

Wheat straw has already been shrunk. In the future, meat could be produced without brains, legs or guts. John S. Dykes


Dematerialization is one of the reasons that Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler give for the future's being "better than you think" in their new book, "Abundance." Mr. Diamandis founded the X Prizes, which handsomely reward those who reach certain far-minded goals in technology, medicine, energy and ecology. The first X Prize was the $10 million Ansari X Prize, won by Burt Rutan and Paul Allen in 2004 for sending a spacecraft capable of carrying three people 62 miles into space twice within two weeks. A current X Prize will give $10 million to the "first team to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days for $10,000 or less per genome with an accuracy of no more than one error in every 100,000 bases sequenced."

As these examples demonstrate, Messrs. Diamandis and Kotler think that individual innovators can and will make huge differences to human living standards. Many of their book's fascinating examples are drawn from the world of business. Take Iqbal Quadir, who quit his job as a venture capitalist in New York to start a cellphone company in his native Bangladesh, at a time when cellphones cost nearly twice the annual income of the average Bangladeshi. He had the foresight to bet on falling costs and the usefulness of the new technology for the long-isolated rural poor.

Prizes can reward such unexpected developments, whereas all too much funding of research and development merely perpetuates the predictable. Of course, the effect is slightly spoiled if the prize-giver refuses to recognize an unorthodox solution to the problem. This happened with Britain's famous Longitude Prize of the 18th century, the committee for which notoriously refused for decades to recognize that John Harrison had solved the problem of calculating longitude simply by using a reliable clock.

As well as the X Prizes, Mr. Diamandis is co-founder and chairman of Singularity University, where the futurist Ray Kurzweil's ideas of exponentially accelerating technology are explored. Despite being unusually optimistic myself about what lies ahead for humanity, I'm not yet convinced that we are about to see almost infinite rates of technological improvement—Mr. Kurzweil's singularity—resulting, for example, in the indefinite extension of life.


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