My friend Bill Tulloh, an economist affiliated with George Mason University, offers a very smart reframing of the core argument of A Whole New Mind. I’ll quote his email at length — because I wish I’d come up with it myself:
“The key trend, as I see it, is that the cost of creating additional
units (instances) of a things is falling dramtically. This is obvious in the case of software where manufacturing the second unit is nothing more than copying a disk, but I think it has also been happening in manufacturing of physical goods (nanotechnology self-assembly being the extreme end result). This puts a premium on design — the creation of the first instance. (Emphasis added by Pink, not Tulloh.) Your three As illustrates this well. It provides both a supply side argument (automation and asia as producers) for why producing additional units is getting cheaper, and a demand side argument (abundance and Asia as consumers) for why new types of things are increasingly in demand.
. . .
What makes a new design successful is quite different from what makes a more effcient production process successful. The challenge is figuring out how the new thing *fits* into the constanlty changing world so that it adds value and inspires adopters. This is were I see your six senses coming into play — context matters more than text.”