>>Peter Diamandis: So Eric Schmidt opened up this Zeitgeist with
a question: Is the future getting better?
And I'm someone who believes it's getting better at an extraordinary rate.
That in fact not only does the evidence show it, but literally everything that we're doing
is moving us in that direction.
But people don't believe that.
A lot of people are cynical, a lot of people irrespective of the evidence don't believe
that that's happening.
And I ask myself the question why?
It hits me that to a large degree we're looking at the future with the wetware and hardware
that evolved on the plains of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.
And if you think about it, our bodies evolved to understand and react with our environment.
And back then, the world was best described as local and linear.
It was local and everything that affected you was within a day's walk.
Something happened on the other side of the planet, you knew nothing about it.
It was linear, the life of your great grandparents, your grandparents, you and your kids, nothing
changed century to century, generation to generation.
But today the world is anything but that.
Today the world is global and exponential.
Something happens in China or India, we know about it seconds later.
Literally, things are changing year to year.
And when you look at what that means, it means that this red line is our boards of directors,
it's our politicians, it's us.
We are linear thinkers.
We don't know how not to think in a linear fashion.
And we project the future as we did the past.
But that yellow line, that's technology.
It's technology that we're building here in the room, that we're using every day and it's
growing at an extraordinary rate.
And the difference between that is what I call disruptive stress or if you are an optimist,
disruptive opportunity.
So what does that mean?
That means that you have literally companies that are mainstay corporations of America.
Kodak, 140,000 person organization, $28 billion market cap, that invented the digital camera
that put them out of business.
But what happened?
They said, "We're Kodak, we only do beautiful high resolution images, this digital camera
stuff, it's a toy for kids."
And they ignore it.
This year, they are bankrupt.
But in that same year, this year, we have FaceBook acquiring Instagram, also in the
imagery business, for a billion dollars, this time with 13 employees.
This juxtapositioning is the difference between a linear company and an exponential one.
We are moving into a period of exponential growth for society.
So I study this.
I study this at a university called Singularity University up in Silicon Valley, backed by
our friends here at Google, Autodesk and Nokia and Cisco, and many others, and we talk about
the fact that literally a couple of guys or gals, today have the ability to impact the
lives of a billion people in a positive way.
We call it 10 to the 9th plus impact.
That's an extraordinary time to be alive.
Absolutely extraordinary.
You have the chance to impact a billion people.
So when I think about this movement from a linear thinking society to an exponential
one, it really comes into the tools we have.
Exponential technologies, AI, robotics, synthetic biology, digital medicine, nanomaterials,
3D manufacturing.
Then what I call exponential organizational tools.
The ability for you to, you know, gamify, to crowdsource, open source, hardware, software,
to use machine learning competitions, incentive competitions.
For me, those are the things that I study.
On the X PRIZE front, I study where can we create large incentive competitions that will
go out there to the cognitive surplus, the most brilliant people in the world, no matter
where they are, and say, "I don't care where you are from, where you went to school, if
you solve this problem, you win."
And we all win in the process.
So hopefully you know we ran something called the Ansari X PRIZE, put up $10 million for
the first team to build a private spaceship and fly twice into space.
26 teams from seven countries spent $100 million.
Now you can go all go and fly on a Virgin Galatic flight which commercialized that technology.
When the oil spill occurred back in 2010, we looked at what can we do there.
Because if we can clean up the oil spill on the ocean's surface before it hits the land,
we said we can prevent environmental disaster.
So we looked at the problem.
We realized that the technology for cleaning up the Exxon Valdez in 2010 up in Alaska and
the technology used to clean up the BP spill was the same.
There had been no change in 20 years.
So we went out to other benefactors, Wendy Schmidt stood up and said I will fund it.
She put about $3.5 million, 2 million to operate the competition, a million and a half purse
money.
We challenged teams around the world, reinvent cleaning up oil spills.
In the year's time, we had 350 teams -- I had no idea there was 350 people interested
in the subject -- from around the planet who entered the competition.
We narrowed it down to a top 10 that went head-to-head in the world's largest oil spill
cleanup facility, which is located in New Jersey.
And those teams, the top 10 teams, none of which was larger than 100 people in size in
terms of a company, seven of those top 10 teams doubled what had been the oil spill
cleanup rate for a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry and they did it in a year.
The winning team that thought it was impossible to double it, increased it a factor of six.
And here's the most interesting thing for me, one of the teams that doubled the oil
spill cleanup rate was a team that came together and met in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor.
[ Laughter ] >>Peter Diamandis: The tattoo artist was a
designer, one of his customers put up the money.
Let me show you that video.
>>> My full-time job back home is -- is running a tattoo studio in Las Vegas.
>>> We get asked all the time, how long have you been in the oil industry?
Well, counting today?
[ Laughter ] >>Peter Diamandis: So you never know where
is that genius, because sometimes experts of those people can tell you exactly how it
can't be done.
Truly the naive, orthogonal thinking that comes in with a brand new idea and blows away
the way it always has been.
So where are we going?
We've got the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE and success, this is challenging teams around
the world to build a device, a robot, land on the surface of the moon, take from YouTube
videos and photos, send them back, rove half a kilometer and send back more photos and
videos.
We have 25 teams around the world doing and working on only what only the U.S. and Soviets
have ever done before.
We have just launched the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE.
A hand held mobile device that can diagnose you better than a team of board certified
doctors that a mom can use at 2:00 a.m. in the morning.
Announced this as CES in January.
Already we have 230 teams around the world competing for this.
Thank you.
[ Applause ] >>Peter Diamandis: So those are launch prizes.
We're working right now on something called Organogenesis X PRIZE to go from a skin skill
to a pluripotent stem cell and regrow your heart, liver, lung or kidney.
For me, having two 16-month-old boys at home, how about reinventing education?
So we are working on a Global Literacy X PRIZE.
Give a team 200 illiterate kids, perhaps age six to nine, what team can bring them to literacy
the fastest?
With a scalable technology.
So I wrote a book called Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think.
We did really well with my parter Steven Kotler, and I go around and talk to audiences and
say, you know, we are heading towards a world of abundance.
These technologies that I've spoke about are empowering us to get there.
People go really?!!
Diamandis, haven't you been watching the crisis in Europe and the terrorist activities, all
of these things?!!
I go, My God!
We're living in a world today where most of the news media is a drug pusher and negative
news is their drug.
On every Android device you have, every television, every newspaper, every radio, you are getting
literally negative news over and over and over again.
24 hours a day, seven days a week.
No wonder people are pessimistic.
There's a reason for this.
Because there's an ancient part of the temporal lobe called the amygdal that pays far more
attention to all of the negative news than positive news.
The old adage if it bleeds it leads is played up over and over again.
But it turns out that technology is a resource liberating force.
It's a chance to change our world.
So in Abundance, I talk about the story of this man, Napoleon, III who invites guy, the
King of Siam over for dinner in 1840 to the Palace of Versailles.
And to show his amazing capabilities, Napoleon feeds all of his troops with silver utensils.
Napoleon himself eats with gold utensils, but the King of Siam, the royal guest, he's
fed with aluminum utensils.
Because in 1840, aluminum was the scarcest metal on the planet.
Even though the earth is made 8.3% aluminum by weight, you can't actually go and dig it
out of the ground.
It's all bound by oxidates and silicates to literally create bauxite.
And it was so energetically difficult to extract the aluminum from the bauxite, it was worth
more than platinum and gold.
Which by the way is the reason the tip of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.
Built in that same decade.
They the technology of electrolyzes came along and made it so easy remove aluminum from bauxite,
we literally use it for aluminum foil, aluminum cans, aluminum airplanes, everywhere.
If you think about the analogy of technology taking that which was scarce and making it
abundant, I think about it in these ways: We live on a world -- talk about energy scarcity
-- we live on a world that is bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species
in a year.
It's about making that energy available.
And by the way, the cost of solar has dropped 50% last year, 50% the year before.
We are increasing our production rates globally by 30%.
And if we have abundant energy, a squanderable amount of abundant energy, then water is not
an issue.
We talk about water scarcity and water wars.
We live on a water planet, the pale blue dot.
Two-thirds of our surface is water.
97% is saltwater.
Two percent the polar caps and we fight about half a percent.
The same way we extract aluminum from Bauxite so shall we the water from our oceans.
There is amazing work being done by Dean Kamen and Muhtar Kent, the chairman of Coca-Cola,
is committed to taking that technology globally.
It will give us a world of abundant water.
This Masai warrior on a cell phone has better mobile com than President Clinton did when
he was in office.
And if he's on literally -- on Google, on Android phone, he has access to more access
and information than President Bush did.
On something that they're microfinancing with a set of applications that literally give
them extraordinary video teleconferencing, video cameras for no cost.
We talked about these mobile devices also opening up a world of health and a world of
communication as AI comes on and provides the poorest of child an education that is
better than you can buy today.
So I'll end with this slide.
It's a notion of where we're going.
One of the most important impacts that people are not speaking about today.
This is global population.
We just crossed the seven billion mark.
These green lines here are Internet penetration.
In 2010 we had 2 billion people connected online and by went to that number is growing
to 5 billion people.
Three billion people who have never been heard from before are plugging into the global economy.
These are three billion new minds who will create, discover, produce, help solve our
world's problems.
They represent tens of trillions of dollars being plugged into our global economy.
They represent your next generation of customers or your customer's next generation of customers.
They also represent for me literally the beginning of the greatest period of innovation this
planet has ever seen.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]