It's getting better.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Soundbite - Interview with Peter Diamandis - Interview

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From where Peter Diamandis sits, the future looks good. Diamandis, who has a graduate degree in aerospace engineering from MIT and a medical degree from Harvard, is the founder and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, which gives money to the cause of"radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity." The foundation is best known for awarding the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private manned spaceflight in October 2004. Diamandis' newest exercise in optimism is the book Abundance: Why the Future Is Better Than You Think (Free Press), which he coauthored with Steven Kotler. Diamandis sat down with reason online Managing Editor Tim Cavanaugh in March to discuss why things are getting better all the time. Check out the full interview at reason.tv.

Q: Can you give us a brief description of what the book is about?

A: A lot of people think that the world is getting worse, but they're wrong. The world is actually getting better at an extraordinary, accelerated rate. Human life span over the past 100 years has more than doubled. The childhood mortality rate has decreased by more than 90 percent. Income per person, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Today an American under the poverty line, the poorest of the poor, still has running water, flushing toilets, air conditioning, cellphones; the majority have access to a car; they're living with a set of capabilities that the wealthiest people on the planet 150 years ago, the robber barons, the monarchs, the emperors, would have been jealous of.

This book talks about how the world is getting better and what are the forces driving us that way. The first force driving us toward abundance is rapid, exponentially growing technology. All of these things--faster and faster computers that are enabling artificial intelligence, and robots, and digital medicine, and synthetic biology--those technologies are being used by the second force, which is the DIY [do-it-yourself] innovator, the guy or the gal who is...