>>Peter Diamandis: It's a pleasure to be here and an honor to be here, and thank you to
the organizers for such an extraordinary, fun couple of days.
Let's get started, if I can get the first slide up.
Here we go.
So abundance.
The future is better than you think.
What leads me to that conclusion really is that we're living in a day and age where small
teams of individuals can literally do what only governments and large corporations could
do before.
And I also believe we're living in a did and age where we have the ability to literally
take on and solve the world's grand challenges.
And when I say that, many people sort of scoff at that idea and they say, my God, huge challenges.
How can we possibly take these on and solve them in our lifetime?
And the challenge is that we're thinking about these things using the linear software and
hardware of our brains that evolved over time.
If you go back millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years when we were evolving
as humans on the planes of Africa, the world back then would be best described as being
local and linear.
When I say that, it is local in that everything that affected you was within a day's walk.
And it was linear in that the life of your grandparents, your parents, you, your kids,
their kids, nothing changed generation to generation, millennia to millennia.
So we evolved our brains in a way of thinking just locally and linearly, and that's the
way we think today.
But the fact of the matter is, we're living in a world that is best described as global
and exponential.
You know, something happens in China or India or California, you know about it seconds later,
if not milliseconds later.
And it is exponential in that not only is the life of our parents and you and our kids
different, it is different over a few years.
Think about the technologies that didn't exist ten years ago that we are now completely and
totally dependent on.
So it's that rapid change that is creating this change, this missed expectation, if you
would.
It is this yellow exponential curve, which is where technologies are coming online, and
that red flat line, which is the way our brains think in a linear and local fashion.
And the disconnect between that is really the transformative potential we as humans
now have to take on and solve the world's grand challenges.
Now, what's been driving all of this capability, this extraordinary move forward is, as you
well know, Moore's law.
This is a simple plot of computational speed.
There is a log scale on the left, a hundred years across the bottom.
And there are two things I want you to take away from this chart.
The first is over these hundred years how smooth and consistent the growth in computational
speed has been.
Literally, it is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers.
It doesn't go up and down with war time and peace time and boom time and depression.
It is literally faster computers building faster computers.
The second thing I want you to take away from this curve is that even though, taking you
back to your high school math, on a log curve an exponential should be a straight line,
it is curving upwards, which is the fact that computers are, in fact, getting faster and
faster at a faster rate.
So that kind of capability is driving us across a whole slew of technologies, infinite computing,
if you would, cloud computing, if you would, sensors and networks, robotics -- we just
saw some beautiful demonstrations of that -- 3D printing, digital manufacturing synthetic
biology, digital medicine, nanomaterials, and artificial intelligence.
These are the tools that people have to literally take on and change the world.
And those of you -- I'm curious, how many of you saw the winning of the game in the
United States "Jeopardy" by IBM's Watson computer?
So a small number, but it was an epic event.
And A.I. is, if you would, the partner to robotics we just saw.
With that, I would like to show you a short clip because you really should get a sense
of what this kind of capability can now bring this.
[ VIDEO PLAYING ] >>Peter Diamandis: I swear they do that on
purpose.
It's literally now -- the technologies that exist allow us to democratize the ability
to change the world, to take on the grand challenges.
And at Singularity University, what we do is we ask graduate students to start companies
that can positively impact the lives of a billion people within a decade.
We call that tenth to the ninth impact.
So if you have the ability of small teams to change the world, the question is: How
do you focus them?
And we're living in a day and age where the world's biggest problems are also the world's
biggest market opportunities.
Solve hunger, energy, water and you make billions in the process and you get the benefit of
the planet.
So I also run an organization called the X PRIZE Foundation.
I was inspired by Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic to win a $25,000 prize and launch
something called the Ansari X PRIZE for space flight.
That was a huge success, opened up a private space flight industry.
We now have Virgin Galactic using the winning technology from this vehicle.
I then went on.
We had the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE asking teams to build 100-mile-per-gallon
equivalent cars.
130 teams entered this competition.
Three were won, now going into production.
And then recently on the heels of the BP Oil spill, James Cameron had just joined our board
and said, "You got to do something about that."
And we put out a challenge because what we found out is that the mechanism for cleaning
up oil spills in the ocean's surface had not changed between the Exxon Valdez and the spill
in the Gulf, 21 years.
We launched the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, $1.4 million of prize money,
asking teams to please figure out how to at least double the rate at which oil was cleaned
up on the ocean's surface.
350 teams entered this competition.
The top ten teams went head to head in the world's largest oil spill cleanup facility.
And seven of the ten teams, for a $1.4 million prize, doubled what had been the existing
standards for 21 years.
Extraordinary.
One of the teams was a family out of Alaska who built the dad's design.
The winning team was able to increase it 6X, sixfold increase in the oil spill cleanup
rate.
You clean it in the ocean before it hits the shore.
But what really impressed me, the concept of what's called cognitive surplus that Clay
Shirky speaks about, was a team that met in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor, I kid you not,
that doubled the existing standards for cleaning up oil.
I will show you a short video.
[ VIDEO PLAYING ] >>Peter Diamandis: So the question is: When
you're looking to solve the world's biggest problems, where do you find the solutions?
Because sometimes the expert is the person who can tell you exactly how it can't be done,
right?
And it is really people coming at the problem with an orthogonal point of view.
So for us, it's really the challenge to put out to the world and say, These are the biggest
problems.
Solve these problems.
So where are we going next?
Well, we have the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE.
We have 26 teams around the world who are building private lunar lander vehicles to
go back to the moon, bring down the cost of opening the space frontier by orders of magnitude
but, most importantly, to inspire scientists and engineers, young kids, to go and really
create the Apollo of today's generation.
We just launched at CES something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE.
We are asking teams around the world to build literally a handheld mobile device that any
consumer can use that you can cough on, talk to, do a finger blood prick and can diagnose
you better than a team of board certified doctors.
We expect this to be won in the next four years.
But what gets really, really exciting is that three months after we launched this in January,
we have almost 200 teams from 25 countries competing for this competition, who I would
have never found if I was looking for them.
So, where are we going?
We just raised $19 million from the Robin Hood Foundation in New York, a group of hedge
fund managers and bankers to look at X PRIZEs to attack poverty.
And then one of my commitments this year is to launch a series of X PRIZEs in education,
to reinvent how we educate our kids, finally, after a couple hundred years.
So I say with all of what I have learned from SU and X PRIZE is that we are heading into
a world of abundance, a transformative world.
People say, Really?
Can we really be doing that?
Haven't you heard all the negative views out there?
But, you know, the news media's purpose is to get your attention and they get it by giving
you negative news constantly to your tablet, to your phone, to your newspaper, to your
radio.
It is a drug, and they are the drug pusher.
But the fact of the matter is the world has been getting better at an extraordinary rate
and that literally technology has been the mechanism for turning scarcity into abundance.
And I will give this one example which for me was very poignant.
The guy on the left here is Napoleon, III.
It is about 1840 and the guy on the right is the King of Siam.
And Napoleon invites the King of Siam over for dinner.
And Napoleon feeds his troops with silver utensils.
Napoleon himself is fed with gold utensils, but to impress the King of Siam, he is fed
with aluminum utensils.
You see, aluminum back then was the most precious metal on the planet.
Even though it is 8.3% of the earth by weight, all of the aluminum is bound with oxygen and
silicates.
It is so difficult to extract from bauxite because you don't find it pure in the ground,
that it was worth more than gold and platinum.
That's why in D.C. the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum because it was
built in that same decade.
And then the technology of electrolysis came along and made literally the ability to remove
aluminum so cheap that we use it with a throw-away mentality.
So if you think about that, where technology is a liberating force, the same thing holds
in a lot of other areas.
Energy, we talk about energy scarcity.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are living on a planet 5,000 times more energy hits the surface than
we consume as a species in a year.
It's there, just not yet accessible.
But technology is changing that.
Last year the cost of solar dropped nearly 50%.
The technologies are coming online where solar is growing at 30% penetration a year.
If you have abundant energy, you have abundant water.
We talk about water wars and water scarcity, but we live on a water planet.
70% of our planet is covered with water.
Yes, 97.5% is saltwater, 2% is ice.
We fight over half a percent.
But in the same way that technology brought aluminum out of bauxite so, too, technologies
coming online right now to make water available and available for all.
Think about this Maasai warrior in the middle of Kenya.
This gentleman on a cell phone today has better mobile com than President Reagan did 25 years
ago, right?
And if he is on Google on a smartphone, he has got more access to knowledge, information
than President Clinton did 15 years ago.
He is living in a world of information communications abundance.
We talked about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE.
Imagine Watson, if you would, on your cell phone giving every kid a personalized education.
And, perhaps, for me this is one of the most impactful parts of the forces driving us towards
a world of abundance.
So look at this chart.
This is population, the white lines.
We've just crossed the 7 billion mark.
Those of you who are concerned about population explosion on this planet, do you know the
one way to bring down a population, growth rate of a country?
Educate them and give them great health.
Well, this green line over here is Internet penetration.
In 2010, we were just short of 2 billion people connected to the Internet on this planet.
By 2020, we're going from 2 billion to 5 billion people.
Three billion new minds are plugging into the global conversation.
What do these people want?
What are they going to invent?
What are they going to create?
What do they desire?
They represent one of the untapped resources this planet has to address and solve our grandest
challenges.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're living in a day and age where we have the ability to solve
the world's biggest problems.
We have the technology.
We have the passion.
We have the minds.
So my question for you is: What are you focused on solving because we can bring about a world
of abundance.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]