Fundamental resources/Intro

So what have we got to work with? Mankind's fundamental resources are material, energy, intelligence and information. In reality they are all so enormously abundant that it's incredible to think that there are people in this world who are still going without the basic human necessities.

In the past a lack of technology could be considered a significant cause of scarcity but that is certainly not a reason any more. Despite common perceptions, there is no actual lack of material or energy available to us. Emerging methods of co-operation and advanced automation have the potential to unlock them to provide a good standard of living in all parts of the world, while causing minimal harm to the natural environment - a combination that is hard to imagine today, but is not impossible.

An important trend in technological progress is the tendency of products and processes to steadily become more efficient while using less material and energy – something that Buckminster Fuller termed ephemeralization .