The World in 2050

good morning everybody it is truly an honor to be here and i'm grateful to have a chance to share with you what i'm so excited about today i want to talk about not only the next few decades ahead but really how an extraordinary rate of innovation and breakthroughs is leading towards a world of unprecedented abundance so let's dive in i believe that we are living into a a world the next few decades where we're going to be able to meet the needs of every man woman and child on this planet now when i speak about this most of us don't believe that or most of us have doubts and i want you to realize that we are thinking about the future in a local and linear fashion what i mean by that is as we evolved as humans in the savannas of africa hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago the world back then was local and linear everything that affected you was within a day's walk if something happened on the side of the planet you knew nothing about it life was linear because nothing changed century to century decade to decade the world of your great grandparents you your kids their kids was the same but today we're living in a world that's very different right today the world is global and exponential something happens inside the planet you know about it seconds later your computer is about microseconds later the world isn't changing century to century or decade to decade it's changing year to year so if i were to plot this it looks like this this red line is us it's our citizens it's our government it's everyone around the world it's us humans we are linear thinkers none of us have had a software hardware upgrade perhaps since birth the other line the yellow line is the technology in our world that we're creating that we're using it's artificial intelligence robotics synthetic biology digital printing computers network sensors they're exploding right now and the difference between that linear thinking and that exponential growth is either disruptive stress or disruptive opportunity depending on your point of view if you're the ceo of a fortune 500 company that's worried about your quarterly returns and some kid in a garage comes up with this invention that puts you out of business it's disruptive stress if you're the kid in the garage it's disruptive opportunity so to give an example of this this difference between local and linear thinking in a global and exponential world let me use a company we all know were well called kodak right kodak as a corporation was known around the planet one of the strongest brands in the technology world in 1996 kodak has a 140 000 employees it has a market cap of 28 billion dollars and 20 years earlier in 1976 a gentleman by the name of sassan had come up with the first digital camera he invented it in the labs inside kodak and that digital camera was about the size of a small toaster toaster oven and when he took that to the board of kodak he said here it is the future of kodak they said what are you joking this this digital camera is a toy it takes 12 black and white digital images 0.01 megapixels we're kodak we make beautiful high resolution photographs not this thing but even though kodak had invented the technology they owned the patents they were thinking in a linear fashion and you may know the rest of the story 2012 kodak goes bankrupt put out of business by the very technology that they invented in their labs because they were thinking linearly while the technology was exploding exponentially but in the same year in 2012 another company in the digital imagery business called instagram is acquired by facebook for a billion dollars but they have 13 employees you see this is what's happening over and over again right now we're going from a world of linear thinking companies to exponential ones and i call this the new kodak moment moment in time when a linear thinking company is put out of business by exponential technologies so what does this mean this is a statistic from the babson school of business that says in 10 years time 40 of today's fortune 500 companies s p 500 companies will no longer exist they'll be acquired they'll go bankrupt they'll be dismissed displaced by companies we haven't even heard about yet today the rate of going from i have an idea to i run a billion dollar company is happening faster and faster and faster so i study this i studied this at a university that i founded in silicon valley with ray kurzweil called singularity university university is underwritten and backed by google and cisco and autodesk and gen in tech and we study exponential technologies we study those technologies that are doubling every year in price performance and we run a number of programs and i'm very proud that we have a number of emirati alumni of our programs we run programs at the graduate level we run a graduate studies program and in this program we bring students in for 10 weeks and during the 10 weeks time we ask them to study all these exponential technologies and then to start a company that can impact a billion people positively within 10 years that's what a person can do today that's what an entrepreneur can do you can start a company that can impact a billion people possibly within a decade we call this 10 to the ninth plus companies we also run executive programs for top executives around the world and then finally we run a program called our innovation partners program and it's for the the fortune 100 companies coca-cola cisco dow chemical and so forth that are part of the group so our curriculum is a mix of technologies on one side from ai robotic synthetic biology but on the other side we look at how do you tap the crowd for incentive prices data mining competitions crowdsourcing crowdfunding because in this hyper-connected world of billions of people your innovation doesn't come from inside your company anymore innovation comes from you asking the right questions the world and them helping you solve your problems so what does exponential growth feel like remember i said we are linear thinkers in this world we our minds are wired to think in a linear fashion so if i said to you take 30 linear steps you know one two three four five you end up 30 meters away and all of us can say i'll be there in five meters in five steps 10 steps 20 steps and so forth but if i said to you take 30 exponential steps 30 doublings you know 1 2 4 8 16 32 where will you be in 30 doublings very few of us unless you even memorized would say i'm going to be a billion meters away put differently i will have gone around the earth 26 times so the difference between our linear thinking mind saying will be 30 meters over there versus exponential growth i've gone around the planet 26 times is the point that's why kodak could never catch up once they missed the boat so i want to give you some examples of what this looks like and feels like this computer i have here is 1982 which called the osborne if you were an accountant you might have had one of these it was about the size of a suitcase and it was you know 2500 us dollars 28 pounds 25 years later that computer is an iphone except this iphone is 100 the weight 150 times faster 100 000 times more memory and we have a hundred and fifty thousand fold improvement in 25 years physically this is what we're seeing in 25 years of doublings 25 years after the iphone the computer will effectively be everywhere it'll be ubiquitous it'll be in the cloud it will be free it will be always on that's where we're almost at today let's look at a few other technologies this is steven sasson who i mentioned who made the digital camera you can see how big it is and you can imagine why the board of directors of kodak ignored him when he came in and said it takes 12 black and white images but this camera was 4 pounds you know ten thousand dollars today the camera you can buy is a thousand times better resolution lighter cheaper a billion fold improvement let's take a few more looks this is the guidance and control system for the early intercontinental ballistic missiles today the same technology you buy for an accelerometer for a dollar or a gyroscope for three bucks right in the future it will be in molecular memory cost nothing let's look at one more this is the first gps receiver right 120 000.50 pounds today it fits on your fingertip and the point to make is it doesn't stop here it continues this rate of innovation the price coming down the miniaturization the capabilities continue on and on and on so what makes this all possible is this curve this curve is the rate of growth of computer speeds on the bottom here we have 110 years on the left axis it's a log scale it's how much computer power can a thousand dollars buy you and if you look on this curve what you see is that the rate at which computers were getting faster and faster and this is a log scale so it's exponential growth is pretty constant you don't see world war one or world war ii or recessions or depressions the rate at which computers are getting faster is independent of what's going on in the world we're using faster computers to build faster computers and if that goes on here is what you see so the microprocessor driving this presentation is a circa 2010 intel processor it calculates at 100 billion calculations per second 10 to 11 cycles per second it's just a number it also happens to be more computing power than the us government had in the 80s right nine years from now in 2023 the average computer you can go and buy for a thousand dollars will be calculating at 10 to the 16th cycles per second which again is just a number but if you speak to someone who studies the brain they will tell you that's the rate at which your brain and my brain thinks it's the rate at which your brain does visual and auditory pattern recognition so what happens when a thousand dollars nine years from now can buy you the capacity of the human mind to think but it doesn't stop there because you know another 25 years later now the average thousand dollars is buying you the rate of the entire human race now your kids homework gets really easy so what we're seeing is that faster computers and cheaper computers are now driving a whole array of technologies they're driving ubiquitous network sensors ai robotics 3d printing and so forth and i want to share some insights along the way as i'm speaking about this the first insight i want to share is that the only constant is change and the rate of change is increasing technological convergence is going to lead to unexpected results it's not enough to just say computers are getting faster it's the fact that computers and ai and robotics and 3d printing and all these technologies are coming together and converging to change the world this is the work that we do in singularity university and it's the realization that today an entrepreneur with access to this power to these kinds of technologies literally has more capabilities than governments the largest corporations had just a couple of decades ago so let's focus in on a few of these technologies to give you a sense of where they are and where they're going and i should mention by the way that what i'm giving you is a very quick overview of what we teach at singularity university normally in a week's time so you'll excuse me if we're condensing it from seven days to seven minutes so i'm going to begin first with a conversation about artificial intelligence artificial intelligence is right now changing our world in an extraordinary fashion you may know it as siri on your iphone but that's a tiny fraction of one percent artificial intelligence is the ability for a computer to understand intimately what you need what you want what you're thinking what information you need before you know you need it and to provide this information to you instantly ibm two years ago did a very visible demonstration of ai with a game show called jeopardy which i hope some of you know it's one of the most difficult game shows out there where question is asked you have to answer it properly and to show how amazing ibm's watson computer named after ibm's founder james watson was they went up against the two-time champions the guy in the left who won the most money and the guy on the right who had won the most games and i want to show you a clip of what it looked like for watson and by the way watson is in a small room half the size of the stage it's not connected to the internet it had downloaded wikipedia and that was the only memory it had so let's watch ken you're in the first position please make it louder please i've never said this on tv for 200 please jimmy kathleen kenyon's excavation of this city mentioned in joshua showed the walls had been repaired 17 times watson what is jericho correct 400 same category this mystery author and her archaeologist hubby dug in hopes of finding the lost syrian city of erkesh watson who is agatha christie correct watson who is mary leaking you're right watson what is creed yes let's finish chick's dig me and mel so what is watson watson is a array of of core processors that was able to read a million books a second it had downloaded wikipedia into its memory it was not connected to the internet and what's incredible is that ibm has now taken watson and put it onto the cloud what this means is that as we're heading towards the future anyone anywhere in the world on a cell phone a teenager in mumbai anyone can have access to this level of knowledge ask any question and have an answer better than the best physicians or the best teachers can provide you ibm's first focus is using ai to do diagnostics and it's already demonstrated that it is far better at diagnosing cancer than any doctor i went to medical school and believe me a year after i left i had forgotten most of what i learned it's so difficult right now the amount of knowledge that a physician has to integrate cannot possibly be held inside the human mind so what are the insights here around artificial intelligence the first is that ai can today do most things better than humans last year a competition demonstrated that you show an ai a photograph and that ai can tell you what the photograph is more accurately than person ai can understand and translate for google translate for example between 80 different language pairs it can write it can read so what does that mean it means that 50 percent of our service jobs everywhere in the world will be up for grabs to ai how are we going to handle this big question ai will be empowering the individual where an individual can have access to knowledge that typically only a ceo might have ai will become our best physicians i'll show you some technology around that soon enough but also ai will become our best teachers so everyone on the planet independent of how wealthy they are where they live will have access to the best technology for teaching that exists on the planet let's turn to robotics i don't know if you recognize what this is this is a tesla factory my friend elon musk one of my board members makes this electric car the tesla this is their factory look for the humans there's one right there so the factories today that are producing the safest car on the planet are being driven by robots i want to show you a company that google just purchased google last quarter bought eight robotic companies let's take a look at one of them called boston dynamics this is petman you're going to see the inside in a moment this was developed for darpa i want you to imagine robots walking down the street doing shopping or whatever the case might be this is not 20 years from now this is right now this is wildcat i want look at the reflexes when this man kicks this robot how it reacts in almost lifelike circumstance and i would not want to be walking through the forest when this thing comes out of the trees the point is that these kinds of robots are coming into mass production how they'll be used in commerce this is a robot out of honda you get the picture my friend catherine moore on our faculty from singularity university was sharing information about this these are robotics her company makes called intuitive surgical that allow you to beam in the best surgeon around the world no matter where he or she is to do surgery right then all of a sudden you're independent of geography so some insights about robots robots also are going to impact our job market right i mean i think about this when your robot starts stocking your shelves at walmart if you say we're going to be a company that employs humans you're going to go out of business because you can't compete economically so it's going to change the job market i'm not talking about 30 or 40 years i'm not this decade these robots exist now they're going into production they're being used how we relate with them how they uplift people from the from the menial work and allow them to do more important work that's the decision governments are going to have to make robots will enter every aspect of our lives they'll be cleaning up our homes at night they'll be helping take care of old people you know instead of sending aged people to the old age home when they reach 80 or 90 they can stay in their home because a robot will help them go to the restroom when they need to robots will compete with imported labor forces a place like the emirates for example you know this kind of technology will make you independent of of external labor and it's going to effectively drop the cost of labor to the cost of power right once you subsidize the cost of it it's the cost of electricity so here's another robot my other uh friend and faculty member brad templeton perhaps spoke about this yesterday this is google's autonomous car and the front seats larry in the back is sergey brin and eric schmidt the chairman is in the back and this is a robot a robot that drives autonomously down the streets and this is uh near stanford university and these robots have gone over half a million miles in these cars these cars i've driven in it after a few minutes you feel very relaxed and the car drives itself every major car company on the planet has announced intentions to create autonomous cars so i have kids that are two and a half year old twin boys by the time they're 18 they will not be driving they'll be driving in autonomous cars in california we talk about high-speed trains connecting up and down the coast what a waste of money it's ridiculous to i mean instead we'll have autonomous cars driving up and down the coast so look at what that autonomous car is seeing this is the sensors on top of the car is a lidar a laser imaging radar that's got 60 eye safe lasers whizzing around generating 750 megabytes of data per second that one car is seeing everything going on it's seeing a accident occurring it's seeing a person being pickpocketed seeing a squirrel across the street there is nothing going on there that that car is not seeing that car is absorbing information and data from around it now imagine not one of these cars but millions of these cars on the roads throughout mena europe us there will be nothing going on on the streets that are not being seen by technology i want to hit that again there is nothing going on in any of these streets that these cars are not imaging if we have autonomous cars we have ubiquitous knowledge of what's going on at every street corner but of course that's not the only thing in the next five years there will be five private orbital constellations being launched planet labs is one sky box is another and there are three others i can't speak of and these are going to have constant imaging over the planet everywhere if you want to know what a company's competitor is doing you have live high resolution images of the productions coming into and out of their factories looking at what's going on and if that's not enough we're also going to start to see armies of quadcopters giving you centimeter resolution over every city and if that's not enough whatever google glass becomes will have millions of people walking around imaging everything my point here is that the future we're heading into not 50 years from now this decade is a future in which we're going to be able to see and know anything we want any time of day so some insights we're growing into a world of 1 trillion sensors a trillion sensors sensing everything sensing the temperature in every single room sensing vibration noise imaging everything we're going to head towards a world where you can ask any question and know anything you want any time you want anywhere you want because everything is being sensed is privacy ending or is it already dead this will drive significant changes in our government and our social systems we're going to be reinventing how we think about privacy this next decade now i'll share with you one other thing that came out in the papers two days ago this is a friend of mine jordy rose who's the ceo and founder of d-wave d-wave is one of the top commercial quantum computing companies they're in vancouver they just sold their first d-wave quantum computers to lockheed and to google and quantum computing is interesting for a number of things but one thing and in this article the nsa seeks to build quantum computers that could crack most any type of encryption when quantum computing comes out there will be no encryption so we've talked about that let's talk about 3d printing i had a chance to tour earlier the museum of the future right next door it's beautiful i encourage all of you to go there and 3d printing is part of the equation i serve on the board of the top 3d printing company 3d systems and 3d printing is the ability to take and manufacture anything one layer at a time and so there are machines just like regular printers but they can print in a variety of different materials and i'll give you an example so this is a one of the employees who's got a wrench a metal wrench and he takes this wrench and he scans it with the scanner and these scanners can scan it in high resolution and you create from the scan a million point model of it and then you print this layer by layer by layer and at the end you have when you pull out of it a full-size metal printed wrench that works so this is just the beginning so what can you 3d print you can 3d print very complex shapes this is a polygon with a polygon with a polygon you can print high temperature titanium turbine blades i was giving a very similar talk at uh for jeff immolt the ceo of ge just two three weeks ago at the opening of their events and ge is printing high temperature injectors and turbine blades for their next generation jet engines imagine being able to print in cement so you can 3d print houses this person lost his right lower leg scanned his left leg reversed the image and 3d printed a prosthetic composite this is a full-scale motorcycle in the lobby of autodesk where every component was 3d printed and then these 3d printers what's amazing is you can print in multiple materials and it comes out working so this is something called the gear ring and when you 3d print it it comes out of the 3d printer working let me just back up a second so uh just for for fun on the left here is a 3d printed wedding cake we're now beginning to 3d print with even foods and on the right are concepts for 3d printing of organs so there are 200 different materials you can now 3d print with what does that mean what it means is that we're heading towards a world where manufacturing is geographically independent where you don't have to worry about what's manufactured where the files are in the cloud you have 3d printers locally in your home in your office in your city wherever it might be and you 3d print what you want when you need it massive change in how we think about interconnectedness of the world 3d printers are going to empower individuals and small companies to be creative the rate of innovation is going to skyrocket because i can look at a device i can scan it i can use an ai to manipulate it upload it to the crowd and let anybody 3d print it and finally we're going to enter a copy economy will explode people copy and print so the last technology i want to speak about is genome sequencing this is my friend and business partner craig venter he in 2001 sequenced the first human genome the first person he rates race the us government and sequence the human genome first in 2010 he created the first synthetic life form the first life form whose parents were an email file so we're entering into a world where we can now sequence everybody the cost of sequencing a genome has dropped below a thousand dollars imagine if uae were able to sequence every emirati citizen and transform health care where you know exactly what to predict and what to focus on we're now entering a time where we're going to have extended human lifespan there are a number of companies working on this 100 will soon be the new 60. and then finally biology is becoming a new programming language instead of programming on a computer people are now programming in atc's and g's so that's an overview quickly of these technologies we speak about i want to close with a discussion about how do you crowdsource genius how do you get the world to help you solve your problems so since my childhood i wanted to travel to space i've started 15 companies taking people on weightless euro g flight sending people to the space station and in the early 90s i read about this guy charles lindbergh and i learned that in 1927 lindbergh crossed the atlantic flying from new york to paris to win a prize a 25 thousand dollar prize had no idea it turned out that raymond orteg puts up 25 thousand dollars and nine different teams spend four hundred thousand dollars trying to win this prize for the first person to fly between new york and paris and i said well if i could offer a prize for private space flight maybe this would make my dreams come true and so i'm sharing with you a mechanism that you can solve all the grand challenges on the planet so the idea of this prize was the following it was going to be a 10 million dollar prize for the first person to build a spaceship that could carry three adults up into space land safely and within two weeks make the trip again i spent five years trying to raise the capital i finally met anusha and amir ansari born tehran came to the u.s became entrepreneurs her dream was to fly into space as well they put up the funds we named it the ansari x prize in their honor we announced this 10 million competition and we had 26 teams around the world who spent 100 million dollars going after this 10 million competition amazingly here's the winning ship spaceship won it's in the mojave desert nine and a half years ago october 4th 2004 through the night 30 000 people had flown in driven in to be there for that winning event could someone actually pull us off because we were asking this team to do something that only a few governments had ever done build a private spaceship that could take humans into space here's the ship burning laughing gas nitric oxide and entire rubber at altitude and then the winning moment on the far left anusha and amir ansari myself paul allen who funded the winning vehicle bert rutan who built it brian binney who was the uh the pilot and then richard branson who had dinner with last night who came in the week before the prize was won and bought the rights to the winning technology to create virgin galactic so this competition basically drove 10 billion media impressions around the world we made the home page of google and let me share with you a short video if we can have the audio up of what that winning moment felt like we're announcing today something called the x prize a 10 million dollar contest to privately build a spaceship that's able to carry three individuals fly to 100 kilometers altitude and do that twice inside of two weeks i have never been myself as creative as i have eyeballing this goddamn pride hello and welcome to mojave here in the high desert of california on this incredible day now you are going to witness history in the making release the ansari xprize inspired international competition drove regulatory reform and made history the x prize for 10 million it ignited a personal space flight revolution and now the winning spaceship is hanging in the smithsonian right next to the spirit of st louis that inspired it in the first place on the heels of that i was able thank you thank you very much on the heels of that i was able to build a great board of trustees i was able to recruit larry page and james cameron and elon musk and ratan tata and craig venter and others and at the x prize we focus right now on what are the world's biggest problems where is there a market failure what do we wish was solved that we could go and create an x prize and then invite people around the world to solve the problem saying i don't care where you're from where you've gone to school if you solve this problem you win so we announced two years ago in partnership with qualcomm the qualcomm tri-quarter x prize this is a competition 10 million dollars for the purse qualcomm put up another 10 million to run it we're asking teams to build a hand-held medical device that any mother or father could use at two o'clock in the morning if they're in in the middle of mumbai or the middle of the bronx that they can talk to they can speak to it it has watson ai on the cloud you can cough on it it can do the rna and dna analysis of the bacteria in your saliva you can do a finger blood prick and in success it can diagnose you better than a team of board certified doctors we announced this competition we have 330 teams entered from around the world we expect to win in the next two years and transform the health care industry where we going next the one that's near and dear to my heart is we have 880 million illiterate adults on earth 80 million of them are kids they live in places we can never build schools or teach enough teachers so we are working on a global literacy xprize to build a piece of software that can operate on any tablet that a child can use where there are no schools no literate adults and go from being completely illiterate to speaking reading writing and coding inside of three years it's about creating a world of literacy so if all goes well we hope to launch that this year so insights on incentive prizes x prizes whatever you might call them i believe that any grand challenge can be solved the number of people who have tools to solve problems are exploding you know the beautiful thing about these is you pay only the winner not people who tried or had a good idea you pay upon success how beautiful is that right you get 10 to 50 times the prize per spent by all the teams to try and win it and ultimately you tap into the world's smartest innovators no matter where they are on planet if they work for google or in the middle of a rocket factory in kazakhstan so the question i ask for the leadership here is what challenges do the emirates want to solve on a global scale so i'll close in the last 10 minutes i have on this i wrote a book called abundance the future is better than you think it comes from the mindset i've had running the x prize and running singularity university and seeing the extraordinary power that entrepreneurs have to solve problems you see to the today we live in a world where the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest market opportunities solve hunger water energy whatever it might be become a billionaire and help a billion people in the process but as i went around speaking to people and saying you know we're heading towards a world of abundance people would say to me peter what are you crazy haven't you seen the school shootings here have you heard about the economic crisis here how can you possibly say the world is getting better than it's ever been and the realization that came to me finally after having this reaction from people is to realize that we live in a world today where the news media is a drug pusher and on every device that we have our smartphones our cell phones our newspaper our radio we are being fed negative news over and over and over again in high definition and there's a reason for this we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news you see as we were evolving in the in the plains and savannas of africa hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago if you if you missed a piece of good news like there's some food over there well that's too bad but if you missed a piece of bad news like the russell and the leaves as a tiger your genes are out of the gene pool and so we evolved an ancient part of our brain called the amygdala and the amygdala looks at everything we see and everything we hear and scans it for negative news and if you see negative news it puts you on high alert like there's a fire the dow is crashing whatever it might be and for that reason open any paper and it's ten to one negative stories to positive but you have to ask yourself the question is that the way the world really is and over the last hundred years it hasn't been over the last hundred years the human lifespan has more than doubled the per capita income for every person on this planet adjusted for inflation has more than tripled the cost of food has dropped 13-fold energy's dropped 20-fold transportation 100-fold communications over a thousand-fold this was the cover of of the economist a few months ago we're heading towards the end of poverty a friend of mine at harvard wrote this book the better angels of our nature saying that we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history you wouldn't know that reading the papers your chances of dying of violent death are 1 500th of what they used to be so the question is what has done this what has transformed the world to being living longer having less mortality cheaper everything and with respect to the government officials in the room it's been technology technology is that which has taken what was scarce and made it abundant i used just a few examples this is a fun one we think of diamonds as being scarce and diamonds are being precious this is the cover of wired magazine a friend of mine's company is manufacturing diamonds not at five dollars it's 20 a carat flawless diamonds in the lab today taking what what used to be scarce and making it abundant they had the potential over the next three years to be generating three billion dollars of diamonds for any use you want so what else do we consider scarce you know resources i have a company called planetary resources it's backed by a dozen billionaires eric schmidt larry page ross perrault richard branson this company has built a technology to go out to near-earth approaching asteroids asteroids that come close to the earth that are rich in fuels and strategic metals so one of these asteroids can generate five times for a small fraction of five times the global platinum output do you consider platinum group metal scarce maybe on earth but not in our solar system it's a change of perspective is energy scarce we're living in an energy economy here but as we see we're living in a world that's bathed in 5 000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species in a year right we see the the rate and the price of solar panels plummeting as production rates around the world are exploding water water wars water scarcity we live on a water planet right two thirds of our planet is covered with water yes 97.5 is salt 2 percent is ice we fight over half a percent this is a device dean cayman perhaps the greatest inventor of our time called the slingshot it has two hoses one hose goes in anything wet the gulf arsenic infected water the latrine and out the other water comes at the other hose comes water so pure it meets the medical standards for injectable water and coca-cola is taking these to every village around the planet this maasai warrior on a cell phone has better mobile communications than the president did 25 years ago if they're on google on a smartphone they have access to more knowledge information than president did 15 years ago they're living in a world of communications and information abundance we talked about the tricorder giving us health abundance and i'll close on this slide this blue line is the world's population we just crossed the seven billion mark this green line is internet penetration in 2010 we had just shy of two billion people connected on earth by 2020 just six years from now that number is going to be five billion people connected three billion new mines are entering the global economy three billion new consumers three billion new inventors for me this represents the greatest era of innovation ever if these are not your customers they're your customers customers they represent tens of trillions of dollars flowing to the global economy when they solve a problem we all solve that problem ladies and gentlemen i believe we're entering into the greatest era of innovation we've ever had thank you you

Channel: World Government Summit

Views: 137,896

Rating: 4.8056579 out of 5

Keywords: Government, Summit, Services, #GovSummit, #Dubai, #UAE, #دبي#, القمة_الحكومية, القمة, الحكومية, الخدمات, التجارب, Govt, Peter Diamandis, United Arab Emirates (Country), Singularity University, X-Prize

Id: Mx8qYmkV5NQ

Length: 44min 44sec (2684 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 02 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/cptmcclain]

Great talk about the progress we are experiencing in technological development.

Summary:

It is expected that computers will have the computational ability of humans (in processing) by 2023. It is expected that a single computer will be able to match all human cognition by 2050.

Tri-Quarter x-prize. It is expected that within two years a device will exist that will be able to diagnose conditions better than a team of medical professionals.

It is expected that before a child of 3 grows to be 18 they will not need to have a drivers licence do to self driving cars.

It is expected that 100 will be the new 60 within the next twenty years. Do to developments in genomics and disease prevention.

3D printing will cause location free production of manufactured products.

3D printing housing, organs, and computers will drop the cost down to that of the cost of materials and energy to produce them as well as causing prototyping to accelerate the rate of innovation.

Labor will be roughly equal to the cost of electricity in the next 30 years.

[u/cybrbeast]

I mostly agree with Diamandis, but have two large caveats:

• I think it's very early days to compare computers with human brain power.

We know very little about the brain's actual computing. Almost every new discovery seems to point out that the brain is much more complex than we previously imagined.

Often times brain power is seen as the number of signals that can be processed through the number of synapses. This completely ignores all the computing that happens within each neuron, let alone all the computing performed by the array of neurotransmitters influencing the neurons. The massively parallel nature of the brain is also hard to compare to our computing.

• Diamandis says cryptography will be dead due to quantum computing. He is completely wrong about this. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

[u/ion-tom]

I wonder what the reception was by his audience? I've read before that much of the outside world considers exponential thinking to be just a scifi delusion, and that foreign students at Singularity U tend to go just for the business connections. I can't find the article supporting it, but it was from about a year ago.

[u/kephael]

It's probably just as likely the world of 2050 is a pile of radioactive rubble.

[u/iammaac]

Ray Kurzweil is everywhere.

[u/[deleted]]

There is absolutely no reason to believe that exponential growth in computing will continue at its current rate.