Peter Diamandis: So Eric Schmidt opened up this Zeitgeist with
0:11a question: Is the future getting better? And I'm someone who believes it's getting
0:15better at an extraordinary rate. That in fact not only does the evidence show it, but literally
0:22everything that we're doing is moving us in that direction. But people don't believe that.
0:26A lot of people are cynical, a lot of people irrespective of the evidence don't believe
0:30that that's happening. And I ask myself the question why? It hits me that to a large degree
0:37we're looking at the future with the wetware and hardware that evolved on the plains of
0:41Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. And if you think about it, our bodies evolved
0:48to understand and react with our environment. And back then, the world was best described
0:53as local and linear. It was local and everything that affected you was within a day's walk.
0:59Something happened on the other side of the planet, you knew nothing about it. It was
1:02linear, the life of your great grandparents, your grandparents, you and your kids, nothing
1:06changed century to century, generation to generation. But today the world is anything
1:11but that. Today the world is global and exponential. Something happens in China or India, we know
1:16about it seconds later. Literally, things are changing year to year.
1:22And when you look at what that means, it means that this red line is our boards of directors,
1:28it's our politicians, it's us. We are linear thinkers. We don't know how not to think in
1:33a linear fashion. And we project the future as we did the past. But that yellow line,
1:40that's technology. It's technology that we're building here in the room, that we're using
1:45every day and it's growing at an extraordinary rate. And the difference between that is what
1:51I call disruptive stress or if you are an optimist, disruptive opportunity.
1:56So what does that mean? That means that you have literally companies that are mainstay
2:01corporations of America. Kodak, 140,000 person organization, $28 billion market cap, that
2:08invented the digital camera that put them out of business. But what happened? They said,
2:13"We're Kodak, we only do beautiful high resolution images, this digital camera stuff, it's a
2:18toy for kids." And they ignore it. This year, they are bankrupt.
2:25But in that same year, this year, we have FaceBook acquiring Instagram, also in the
2:31imagery business, for a billion dollars, this time with 13 employees. This juxtapositioning
2:39is the difference between a linear company and an exponential one. We are moving into
2:43a period of exponential growth for society. So I study this. I study this at a university
2:51called Singularity University up in Silicon Valley, backed by our friends here at Google,
2:56Autodesk and Nokia and Cisco, and many others, and we talk about the fact that literally
3:01a couple of guys or gals, today have the ability to impact the lives of a billion people in
3:07a positive way. We call it 10 to the 9th plus impact. That's an extraordinary time to be
3:11alive. Absolutely extraordinary. You have the chance to impact a billion people.
3:17So when I think about this movement from a linear thinking society to an exponential
3:22one, it really comes into the tools we have. Exponential technologies, AI, robotics, synthetic
3:28biology, digital medicine, nanomaterials, 3D manufacturing. Then what I call exponential
3:34organizational tools. The ability for you to, you know, gamify, to crowdsource, open
3:40source, hardware, software, to use machine learning competitions, incentive competitions.
3:46For me, those are the things that I study. On the X PRIZE front, I study where can we
3:50create large incentive competitions that will go out there to the cognitive surplus, the
3:56most brilliant people in the world, no matter where they are, and say, "I don't care where
3:59you are from, where you went to school, if you solve this problem, you win."
4:03And we all win in the process. So hopefully you know we ran something called the Ansari
4:07X PRIZE, put up $10 million for the first team to build a private spaceship and fly
4:12twice into space. 26 teams from seven countries spent $100 million. Now you can go all go
4:19and fly on a Virgin Galatic flight which commercialized that technology. When the oil spill occurred
4:25back in 2010, we looked at what can we do there. Because if we can clean up the oil
4:30spill on the ocean's surface before it hits the land, we said we can prevent environmental
4:37disaster. So we looked at the problem. We realized that the technology for cleaning
4:42up the Exxon Valdez in 2010 up in Alaska and the technology used to clean up the BP spill
4:49was the same. There had been no change in 20 years.
4:53So we went out to other benefactors, Wendy Schmidt stood up and said I will fund it.
4:58She put about $3.5 million, 2 million to operate the competition, a million and a half purse
5:03money. We challenged teams around the world, reinvent cleaning up oil spills.
5:10In the year's time, we had 350 teams -- I had no idea there was 350 people interested
5:14in the subject -- from around the planet who entered the competition. We narrowed it down
5:19to a top 10 that went head-to-head in the world's largest oil spill cleanup facility,
5:25which is located in New Jersey. And those teams, the top 10 teams, none of which was
5:32larger than 100 people in size in terms of a company, seven of those top 10 teams doubled
5:38what had been the oil spill cleanup rate for a multi-hundred-billion dollar industry and
5:43they did it in a year. The winning team that thought it was impossible to double it, increased
5:48it a factor of six. And here's the most interesting thing for me, one of the teams that doubled
5:54the oil spill cleanup rate was a team that came together and met in a Las Vegas tattoo
6:00parlor. [ Laughter ]
6:01>>Peter Diamandis: The tattoo artist was a designer, one of his customers put up the
6:06money. Let me show you that video.
6:10>>> My full-time job back home is -- is running a tattoo studio in Las Vegas.
6:16>>> We get asked all the time, how long have you been in the oil industry? Well, counting
6:21today? [ Laughter ]
6:23>>Peter Diamandis: So you never know where is that genius, because sometimes experts
6:29of those people can tell you exactly how it can't be done. Truly the naive, orthogonal
6:34thinking that comes in with a brand new idea and blows away the way it always has been.
6:40So where are we going? We've got the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE and success, this is
6:45challenging teams around the world to build a device, a robot, land on the surface of
6:50the moon, take from YouTube videos and photos, send them back, rove half a kilometer and
6:54send back more photos and videos. We have 25 teams around the world doing and working
6:59on only what only the U.S. and Soviets have ever done before. We have just launched the
7:05$10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. A hand held mobile device that can diagnose
7:12you better than a team of board certified doctors that a mom can use at 2:00 a.m. in
7:16the morning. Announced this as CES in January. Already we have 230 teams around the world
7:23competing for this. Thank you. [ Applause ]
7:27>>Peter Diamandis: So those are launch prizes. We're working right now on something called
7:32Organogenesis X PRIZE to go from a skin skill to a pluripotent stem cell and regrow your
7:37heart, liver, lung or kidney. For me, having two 16-month-old boys at home,
7:43how about reinventing education? So we are working on a Global Literacy X PRIZE. Give
7:49a team 200 illiterate kids, perhaps age six to nine, what team can bring them to literacy
7:55the fastest? With a scalable technology.
8:01So I wrote a book called Abundance, The Future is Better Than You Think. We did really well
8:05with my parter Steven Kotler, and I go around and talk to audiences and say, you know, we
8:09are heading towards a world of abundance. These technologies that I've spoke about are
8:13empowering us to get there. People go really?!! Diamandis, haven't you
8:17been watching the crisis in Europe and the terrorist activities, all of these things?!!
8:22I go, My God! We're living in a world today where most of the news media is a drug pusher
8:28and negative news is their drug. On every Android device you have, every television,
8:33every newspaper, every radio, you are getting literally negative news over and over and
8:37over again. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No wonder people are pessimistic.
8:42There's a reason for this. Because there's an ancient part of the temporal lobe called
8:46the amygdal that pays far more attention to all of the negative news than positive news.
8:51The old adage if it bleeds it leads is played up over and over again. But it turns out that
8:58technology is a resource liberating force. It's a chance to change our world. So in Abundance,
9:05I talk about the story of this man, Napoleon, III who invites guy, the King of Siam over
9:11for dinner in 1840 to the Palace of Versailles. And to show his amazing capabilities, Napoleon
9:18feeds all of his troops with silver utensils. Napoleon himself eats with gold utensils,
9:25but the King of Siam, the royal guest, he's fed with aluminum utensils. Because in 1840,
9:31aluminum was the scarcest metal on the planet. Even though the earth is made 8.3% aluminum
9:37by weight, you can't actually go and dig it out of the ground. It's all bound by oxidates
9:43and silicates to literally create bauxite. And it was so energetically difficult to extract
9:48the aluminum from the bauxite, it was worth more than platinum and gold. Which by the
9:51way is the reason the tip of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum. Built in
9:56that same decade. They the technology of electrolyzes came along
10:00and made it so easy remove aluminum from bauxite, we literally use it for aluminum foil, aluminum
10:07cans, aluminum airplanes, everywhere. If you think about the analogy of technology taking
10:12that which was scarce and making it abundant, I think about it in these ways: We live on
10:18a world -- talk about energy scarcity -- we live on a world that is bathed in 5,000 times
10:23more energy than we consume as a species in a year. It's about making that energy available.
10:29And by the way, the cost of solar has dropped 50% last year, 50% the year before. We are
10:34increasing our production rates globally by 30%. And if we have abundant energy, a squanderable
10:39amount of abundant energy, then water is not an issue.
10:44We talk about water scarcity and water wars. We live on a water planet, the pale blue dot.
10:52Two-thirds of our surface is water. 97% is saltwater. Two percent the polar caps and
10:57we fight about half a percent. The same way we extract aluminum from Bauxite so shall
11:04we the water from our oceans. There is amazing work being done by Dean Kamen and Muhtar Kent,
11:10the chairman of Coca-Cola, is committed to taking that technology globally. It will give
11:18us a world of abundant water. This Masai warrior on a cell phone has better
11:25mobile com than President Clinton did when he was in office.
11:30And if he's on literally -- on Google, on Android phone, he has access to more access
11:36and information than President Bush did. On something that they're microfinancing with
11:42a set of applications that literally give them extraordinary video teleconferencing,
11:47video cameras for no cost. We talked about these mobile devices also
11:55opening up a world of health and a world of communication as AI comes on and provides
12:01the poorest of child an education that is better than you can buy today.
12:08So I'll end with this slide. It's a notion of where we're going. One of the most important
12:15impacts that people are not speaking about today. This is global population. We just
12:22crossed the seven billion mark. These green lines here are Internet penetration.
12:29In 2010 we had 2 billion people connected online and by went to that number is growing
12:36to 5 billion people. Three billion people who have never been heard
12:41from before are plugging into the global economy. These are three billion new minds who will
12:48create, discover, produce, help solve our world's problems. They represent tens of trillions
12:55of dollars being plugged into our global economy. They represent your next generation of customers
13:01or your customer's next generation of customers. They also represent for me literally the beginning
13:08of the greatest period of innovation this planet has ever seen.
13:12Thank you. [ Applause ]