The future's rosy

After four years of incessant gloom, a burst of optimism is seizing America. Or at least pockets of it. The Dow Jones index has been dancing at around 13,000, a number last seen in the spring of 2008 when Lehman Brothers was still just about a going concern. Apple has added $100 billion to its value in just the past eight weeks. Unemployment is finally tilting downwards. In Washington, both President Obama and the Republican candidates have been drooling over the same magazine article, published last month in The New Republic, titled Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline, which argues that those Americans who doubt their country’s continued success are committing “pre-emptive suicide”.

Meanwhile, from Silicon Valley comes Abundance, which rocketed to the top of the Amazon charts on publication, arguing that thanks to technology, the world will soon be free of hunger and poverty, and that “we will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs for every man, woman and child on the planet. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.”

After many false dawns and promises that the green shoots of recovery could soon be poking through, 2012 looks like it might be it. Maybe not for Greece but for America at least, and as America goes, Europe should follow.

Abundance is an intriguing contribution to the positive mood. Its authors, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, make the case that “our day-to-day experience has improved massively over the past two centuries”, that technology is on the brink of an epochal set of breakthroughs and “poised to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years.”

They write that three factors are going to lead to fast and dramatic change for the good: DIY Innovators, people enabled by ever cheaper technology to do ever more remarkable things without the support of companies and universities, Technophilanthropists, a new generation of ultra-rich, youngish people with a fundamentally optimistic view of the power of technology, and the Rising Billion, the poorest billion people in the world who now have access to technologies such as mobile phones even while their water sources are to be improved.

Diamandis has a ready audience because of his position within the technology community. A rocket science and Harvard-trained doctor, he has run a series of companies devoted to space exploration, with names such as Zero Gravity Corporation, the Rocket Racing League and Space Adventures.

His most successful venture, however, has been the X-Prize Foundation, which runs contests to discover innovations. He created the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, a $10 million Progressive Automotive X-Prize for fuel-efficient cars, and is now running similar contests in healthcare, energy and education.

He is also the co-founder of Singularity University, a unique institution based at a Nasa campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, which invites people each summer to come and think about “solving the planet’s most pressing challenges using exponential & accelerating technologies”.

Diamandis’s go-go optimism is not universally shared, even in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, wrote a widely distributed article last year saying America had given up on its dreams during 40 years of ideological wandering, and that progress through technology should no longer be assumed. He wrote: “The first and the hardest step is to see that we now find ourselves in a desert, and not in an enchanted forest.”

One of Thiel’s answers has been to invest millions in “sea-steading”, the idea of developing colonies of people living on platforms in the ocean. So, it seems, while our future may be put out to sea, it is also looking healthy.