Sprinkle of Optimism

This is the second book for me by Peter Diamandis (ironically going backward). This book was much better and thoughtful than his latest one: the future is faster than you think. He put his passion in the writing and what he wanted to tell the world about his X Prize and philosophy. I quite liked it. He describes how our primate brains miss out the exponential technological progress. And discusses the drive for innovations revolve around 4 motivations: curiosity, fear, money, and legacy. Each fits nicely into our social system: science/academics, military, capitalism, and philanthropist. That is reassuring we have the right balance that fuels innovations in place (on top of X Prize style competition of course).

Another thing I truly appreciated is the countless number of chart references at the end. It amounts to 50 pages. As a data nerd, I crunched into every one of them.

Since this is the second book I read, one thing I wish he did was to analyze critically how some of the predictions didn't come true or taking longer than expected. I belive that is the style of Ray Kurzweil. It seems some of the predictions of blood monitoring or organ printing have not progressed that far since the book publishing 8 years ago. That's also true of books that have not faced demonetization or democratization unlike music even though ebooks had been around for years now. That would have much more educational value to us readers.