Book review - "Abundance" by Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize Foundation and the co-founder of Singularity University, is one of the foremost futurists today. He is well known for both popularizing emerging technologies and driving their development. His new book, Abundance, chronicles the ways in which technology is rapidly transforming life for people all around the world, and will soon usher in a “post-scarcity economy.”

Diamandis starts out by identifying the sources of humanity's biggest needs today – water, food, energy, education, information, communication, transportation, health care, and freedom/democracy – before going on to explain how technology can solve or is already solving these problems. Many of these same topics have already been covered in this blog.

Technologies like Dean Kamen's Slingshot will soon transform the way water is distributed and solve humanity's single greatest problem. Bioengineered crops, in vitro meat production, and vertical farming will soon enable us to grow food in places where it was not previously possible, under conditions that are much safer, more environmentally friendly, and less volatile. New online education technologies will soon enable far more people to have access to high-quality K-12 education, at a greatly reduced price, and Moore's Law is reducing the price of computing to the point where nearly anyone in the world can afford it (case in point: the proliferation of cell phones throughout even the poorest parts of Africa and India.) Solar energy will become cost-competitive with fossil fuels by the 2020s, thus offering a virtually unlimited source of environmentally-friendly energy.

But the part of the book that I found the most intriguing wasn't simply the range of technological solutions to humanity's greatest challenges; although Diamandis writes about these emerging technologies with an insider's knowledge, they have all been discussed elsewhere for years. The most intriguing part was Diamandis' idea of billions of new minds “coming online.” Sadly, people grinding out an existence in poverty are usually not able to contribute their ideas and talents to the world, and we are all worse off for it. But as we solve the problems of poverty and move toward a post-scarcity economy, billions of people will be freed from the task of eking out a subsistence lifestyle and will be able to contribute more to humanity's wellbeing themselves.

In my opinion, this reserve of squandered brainpower is the biggest overlooked resource of exponential growth that humanity has. Even the futurist most known for the concept of exponential growth, Ray Kurzweil, rarely talks about this untapped human potential. I find Diamandis' idea of exponential growth due to human intelligence far more plausible than Kurzweil's idea of exponential growth due to artificial intelligence...at least for the next few decades.

For most of human history, progress crawled along at an incredibly slow pace, because nearly everyone was dirt poor, focused on staying alive rather than making the world a better place. Progress accelerated dramatically in the 19^th and 20^th century, as more and more people gained access to the basic necessities of life and were able to build careers in areas in which they were talented and interested. But even today, at most a small fraction of humanity is currently driving the vast majority of the technological, social, political, and economic change around the world. This small fraction is disproportionately comprised of those who have already benefited from abundance. Far too many people still do not have access to the basics of life, which are a prerequisite to leaving a lasting mark on humanity.

As more and more people gain access to these things and we enter a post-scarcity economy, the world will begin to “wake up.” What happens when 8 billion people, rather than 1-2 billion, have everything they need to pursue their dreams? What will they do? How much more rapidly will our world progress when we have so many more people working for the betterment of the world? What kind of ideas, dreams, and talents already exist in the world today, lying dormant and waiting to be unlocked by the technological drivers of abundance?

Book rating: 5/5 stars

Book Review - "Disrupting Class" by Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class, is a fascinating look at how disruptive new technologies will soon transform the dismal state of the American education system. By far, the most intriguing aspect is the potential for online education to completely upend traditional schools and dramatically improve education.

Some of the biggest problems with schools are often lost in the contentious political debates over teachers’ unions, vouchers, and merit pay. Often, the underlying problems are completely ignored because they seem intractable. The traditional classroom model – where one teacher instructs 25 students – is antiquated and ineffective at addressing students’ needs. As Disrupting Class illustrates, each student has unique learning styles and abilities, which are completely ignored in traditional schools.

In brick-and-mortar schools, where there are vastly more students than teachers, education cannot be customized to individual students. The instructor tries his or her best to teach according to the learning style that reaches the most students, but those who march to the beat of a different drum inevitably fall through the cracks. Classes invariably move at the same pace despite the fact that students do not learn at the same pace. An instructor teaches a unit, the students are tested on the material, and the entire class moves on to the next unit, regardless of the performance of individual students. As a result, the advanced students are bored in school and want to move faster, while the struggling students fall farther and farther behind as their knowledge deficiencies accumulate.

Disrupting Class envisions a future where these things are no longer problems, due to interactive online education that is far better than today’s education software, which far too often is nothing more than glorified flash cards. In the online classes of the future, each student will be able to learn at his or her own pace, and won’t advance to the next unit until he or she has mastered the material from the current one. The concept of awarding letter grades for classes might be replaced by measuring how long it takes a student to earn an A.

Additionally, online education will allow for classes to be customized to the student’s particular learning style. The debates over whether one particular teaching style is better than another, or whether charter schools are better than traditional schools, will vanish. When each student can learn the material in a manner tailored to his or her own needs, we will finally recognize that no single teaching style or type of school is best for all students.

Although the book primarily focuses on the American education system, the international implications of disruptive education technology are possibly even more profound. Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, stressed this point in his recent TED Talk. Online education offers the possibility to turbo-charge the human development of countries where access to education is still a problem. Far too many children in the slums of developing countries have little access to education of any kind. The proliferation of online education – which should roughly coincide with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in much of the developing world – will open up vast new worlds of information to students in the most remote parts of the planet, where local teachers are unavailable, unknowledgeable, or expensive.

Disrupting Class gets its name because, in Christensen’s view, these educational innovations will largely take place outside of traditional classrooms, and eventually supplant them entirely. In the infancy of online education, teachers will use online education to supplement their in-class curriculum, or use it to allow students to take classes that are not offered at the school. Over time, education software will play a larger and larger role in classrooms until the schools themselves are no longer necessary. Students might continue to gather with their local friends in a building called a “school” to learn, but classes will be determined by learning style, ability, and personal interests rather than by school district. Teachers will instruct students entirely via computer.

How long will it take until online education is widely adopted? Not long, by Christensen’s estimate. He notes that online education is following the same adoption pattern of many other disruptive technologies, such as digital photography, which start off very slowly but suddenly become dominant once they reach critical mass. According to Christensen, in the United States in 2000 there were 1,000 students in classrooms for every 1 online learner. By 2007, this ratio had dropped to 100 to 1. If this trend continues, online learning will command a sizable chunk of the market (10%) by 2014, and gain a majority by 2019. Shortly thereafter, our 170-year-old model of classroom-based learning will come to an end.

Projections from "Disrupting Class" by Clayton Christensen

My sole criticism of the book is that it is a bit too broad. Christensen primarily focuses on online education, but devotes short sections to other innovations like new methods of evaluating teaching styles, and teaching highschoolers the necessary parenting skills they will need to one day raise successful children of their own. Although these are certainly interesting ideas worth exploring, they felt a bit out of place in a book primarily about the disruptive nature of education technology. I would have liked to see these chapters replaced with more information about online education, which is, after all, the main focus of the book.

Disrupting Class is thought-provoking and charts a very plausible course for would-be developers of online education tools. The future of education will inevitably be online. The advantages are just too numerous to ignore.

4/5 stars

Book Review - "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan

Astronomer Carl Sagan’s 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World is the ultimate guide to critical thinking. Carl Sagan asks, “How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience, New Age thinking, and fundamentalist zealotry…and the testable hypotheses of science?”

Sagan offers a lengthy explanation of how the scientific method works, and how it is demonstrably more successful than any of its pseudoscientific imitators. He teaches the importance of having a skeptical worldview, especially of extraordinary claims. As he stated in Cosmos, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Sagan explains the necessity of Ockham’s Razor – the rule of thumb that people should not assume anything that the evidence does not require them to assume – in critical thought. He systematically exposes the absurdity behind many of the most popular modern-day forms of pseudoscience, including astrology, homeopathy, psychics, alien abductions, Freudian psychoanalysis, doomsday predictions, graphology, and numerology.

While some have criticized the book as being anti-religious, Sagan himself disputed this characterization. He was clearly an agnostic, but had a deep appreciation for the sense of wonder that religion could inspire and recognized that it had much in common with his own appreciation for science. He does take certain religious views to task – such as the ideas of young-earth creationism, faith healing, and divine intervention. However, he notes that although “religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience…there is no reason why religions have to play that role.” Sagan was a strong advocate of finding common ground between the religious and scientific communities: a central theme of his novel Contact.

14 years after its original publication, The Demon-Haunted World seems more topical than ever. The applications of critical thinking extend far beyond the realm of science. By being skeptical of unusual claims, we can better gauge the veracity of some of the odd statements we routinely hear from any authority, including our politicians, educators, corporate gurus, and religious leaders. In my opinion, there is no more important skill that our schools should teach students than the process of thinking critically. Unfortunately, most high schools and many universities don’t offer any classes in critical thought, even as electives. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World can guide us where our schools do not.

The Demon-Haunted World was Sagan's last book before his death in 1996. Although it never reached the same level of popularity as some of his other works such as Cosmos and Contact, I think it is his most important work for the layperson. The Demon-Haunted World has shaped my view of the world more than any other book.

5/5 stars

Book Review - "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" by Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier’s new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, is a criticism of many emerging technologies and beliefs which Lanier finds dehumanizing. In this long, rambling critique, Lanier’s targets include open-source projects, crowd-sourcing mechanisms such as wikis and prediction markets, and “cybernetic totalism.” If Lanier was not one of the founding fathers of virtual reality, it would be easy to label him a luddite, but he insists that he merely wants to help steer the course of technological development rather than inhibit it. But compared to the vast majority of third culture futurists, Lanier comes across as extremely conservative and reactionary. While I knew before I picked up the book that I would disagree with almost everything Lanier had to say, I think it is important to give a fair hearing to contrary ideas from intelligent people to avoid the echo chamber effect. The world always needs gadflies.

Lanier believes that crowd-sourcing tools are causing people to rely too much on the hive mind. He rejects the notion of the “wisdom of the crowds,” viewing wikis as error-prone and bias-prone compared to more scholarly texts. This may or may not be true (the empirical evidence is mixed), but ultimately it is irrelevant. While Lanier laments the fact that Wikipedia has become the central repository for human knowledge, he offers no convincing solution. “Stop relying on Wikipedia” is a poor excuse for a solution. If it were that simple, Wikipedia would never have become so popular in the first place. It’s no accident that people prefer Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Brittanica.

He criticizes “cybernetic totalism,” which he defines as the belief that human brains are nothing more than complex computer programs, and will one day merge with computer technology. This seems like a thinly veiled swipe at transhumanism in general, and specifically the Singularity (the belief that one day soon we will create a computer smarter than we are, which will create an even smarter computer, which will endow us all with godlike powers), which is the dominant mindset among most computer scientists. I have my own criticisms of the Singularity, so I really wanted to root for Lanier in this section of the book. But ultimately, I think that Lanier’s conclusions are just as irrational as some of the more wild claims of Singularity enthusiasts. Rather than question the plausibility of this worldview, Lanier attacks the desirability of a man-machine merger. I think he is barking up the wrong tree here. If this is plausible and most people view it as beneficial, it will almost certainly occur eventually regardless of whether Lanier thinks it dehumanizes us or not. Once again, Lanier offers no solution as to how to avert this technological outcome, or suggestions on how we could steer technological progress toward a goal he views as more desirable.

On the rare occasions when Lanier does suggest an alternative solution, his recommendations are so laughably impractical that they are difficult to take seriously. For example, he considers the evolution of music from a physical product (e.g. a record, tape, or CD) to a digital file as a small tragedy. He believes that this encourages piracy and destroys the incentive to create songs, and that as a consequence we have entered a musical dark age. That’s a perfectly valid opinion, but what is his solution? For us all to go back to physical music products! He suggests “songles” – little trinkets like bracelets, necklaces, or coffee mugs that could unlock our music when they are physically near a computer. Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of this, Lanier seems oblivious to the fact that we moved away from physical music products because people didn’t WANT physical music products. They simply want to be able to listen to their music whenever they want to, with as little hassle as possible.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with this book is Lanier’s presumption that we can simply choose to not walk down a certain path of technological development if most of us agree it is detrimental. He is clearly a technological determinist, whereas I’m more of a technological fatalist. In my view, anything that CAN be developed WILL be developed, provided that enough people view it as beneficial, the technology is diffused enough to make it impossible to ban, and the economic incentives exist for its development. Ultimately, Lanier falls victim to what my good friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “the illusion of control.” While it may be comforting to Lanier to believe that we can guide technological development so directly, this seems to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Don’t get me wrong; we absolutely need to have ethical debates about technological progress. But ultimately the naysayers will need to propose actual solutions instead of merely lamenting about the undesirable consequences of technology.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto is only 192 pages but feels much longer, given the disjointed, rambling nature of the chapters. It’s worth a read for anyone interested in futurism, for the simple reason that Lanier is one of the few contrarian voices in the third culture. But don’t expect to be convinced by many of his arguments.

3/5 stars