If you read the papers, right, and you spend
your time sort of talking to everybody, this problem and that problem and everything's
getting worse and so forth, this is, in fact, not true.
In fact, things are getting better globally, on that little green orb, in almost every
dimension in ways that are very dramatic and occurring very, very quickly.
We have an explosion in innovation that's now occurring at a rate that's mind numbing.
It's so fast, we forget what we didn't used to have.
Anybody remember when you didn't have an iPhone or an Android phone and all those apps? Right?
You've already forgotten. Anyone remember before you had a cell phone?
You've already forgotten. Anyone remember when you didn't have a digital camera, when
you had to develop film? Well, watch the movies from the 1970s and 1980s. You'll
remember. You were alive then. The rate at which the rate at which
this stuff is happening, the U.S. took 50 years for GDP to double. China did it in
15. It took 60 years for air conditioning to get to 80% of U.S. citizens. I'm sure
it was first here, by the way. And it took 10% to get 80% market share for smartphones.
It's just that much faster. And we now have these amazing new ways of
thinking about things. Think about Uber as rethinking public transportation through
the sharing economy. Did anybody think that automobiles could be
reimagined? There's been all these marketing programs about reimagining the automobile.
Tesla did it. They actually built a different kind of car. They literally reinvented it
and now everyone is figuring out what to do about that.
Solar power is now at purchase parity with natural gas, price purchase parity with natural
gas, and the U.S. is set to surpass Saudi in oil production within a decade. We're
already number one in natural gas, another technological innovation.
Software transforms every market in everything you could imagine, even for like food deliveries
for your home. That's how powerful software is.
And imagine from a health perspective. We're going to talk about this. Real time noninvasive
monitoring of your health connected by mobile small devices. That's our future. We will
literally be healthier as a result. And I've become convinced we sort of need
a new language to talk about innovation, power, innovators, job creation, and so forth. It's
happening at such a scale and it's such a set of impact. It's an interesting quote
from an economist named John Haltiwanger who looks at the sources of job creation.
If you're worried about jobs, and Laura and I will talk about that in a minute, quote,
"We have found that startups together with high growth firms which are disproportionately
young account for roughly 70% of overall job creation in the United States."
You want an answer? Here's the answer. Now, scale matters, and scale matters a lot.
And we're beginning to see the impact of scale.
I call the businessman's lament the following quote. "How do we make our money in a globalized
market where scale is everything?" And what we're seeing now are global firms, global
brands, global platforms which are changing the economics, changing it in all sorts of
different ways, and people have to react. And the question is can they provide an alternative
platform? Can they become a regional champion and so forth. And everybody is sorting this
out now. And you think about it. Think about the
ruthless efficiency of Amazon or the effectiveness of Apple's product development program.
We have already seen the effect of this in the Shenzhen manufacturing, right? Shenzhen
manufacturing took over manufacturing globally. And there is a dichotomy of sort of local
control and global platform. We you really want is we all want to be a village and we
all want to be in charge of everything so we can make local decisions, right?
But, in fact, building these platforms and the interconnectedness that this conference
is about is how you win. We have to find the balance between the two.
People want There are, by the way, examples of this. In the country analogy, there are
small countries that have done very, well: Scandinavia, Denmark, Hong Kong, Singapore,
those sorts of things. Think about companies. This about, like,
Bose and other sort of specialized product developers that do a fantastic job in a smaller
market. It can be done. So the question that I would ask is as we
enter this debate between scale, scale and local control and empowerment, are there a
set of human rights and principles of human interaction that could be the basis for real
and universal growth and not just for the economic winners but everybody else?
Because, remember, the prices are falling. These things are getting connected. We
see what everybody is doing, the good and the bad, right? And that is our future.
The second thing I wanted to say was that culture and creativity matters a lot. Marxism
is discredited, and it was discredited because in many ways, it was designed to run an agricultural
model. The one thing that Marxism sort of failed to properly understand was that innovation
could come along and replace an awful lot of the units of production. And it doesn't
work in a knowledge economy. And, by the way, China works very, very well
as long as you are not a woman and as long as the air doesn't bother you, right? So
there are scale models that are different from the ones that we're used to, which are
also growing very dramatically and good for them.
But you need to create a space for new ideas. You need a place for innovators to work.
This, of course, is the genius of Silicon Valley in the United States and other countries
are now sort of trying to address this. But I would say you have got to figure out
a way to create a place for people to innovate, to fail, to try things. And in those places
where they exist, people will do it. That's how strong and bright this future is.
If you go back to the original notion of the limited U.S. role, right, 200 years ago,
people at some level inchoately understood this.
Go back to the formation of the European Union way back when 30 years ago, again limited
power, spaces, innovation, different approaches. The laboratories of innovation are not necessarily
global and single sourced. So can we imagine and, of course, there
is this stifling effect of sort of rules, right? You have a fight between hawks and
doves. And, inevitably, the downside, people regulators try to prevent it rather than
accepting the fact that there will be some kind of an impact.
And I think we're going to work through these because the opportunities are so fantastic
that we're talking about. So what I want you to do is I want you to
imagine a little bit for a minute or two what does the world look like at the rate at which
things are coming. Let's talk about personalized medicine. Sequencing
that is in the case of "sequencing," I mean DNA sequencing which we will today
and Craig can talk about this later. The sort of retail price, about $1,000.
The real cost is sort of $500. Most people think it will get to $100. It is following
faster than Moore's law scaling. Literally sequence everything living and find
out what drug will work specifically for you to analyze outcomes for you, to figure out
exactly what solution for whatever ailment you have and fix it and fix it for good.
The biologists have developed a technology called CRISPR, which is a way to use biology
to go in and actually turn on and off and modify cells, right?
These are the kinds of innovations that are going on literally right now and will continue
for a while. What about transportation? I've been in
the Google self driving cars. And aside from freaking me out, they're safer than me
driving. [ Laughter ]
They follow a little closer but they see a little faster. That laser is faster than
my aging vision, trust me. And so the fact of the matter is we know that
technology is going to happen. It is just a question of whether the regulators will
allow us to make it happen. And every time we get that stuff out, we save lives. We
don't hurt people. We help people. And if you know if you have a family
member or a friend who was killed in an automobile accident here or in Europe or anywhere in
the world, you know why we're doing that. And, by the way, the one after that and
I'm not kidding is transportation in the air. There's a new generation of much
more powerful electric motors, much more powerful lithium based batteries, and much more sophisticated
hovering systems, multibladed think of it as multibladed small helicopters that
will whisk us around. By the end of our lives, it is reasonable
to expect that people who discovered that we can't build more roads and so forth in
cities but we can use the airspace. And you will see that in our lifetimes.
In education, right, something which has been resistant to change for a very long time,
think about life long learning tailored specifically to you where, in fact, you talk or the computer
somehow interacts with you by talking to you or asking you questions or whatever and it
figures out where the gaps are for the special skills that you have, for the special the
things you want to do and the things that you're capable to do. And it figures out
that unique opportunity that just this one little gap filling will fill.
That's all in development right now. Think about in automation, what is the story
of the last hundred years? A hundred years, people were dying in factories, especially
children. Today those jobs repetitive tasks, the ones which injure human beings
are largely being eliminated by very sophisticated automation and that, of course, continues.
And, of course, it is interesting that the people who run the robots are paid more than
the people who are replaced by the robots. Again, another part of that story.
Think about biology, synthetic biology, and the ability to computationally simulate what
life will look like as we figure out how to solve all sorts of new problems, whether it
is productivity or health. Manufacturing, a new generation of materials,
very light, that basically solve solve the problems of energy consumption and global
warming. The easiest way to solve many of these problems is have cars that are that
are a factor of ten lighter that are just as safe, and that technology is on the way.
Smart power grids, right? Enormous amount of power is wasted in the world. And, again,
using principles of the Internet, new principles in algorithms, we can even do that.
So to me when I look at that and I say there's a real partnership coming between humans and
the products, machines, thinking, networks that we build, that that that that partnership
makes us safer and stronger. But the real revolution is in helping us think.
We're very, very close to being able to solve vision, text recognition and speech recognition.
When that happens, the computer scientists, the people who do this just based on numbers
can begin to build systems that are extraordinary. I imagine that in five years, I'll be able
to use and I'll choose this, so I will choose this to have a program that reads
my mail and replies for me in my idiom. It sounds like Eric and did you want
to go to Venice, or did you want to go to Arizona? I have to go to Arizona. It is
more important, and I work all the time, or whatever.
The ability to summarize, the ability to sort of read everything going on and give you an
accurate summary, a hugely important facility. An ability to myth bust, to look deeper. I'm
especially looking forward to using that in the political realm.
[ Laughter ] But over this while and, again, with
your permission, with your buy in, with every conceivable privacy protection and a lot of
encryption to get those NSA folks out, we're going to sort of think of it as outsourcing almost
it is a way of outsourcing aspects of your brain that literally the things you have
spent so much time trying to remember we can put somewhere else. And then, again, with
privacy and with this computation, we can help you just be smarter.
When you think about it, the experiences that we have in this model will be captured and
transformed in memories that we can use forever. We will be incredibly smarter. We will have
amazing IQs. That impact alone, right, in terms of the
ability, is what we need to spend a lot of time working on. Because the way we'll get
through all the challenges is we're just going to be smarter.
When you think about this, what our choices are, and there's so much investment
going on around the world what are the right positions to take, you can have growth,
and you can have growth under principles, growth in the knowledge economy, in science,
in energy. You have to understand that some problems
can't be solved today, but maybe they'll be solved by people in the future. We should
work on them now. But some problems are really hard. But no one would have expected
100 years ago that we'd have solved so many problems today.
You want to focus on cities, right, the infrastructure and knowledge engines of our future, and the
infrastructure to make cities globally even more effective, to make them even more impressive.
And I mean broadly defined cities. And let innovation in all forms occur, and
then the social services and so forth take care of the people who are affected by it.
Because the innovation itself provides great economic value.
You know, there's a sort of stereotype of America, and the stereotype is, capitalism
without a heart. And there's a stereotype of Europe, which is heart without capitalism.
Right? Those are stereotypes. Why don't we do both?
Why don't we take the principles that I'm talking about and do capitalism and heart?
You have all the tools necessary, all the principles, you have all the knowledge systems,
you have all the universities, and you have amazingly talented people who want to go at
this. Let's empower them and make it happen. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]