: Using Moore’s law,( Moore's Law refers to Moore's perception that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, though the cost of computers is halved.) the average $1,000 laptop should be computing at the rate of the human brain in fewer than fifteen years. Fast-forward another twenty-three years, and the average $1,000 laptop is performing 100 million billion billion calculations (1026) per second—which would be equivalent to all the brains of the entire human race.
This book, published in 2010, estimated the Internet users in 2020 to be 3bn. Today I checked it on google to find it to be 4.5 bn. That’s the pace of technology.
Larry Page describes the future of search in similar terms: “Google will be included in people’s brains. When you think about something you don’t know much about, you will automatically get the information.”
If we do a crash course in data generation to understand the power of abundance we will realize the speed of growth that’s happening. “From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five Exabyte’s of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes. In the year 2010, the human race generated five exabytes of information every two days. In 2013, the number was around be five exabytes produced every ten minutes. Today in 2020 we are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes in a day which is 1.7mb per second for every person…90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years…It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.”

The Robotics, AI, and the Unemployment Line of today.

In 1862, 90 percent of our workforce were farmers. By the 1930s, the number was 21 percent. Today it’s less than 2 percent. So what happened to the farm jobs that were displaced by automation? Nothing fancy. The old low-skill jobs were replaced by new higher-skilled jobs, and the workforce was trained to fill them. This is the way of progress.

Cumulative Progress:
If I am good at something, my subordinates should be good at something else. Otherwise progress does not happen. In a world of material goods and material exchange, trade is a zero-sum game “I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”


The Power of Constraints
Whenever the problem is big, we think more and expect an out of the box solution. Peter suggests not to think out of the box all the time. Keep trying the easily available practices one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that liberates.”



Disclaimer: This write up is just an attempt to preserve the good points stated by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. In the process, I have used my knowledge, experience, forecasts and discretion to settle on a point.