[applause] [00:00:09] Peter Diamandis:
It's great to be back at Summit. I love Summit. I am so thankful to be invited back. It's a conversation here
like you have no place else. I want to talk about
the future because, I'm passionate about it, I have two seven-year-old boys,
I think about the future, I live most of my
life in the future. It's depressing these days to
be thinking about the future because, you're constantly
bombarded by negative news. You're questioning,
how can we handle these things? What capabilities do I have in the
face of all of these social issues? What capabilities do I
have the fact that doing the things I want to do in
the world are expensive? Do I have the training
to do those things? When you start dreaming,
especially out there in the world, when you dream big,
people say, "You're crazy. Who are you to dream that big?" People shut you down. Sometimes it's your
husband or your wife or your friends or
your faculty members. When you start talking about
all the amazing technologies out there, people are saying, "Man,
I'm just trying to get a job. I'm just trying to get like
insurance to my family. How do I deal?" It's really tough. It's really hard. My job here in the next 30 minutes,
then the Q&A that follows, is to change the most valuable thing
you have, which is your mindset. How you think controls
everything, how successful you'll be or not,
who you spend time with or don't? It's everything. While I can stand on stage here
and lecture about exponential technologies like I do up
at Singularity University or solving the world's grand
challenges at the XPrize for a week solid, that's not
what I want to talk about. I want to talk about your mindset
because, it's everything, everything. Let me start. The first is,
I want to tell you without any question and I hope you get this and believe that we're
living during most extraordinary time
ever in human history. The only time more
exciting than today is tomorrow, and so on, and so on. We forget how brutal
the world used to be. A hundred years ago,
in the year 1918, 250 million people were
infected by the Spanish flu. 50 million people
died in that one year. 20 million people
died in World War I. Scale that up by a factor of
four proportional to today's population, it would be insane
to see headlines like that. Ultimately, the world is amazing. The other thing that's true is
that, none of us truly have any idea how
fast the world is changing. We're changing at an
accelerating rate. For me,
that means that the tools we're going to have to change the world are getting more and more powerful
at a speed that is going to shock us. Let's begin. I had a chance to write
a book I'm very proud of. I presented it as the opening
talk in TED back about six, seven years ago called Abundance: The
Future Is Better Than You Think. In that same year, I was the closing
speaker for President Clinton at CGI. At the end of his
introduction, he said to me, "Peter, why are you so
positive about the future? Don't you watch the news?" I said, "President Clinton
with all due respect. No, I don't watch the news." I look at the data. The reality is that,
as we humans were evolving on the Savannahs of Africa,
hundreds of thousands, millions of years ago, back then,
if we missed a piece of negative news like rustling leaves
is the wind and not a lion. The negative news could
put you out of your misery. We developed an ancient
piece for a temporal lobe called the
amygdala, about the size of your thumb that
scans everything you see and everything you
hear for negative news. If you see it,
it puts you on red alert. It's not something we control. It's something deep-wired
into our brains. At the end of the day,
the news media uses this, right? The old adage,
if it bleeds, it leads. Is so true, right? If you ask yourself the question,
what's the news media's job? It to deliver your eyeballs
to your advertisers. That's it, pure and simple. If we're paying 10
times more attention to negative news and positive
news, open up the newspaper tomorrow
morning and just count the number of negative
stories to positive stories. It's extraordinary. It's 10 to one. I mean, do the experiment. It's not that they're
masochistic or that they want to just have
a negative mindset. It's their business. They don't show you
all the other amazing news going on in the
world every single day. I choose not to watch the news. I mean, period, I get back
two hours a day, it's amazing. My social network will
tell me what I need to know, my family
will, my friends will. There's nothing I don't miss. I have Google alerts for my
companies and things that I care about, but allowing the
Crisis News Network, or Fox, or whomever it might be to tell
me what they think I should be learning, no,
not what I want to do with my time. If you do look at the
data, it's extraordinary. This is about a mindset shift. Over the last hundred years, the
per capita income for every nation, the planet has more than tripled, the
human lifespan has more than doubled. We're about to double it again. The cost of food
has dropped 30-fold. The cost of energy is 100 fold. Transportation,
100 or 1,000 of fold. Communication's millions
of fold cheaper. Let's look at some of
the data in real life. This is people living under extreme
poverty between 1800 and 2015. Plummeting, absolute plummeting. We're about to take the entire
planet out of extreme poverty. Check this out. This ichart is people
living without hunger. The green is what you should be
focusing on as well as the beige. These are countries
that have increased availability of food,
25% to 50% or over 50%. None of these are in hunger. Let's look at literacy around
the world, going from 15% to near 85%, this is average
years of school, increasing. Now, let me show you this
data, but ask yourself the question, what's driving
this over the last 200 years? Why are things getting better? Should you have faith in this data? Is all of a sudden, everything's
going to stop and reverse itself? This is children
under the age of five. It used to be a coin
flip if they survived. Today, it's 4%, still too high. Check this out. This is children in labor. This is child labor. You see from 2000 to 2016, we went
from 16% down to 10% and children doing hazardous work over the last
18 years, from 11% down to 5%. Why is this decrease happening? It used to be dangerous
to have a baby. This is maternal mortality rates. This is the chance that you
would die in childbirth. Plummeting. This is increasing
average life expectancy. We've doubled it from what
used to be in the mid-30s. Now it's the mid-70s pushing to
80, we're about to double it again. Are you worried
about overpopulation? Don't be. A lot of my friends worry about
under population of planet Earth. This is the replacement. Fertility rate in the United States,
we're now below the replacement fertility rate in the United
States at 1.76 instead of 2.1. Now, it's not this way every place
in the world, but it's getting there. This is the rest of the world. We're now at 2.42. Bill Gates has an amazing TED Talk. He says, "You do two things
to any city, any country. You make them better educated,
you make them healthier, their population rate plummets." This is work hours
in developing world. This is significant. We forget the fact that it-- We used to be just plain
difficult to survive. Life was about survival. You would work 80 hours
a week to survive, to get the food, the water, the energy,
the chance to have any kind of pleasure was a remote existence. Today, we're taking a
break from survival. Look what we're doing here. It seems to learn, to love,
to spend time together. That comes with free time. As we start to look around the
world, going from an average of 65 to 70 hours down to 40
hours, that's amazing. As technological
socialism, this is AI and robotics coming in
to do your work for you. That's going to increase. What do we do with our free time? This is a question. This is an opportunity, as I teach at
Singularity University, the world's biggest problems are the world's
biggest business opportunities. Do you want to become a billionaire?
Help a billion people. One of the things I think about
is, what do we do with the
extra time we have? Are we going to play,
are wee going to learn, are we going to
explore virtual worlds? We're going to find out. That orange line, red,
whatever it is, is airline fatality. Airplanes are clearly the safest
mode of transportation on the planet. In 2017, zero commercial deaths. That blue line is cars getting better
and better but as soon as we head towards all autonomous electric
cars, they all go to zero as well. The safest place for you to be is
going to be in your autonomous car. Safer than your house. This is global death rates
from natural catastrophes. Look at that plummeting
back in the '60s '70s '80s. What's going on there? Why is it happening? It's the result of
satellites looking at hurricanes,
data models looking at tsunamis. It's ability to get help
in that golden hour. I love this.
This is from a friend's book, Steven Pinker,
from Better Angels of Our Nature. He says, "Our chance of
dying a violent death today are 1:500 of
what they used to be. We're living during the most
peaceful time ever in human history. It's hard to believe that,
but that's what the data shows us. At the same time,
despite the challenges we have here and on the
news, if you look at that wedge of green
of increasing democracy around the world, that's incredible. I want to say to you,
the data is important. To understand the data,
not just what you're fed or what you're told but
to look at the data. Do we have challenges?
Do we have problems? Absolutely. I look at the data and
say, "Okay, got it. The worlds getting better
by all these measures but honestly, Peter,
how does that affect me? How's it going to help
me do what I want to do? I'm living in America already." Guess what? As it turns out,
this concept of abundance goes way beyond just
the developing world. All the exponential technologies,
computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics,
3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain,
all of those technologies are transforming what used to
be scarce into abundance. We are heading towards a
world where scarcity is gone. We're going to be able to
meet the needs of every man, woman and child and we'll
be able to provide each of us with literally the
power that was had only by the heads of nations or
the largest corporations. There is nothing that
you don't have access to. At the end of the day,
I want to hammer this point down. We're living into a decade ahead. We're going to create more wealth
than we have in the entire past century, where each of you is going
to have access to more capability and wealth and computation in
manufacturing, in a whole slew of different areas than the heads of
nations in largest corporations. Ultimately, your choice. The conversation we
need to have is, what are you going to do with that power? What do you care about solving? What do you care about transforming
from scarcity to abundance? The question is, what do you
consider scarce in your life? Is it time, money,
resources, expertise? I would pose it to you that
there is nothing truly scarce. Let's take a look. In the 1880s.
This is one example. To get one hour of
light from a kerosene lamp on average took
about an hour of labor. Today, it's a half a second of
labor to get you an hour of light. Again, transforming what used
to be scarce into abundance. I opened my book, Abundance, with the story that takes
place in the year 1861. Napoleon III is welcoming the King
of Siam to the Palace of Versailles. To demonstrate how
wealthy Napoleon is, he feeds all the troops
with silver utensils. Napoleon himself eats
with gold utensils but the king of Siam is fed
with aluminum utensils. It turns out that in that
year of 1861, aluminum was the most precious
metal on the planet. Even though the Earth's crust
is 8.3% aluminum by weight, it's combined with oxygen, silicate to
make this thing called bauxite, but it was so energetically
difficult to extract the aluminum from the bauxite that it was
worth more than gold and platinum. Which by the way, if you go to Washington DC and
look at the Washington Monument,
the capstone is aluminum because it was built in that same decade. Then, in the US and in France,
the same month, scientists discovered this process
called electrolysis that made it so cheap to
extract the aluminum from the bauxite we use it with a
throwing mentality right now. Again, this notion of
what used to be scarce becoming abundant
over and over again. What would you think of as more
scarce than a perfect diamond, right? A four-carat, a six-carat,
eight-carat diamond. The bureaus teaches us about
the value of perfect diamonds. A friend of mine up
in the valley has a company called,
The Diamond Foundry. It's got a machine about the
size of a large refrigerator. In one end comes methane,
water, electricity, at the other end comes perfect diamonds
four, six, eight, 10 carats. Would you like to have color in it? No problem,
we'll make some imperfections. Sure. Now, they're smart. They price it at 10% below the given
rates and they call it California culture diamonds that got Leonardo DiCaprio there to
present the company. At the end of the day,
scarcity is contextual. What do you think of as scarce? Energy? No. We live on a planet it's
bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than
we consume as a species. Energy is not scarce by a long shot. We used to go and hunt whales to
get whale oil to light our nights. Then, we ravaged
mountainsides to get coal. Then we drilled kilometers
under the sea floor to get oil. Well, guess what? In the next 20 years,
as I'll show you in a moment, we're heading towards
an all-electric economy. Water, not scarce either. We're able to take the water out of
the atmosphere out of the oceans. I'll show you more on that. Health. AI is going to
provide us-- The poorest child on the planet
and the son or daughter of a billionaire is going to access the same health care,
the same education. The same way that today, a kid on
one of these devices has access to the same knowledge
and information as the president,
CEO of Baidu or Google. At the end of the day, is it time? Is
it money? Is it resources? Expertise? Let's look at some of these. Again, my goal is I want
to change your mindset. I want you to understand that
there is nothing truly scarce. In a day,
you have the ability to transform scarcity into abundance
over and over again. Let's look at energy first. Again, this planet is blessed by
more than 8,000 times more energy hitting the surface than we
consume as a species in a year. Last year and this year,
we're hitting all-time lows in solar. The price of coal was five to
six cents per kilowatt hour. Check this out. In Mexico last year,
2.7 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Abu Dhabi and Dubai,
2.4 cents per kilowatt-hour. We're heading towards a
world where within 10 years, that price will drop below
a penny per kilowatt hour. At the end of the day-- A dear
friend of mine, Rome Gnomes showed me a quote from one of the Middle
Eastern members of the royal family who said, "The Stone
Age did not end from a lack of stones, either will a petroleum
age from a lack of petroleum." It doesn't matter
how much natural gas and how much oil or coal there is. When the price of
solar and wind plummets so low, so fast, and democratizes access to energy on this
planet, we're going to stop and
it's going to change. We need batteries. Of course, this year Gigafactories
on schedule 35-gigawatt hours of production more than
anyplace else on the planet. At the same time,
there are 10-gigawatt factories under construction
around the world. This is a chart that shows
us what Tesla did with the gigawatt factory but at
the same time, we've seen the price plummeting twice
as fast as the greatest optimists because,
that's what entrepreneurs do. They're optimists and they create
the future they want and desire. Are we going to have problems? Sure. Are we going to get there?
Absolutely. Every major car
company, $90 billion are going into electrifying
every fleet on the planet and with
that goes massive investments in the
battery technologies. We are racing towards
an all-electric future. The question is,
do we have the resources to actually fuel that all-electric? Do we have the rare earth
metals for the batteries and the electronics and all
the things that we're needing? Again, there's this
scarcity mindset out there. It's, "Oh my God,
we're going to run out. Everything we need is in China."
Bullshit. Check this out. Less than a year ago,
off the coast of Japan, in the silt, on the ocean floor was discovered
16 million tons of rare earth metal oxides, enough to
supply us all the electronics and battery capacity we
need for the next 400 years. That's just off the coast of Japan. Again, every time we're
able to use technology to push the valley a
little bit farther, a little bit lower,
a little bit higher, whatever it might be,
we discover more and more. At the same time, and you guys
know I'm passionate about space. Near the earth are called
a population of near earth asteroids,
and these near earth asteroids are rich in all the
platinum metals we need palladium, platinum,
rhodium, all of these. Here are some stats. I just find these always incredible. One 500-meter platinum group
metal rich asteroid has more platinum than is mined
in the history of humanity. There are 2,500 of these. They come closer to
earth energetically than getting to the moon surface. Everything that we hold of value
on earth, metals, minerals, energy, real estate is going to be in
your infinite quantities in space. I have great hope
and expectations that both Bezos and Musk are going to be opening up that future for us, where
we have no resource limitations here. About capital abundance,
do we have enough money? Do you have enough money
as an entrepreneur? Do I have enough money
as an entrepreneur to do the things that I want? Well, check this out. Right now, right here,
we're seeing an explosion of capital. Here are the numbers. We see $34 billion
in crowdfunding this year, $300 billion of
crowdfunding by 2025. What does that mean? It means an entrepreneur
in the middle of Tanzania has access to all the capital they need
to make their company work on the web through the crowd. Beyond that, in 2017,
we saw all-time highs in Europe for venture
capital at $19 billion, in Asia at $48 billion,
in the United States at $84 billion,
a massive influx of capital. Besides crowdfunding and venture
capital, it's, of course, ICOs and token generation
events, $6.6 billion in 2017. The first half of 2018 saw seven
billion dollars and accelerating. Then, we're seeing something
super extraordinary and amazing which is, massive influx of capital
from sovereign wealth funds. Around the world, we're seeing
billions of dollars flowing from sovereign funds down, down into
the pockets of the entrepreneurs. Here's Masa Son at SoftBank, who
started the first $100 billion vision fund with a commitment for about
a trillion dollars of capital. What does he want to do with it? He wants to invest it
in AI and robotics. This is a quote from him,
he says, "I totally believe the singularity is coming
in the next 30 years. That's why I'm in a hurry to
aggregate the cash to invest." When I think about how fast the
world is changing, it's a realization that we're about to go from
3.8 billion people connected on the internet last year in 2017
to eight billion people connected in the next five years,
4.2 billion minds are coming online. They're being connected by gigabyte
connection speeds with access to all the capital they need,
all the computational power. We're about to see more
and more entrepreneurs coming online,
solving more and more problems. That gets me excited. The other thing is, we're becoming
healthier and living longer. One of my passions, I invest my
time, my money from my venture fund, from my own time into, how do we
extend the healthy human lifespan? How do we give you the vitality
at 100 that you had at 60? How long do you want to live? How long do you hope to live? How many careers are
you going to have? Right now, I've had the
chance to start two companies. One, cellularity,
which is in the stem cell business. It actually collects
and creates a derivative of placental stem
cells to be able to hit autoimmune disease,
extend life and increase muscle mass and fight cancers
then, human longevity. I'll talk about that in minute. There's a whole slew
of other companies. In the next 10 years,
I'm clear, we're going to add 10 at a minimum, likely 20 or 30 healthy years on everyone's life, and the price
will be coming down. This is about increasing the GDP
of every nation on the planet. As my friend Ray Kurzweil
says, "We're heading towards a period of
longevity escape velocity." He and Aubrey de Grey
define longevity escape velocity as that moment in time
where for every year that you're alive, science is extending your
life for a little more than a year. It departs very
nicely, very quickly. This is in the work of cellularity,
it's the notion that, as we are growing, at about age 20, you start
to have a die off in your stem cells. By the time you're age 50, 60,
70, your stem cell populations have dropped by a factor of
1,000, maybe 10,000. Those stem cells are
regenerative engine. If you can resupply
those stem cells to you, it allows you to live
longer and healthier. Back in 2001 when
Craig Venter sequenced the first human genome took $100 million and nine months, today, it's
under 1,000 bucks and a few hours. Illumina and the
Beijing Genome Institute predicts 100 bucks and
one hour next year. That's a million fold
price performance increase. We're talking about every single
human on the planet being sequenced. What's even more exciting
than being able to sequence for a small pittance of
money, for the price of Americano these days,
eventually, besides sequencing your genome,
we can now edit your genome. This comes out of Harvard and MIT. This is called CRISPR 2.0. You are a collection of 3.2
billion cells that define you. It's your software code. They discovered a variant of
CRISPR that allows you to change one of those A, T, Cs, or Gs
efficiently, accurately, cheaply. Check out these numbers. 32,000 out of 50,000
human diseases are due to one of your 3.2
billion letters being off. Imagine being able to go in
and just snip, edit, replace, maybe to cure yourself,
or maybe to cure the rest of the generations to come.
We're going to deal with incredible, exciting, fun,
challenging moral ethical issues like, do we give our children the best genes they
can possibly have? Right now, you give them the
best education, the best food. When you're looking for a mate,
you're not randomly selecting a mate. You're looking for someone who looks
good or strong or is intelligent. Do we actually go and
start playing God? Morals and ethics change. They're constantly changing. If I did a heart transplant
today, it's a miracle. I did a heart transplant 1,000
years ago and burned at the stakes. What Health Nucleus does down
in Santiago, we sequence you. Over the course of three hours, we sequence all 3.2
billion letters in you. We sequence your microbiome. We look at 1,100 chemicals
in your bloodstream. We do a full body MRI, a brain
MRI, a brain vasculature. We do a coronary CT, a heart CT. We generate 150 gigabytes of
data about you in three hours. Then we ask the questions,
is there anything going on inside your body
you should know about? If there is,
the answers is, "I don't want to know," is
not the right answer. It's, you fix it. What we do right now is
about giving you a healthier, longer life to do more
things on this planet. I want to close with the notion
that, we're living in a world where access to
expertise is everywhere. You and every one of us
is an expert in something. At the end of the day,
if you want to do something in your life that you
don't know how to do but you're passionate about doing
it, you can reach out there,
you get all the expertise you need. What are you passionate
about changing? What do you want to
do on this planet? For me, it was space. I wanted to go to space
since I was a child. I was born in the time of the
Apollo era, and literally, it formed my vision of
what I wanted to do. I wanted to become an
astronaut so badly. The Apollo program
hard to believe was 49 years ago, we land on the moon. The Apollo program showed
us what was possible. Then, this scientific documentary
showed us where we were going. A hopeful vision of the future. This lit up my life. I was absolutely clear
of what I was doing. I knew my massively
transformative purpose, it was to help take the human race
off the planet to the stars. After I looked at the
numbers, I found out my chance of becoming an astronaut
were like one in 1,000. I had a better chance of
becoming an NBA all star at 5'5'' than I did entering
the Astronaut Corps. Then one day I read about
Lindbergh that in 1927, he crossed the Atlantic not on a whim
but to win a $25,000 prize. When I gave up on NASA
being the way I was going to go to space,
I was like, "How I'm I going to get a spaceship
to go to space." I figured out,
this is what I'm going to do. I was going to create a $10 million
prize, $10 million was enough to inspire the entrepreneurs but
not the Boeings and the Lockheeds. I was going to offer it up
for the team who could build a private spaceship,
carry three adults, me and a friend and a pilot or an autopilot
and three of us up to 100 kilometers, land safely and
doing that within two weeks. Amazingly,
that $10 million prize ended up inspiring 26 teams from seven countries around the world who spent $100 million dollars
trying to solve it. They're all optimists. This was the winning moment in
Mojave on October 4th of 2014. Here's the vehicle, SpaceShipOne,
hanging in the Smithsonian right next to the spirit of Saint Louis
inspired in the first place. For me, my challenge
that I wanted to do was, I wanted to find the
experts out there in the world that could build
me the private spaceships that would take me and
my friends to space. This idea of an incentive prize,
it worked, it worked amazingly well. We didn't pay any of the
losers, we only paid the winner. On the heels of that,
Richard Branson came in and bought the rights for SpaceShipOne
to create Virgin Galactic. I'm very grateful for
him to commit the $250 million dollars that he
did, not billion dollars. I have my my seat to fly on
one of the first flights, which I'm excited to do,
hopefully, maybe it's next year. On the heels of that,
we built an amazing Board of Trustees
and benefactors from Larry Page and James Cameron and Ray Kurzweil and Elon
and and Dean Cayman. We've launched about a little over
$150 million in prizes to date. Another 200 million plus are in
development around the world. I must give you a quick look at what
we're working on and we'll go to Q&A. We awarded, last year,
the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE. This is, of course, from Star Trek,
the Tricorder, and thankful to the Roddenberry Foundation for their
support in this, as well as Qualcomm. Can you build a handheld
device for the mother or the father,
not for the doctor or nurse, that can diagnose 15
diseases at two o'clock in the morning when
your kid is sick? This is a prize going on right now. It's in finals over
the next six months. This is funded by Elon
Musk, he put up $15 million, The Diverse
family, Tony Robbins. Scott Harrison funded The rest. This has built an
Android app that can take a child in the middle of
no place where there's no schools, no literal
adults, from illiteracy to basic reading, writing,
and numeracy in 15 months. We had 700 teams around
the world entered, we narrowed down to five finalists. Google gave us thousands of tablets. We went to Tanzania,
we found 2,500 students who were completely illiterate
of English and Swahili, gave them the tablets,
taught the village mama how to power and charged with
solar in the villages. We're in testing right now. We're going to open source
the final winner and make it available to everyone
on the planet for free. This is how you scale
a billion teachers. Thank you. This is how you scale a
billion teachers on the planet. Well, this XPRIZE is
well, also in finals. This is a challenge, we said, "Okay,
we have to do environmental prizes." In fact, this year at Visioneering, our top prize is prize
after prize after prize are environmental prizes,
saving the coral reefs. A dear friend of mine, Lee
Stein, in the audience here, was the person who drove this
one on top and by the second and helped us on coral
reefs, but taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, a whole bunch
of XPRIZEs in this arena. This is an XPRIZE that asks team
to build a device that attaches to a coal plant or natural gas
plant and sucks the CO2 out of the smokestack, add temperature, add
pressure, add concentration and turns it into a product more valuable
than the cost of extracting it. You make CO2 extraction a profit
center for the energy plant. How cool is that? Right? Thank you. We've got final-- One
person thought it was cool. We got finals going on in Wyoming. Governor Mead there has been an
incredible supporter, and in Alberta, we have five teams going head
to head in each of those plants. Next week, I think,
or two weeks, whatever, I'm flying to Greece
for the finals of this. This is the show, ocean discovery. We know more about
the surface of Mars and the moon than we
do the ocean floor. The physics of salt
water don't allow us to actually
visualize and penetrate. This is an XPRIZE, it's underwritten,
supported by Shell and by Noah, that ask teams to build a
device, a robotic device they can launch from the shore, go out to
a particular point, go down 4,000 meters to the ocean floor and map
500 square kilometers in 24 hours. I have no idea what I'm going
to see when I get there, but there are seven finalists going
head to head to do this, to allow us to map what is probably
the richest source of Biotica and richest source of resources
that we have on our planet. I love this one. This is one funded by All
Nippon Airways out of Japan. The CEO of All NA
calls me and says to our team,
"What's going to make it so we don't have to actually
fly anyplace anymore?" A dear friend of
mine, Dr. Harry Clore was the bold innovator
on this and he came up with the ideas that he'd
been working on for a while. He said, "What about a future
we have robotic avatars?" Where the robot is-- I'm not
here on stage, I'm back home in Santa Monica,
there's a robot on stage over here. I'm home in my pajamas with
the VR goggles on, a haptic suit, and as I walk around,
the robot walks around, as I look at you, the robot
looks, and as I reach out and shake your hands,
I feel that at home, right? These robotic avatars
will allow us to put robots in places of
danger, after the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown
or when you need medical help,
whatever the case might be. Love this one. We awarded this 10 days ago. Another dear friend, Eric
Hirshberg, put this idea forward. People talk water wars
and water scarcity. Well,
it turns out that two thirds of the planet has humidity
high enough that you could suck the water
out of the atmosphere and we challenge
teams around the world to build a device that can pull the humidity out of the
air and give a village 2,000 liters of clean,
drinking water for two cents a liter
from renewable energy. Amazing. We awarded the winning
team, actually, from here in California at our
Visioneering event last year. I'll close with this thought. "A negative mind will never
give you a positive life." If you'd like these slides, please, you can download
them, just send us a text. Share them with your
friends, your family, your companies, whatever you want. Let's get the data out there. Let's help everyone
realize we are alive during the most extraordinary
time ever in human history, a time where each and
every one of us has the opportunity and the
ability to change the world. There is nothing you
don't have access to. You have access to all the capital
you need, the computational power you need, AI on the cloud, 3D printing
on the cloud, what is it you want? Right? Any one of you could spin
up 1,000 processes, of course, on AWS or Google
or Azure if you wanted to. It's this. This is the scarce,
most precious resource on the planet, your mindset,
your commitment, your passion to not take no for an answer
and solve the problems that you were put on
this planet to solve. An honor and a pleasure. Thank you. [applause] Thank you. Thank you. It would be an honor
to take some questions. It's the fun part.
We have about 20 minutes. We have some microphones. We get the house
lights up a little bit. This is such a beautiful setting, I
want to take it in for a little bit. Let's start over here, sir. Are we able to get the house
lights up a little bit more? Thank you. [00:38:13] Speaker
2: How do we ensure, with all the advances
in technologies, that the robots have had
the-- we can all get through the transition
in a good way? [00:38:26] Peter: Yes, a great
question and an important question. It's the question of our age. That relates to jobs and it relates
to a whole slew of a Jason sees. Let me be clear about something. My dear friend, Ray Kurzweil,
his prediction is that, we're going to-- Two important
thing, I want you to put these in your mind as milestone
dates, 2029 is his prediction of when we're going to
have human-level AI, right? Time check, 11 years from now. Next time check is his prediction
of when we're going to have brain computer interface, your neocortex
connected to the cloud is by 2035. First of all, we're alive during
the most extraordinary time ever because, this is the time that we
are transforming the human race. Let me be very clear,
I'm clear from myself that we're going to
transform what it means to be human,
what it means to live in society, how we govern, how we do everything. It's the next 20 years. It's not 100 years, it's not 50
years, it’s the next 20 years. I truly believe that. We don't truly understand
how quickly things are transforming and
combining and recombining. Eyes wide open, don't blink,
it's really important. To answer your question,
first of all, I think we are beginning a process of,
it's not technology or us. I think that we are
going to begin to-- or, continue to merge
with technology. If I were to ask a
question, anybody here in the room not have their
cellphone with them? Okay, there's nobody. The point I want to
make and there was one person at an event I spoke to. It was about twice the size as this and they had lost it
that morning in Uber. This is part of us now. This is our extended memory. We have 300 million
pattern recognizers in our neocortex,
once those are full. We're going to begin to
merge with technology. There's probably a billion
dollars a year being invested in connecting the
neocortex to the cloud. Folks like Brian Johnson and the folks that Elon has
backed, [?], Google, Facebook,
defense departments, nation, states and so forth. We're going to be
connecting the human brain. At the end of the day,
we're evolving a new species of which we are part and,
how do we assure that it has human soul and how do we assure
that it has ethics and morals and is something our children,
I don't know the answer. My job here is to help
show where we're going and help raise these questions
so we're aware of them. I don't feel like we can just wait and let someone else
figure this all out. This is our responsibility. Next question here please. [00:41:38] Participant:
When in the future might women share
equally in the abundance? [applause] [00:41:49] Peter: The reality is,
the answer is now, it's always now. I'm very proud that at the
XPRIZE, probably three quarters of our
leadership team are women. I'm very proud of Anousheh Ansari. I've been CEO for the longest
time, I step down, I step back in and Anousheh Ansari
just came in as a CEO. I've got three amazing
women right here, Aster and Anna and
Susan who are part of my leadership team,
we're a majority women and vast majority
women-lead organization. At Visionary last week, I was
listening and I was like, "This is not only the decade, this is
the century of women coming." I do believe it's yours to take and
thank God, we've screwed up enough. I'll just leave it at that
but, in reality if you look at-- I'll
say one last thing. One of the issues has been around
reproductive rights and one of the realities is the age limit
of, do you have a baby by the time you're 35 because the
bullshit that Hollywood feeds us, you can have a baby until
you're 45 or 50 is just that. You can do it from surrogate
pregnancies in future fertilization but there's
technologies now allowing us to have a child at any
age, which was one of the benefits men had and
now, women can have as well. I think that's an important
equalizer that's coming, thank you. Please. [00:43:17] Participant: You have
a very optimistic take on this. How do you reconcile
a lot of the thoughts of say,
Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking who think and exponential
take off for singularity is actually a terrifying scenario? [00:43:32] Peter: Sure, I've known Elon for 18, 19 years and I knew Stephen
Hawking relatively well. One of my greatest moments in my
life was flying him into zero G. Here's the challenge,
are there going to be problems? Absolutely, there're of
course going to be problems. I'm not sitting here
saying it's la la la, everything's going to be
great, we're fine. Over the last 100 years if I asked
you "Do you think the world's gotten better over
the last century?" Hopefully, you saw the numbers, by extraordinary rights across the
world, across the globe but we still had World War I, World War II,
the Spanish Flu, the Vietnam War. 150 million people died over that
century but the world got better. Are we going to have problems,
are we going to have terrorism? Are going to have
all kinds of issues? Absolutely, but we're also
going to have a level of tools and capabilities to solve
problems like never before. I'll give you a couple of examples. I think Sundar, the CO of Google
said that AI is more powerful than fire and electricity, I think was
his quote, and I think it's true. We're all going to
have an AI shell that is on all the time
that's empowering you. It really is I think
within the next 10 years, we're going to have a version of J.A.R.V.I.S.where you give
permission to that AI listen to every conversation you have, read your
emails, measure the chemicals in your bloodstream, look at what's going on around you,
remind you on information. It's going to give us this
incredible superpower. You don't have to have it but it's
going to empower us in these ways. It's also going to empower you to
solve problems like never before. What gives me great
hope or the world is, what do you define
an entrepreneur? Many of you are here
entrepreneurs, what are you? What am I? We are people who find a
problem and solve a problem. That's what an entrepreneur does. We're going to have more
people solving problems on this planet than any time
ever in human history. It used to be just the robber
barons or the governments. You have to go plead please
and when all they could do was change monetary policy or
send their troops some place. You, you can solve the problem. You can design, create, fix it. As I teach at SU that the
world's biggest problem is the world's biggest
business opportunities. Go solve one of those big problems. Solve a billion person problem,
become a billionaire in the process. That's what get's me excited
and hopeful of the future. Thank you, please. [00:46:16] Participant:
Negative externalities like pollution, human encroachment
of natural ecosystems. Our exponential abundance
is causing or at least plays a major role in this major
extinction event on the planet. How do we ensure we
have an abundance of biodiversity as we move
forward in this process? [00:46:31] Peter: Great question,
let me give you a take at it. First of all, I believe we have had
made all these major extinctions. I want to put context. The world used to be
four billion years ago, a reducing
atmosphere of hydrogen and methane and then, this poisonous gas called oxygen
came into existence. Oh my God, such corrosive material, massive die off of
billions of species. Should've shut down at
oxygen right then and there. Luckily,
they didn't and we came along. Environmental change has
always been the norm. We're accelerating it,
we're causing it, we also have the ability to stop it or
slow it down or vary it. If you think of this
as a planet for humans, I would say we're a planet for cows. One third of the non ice landmass
of planet Earth is livestock. The idea that we are
growing all of these food products by virtue of this
normal process is insane. What is food right now,
it's getting sunlight from the sun, photosynthetically
converting it to carbohydrates in the grass or the corn,
whatever the case might be, having a cow eat that and
then you actually eat a steak. It's really getting sunlight's
energy into your body, is what the food process is but there're
far more efficient ways to do that. Amazing companies like
my friend Josh Tetrick at JUST,
Memphis Meats and many others are going to transform how
we generate our food, giving us back incredible
amounts of land. Autonomous cars are going
to free up 15% of LA streets and parking lots to give
us back those areas. At the end of the day,
yes, we've screwed up, but technology's going to allow us
to then hopefully change it. If I said to you,
"What was the environmental crisis of the year 1890?" Do you know by chance? It was horse manure. In 1880s and 1890s as we moved from the rural areas into
downtown Detroit, New York, Chicago,
people brought with them their motive force, the horse. The horse shit was piling
up high and it was causing a lot of disease and
problems and if you look at the articles back then,
the prediction was that this is growing out of control,
it's going to be a problem. Of course, what changed it
was the invention of the car. Autonomous cars,
electric systems, these things are going to change things. There's a multitude
of different ways and yes, we have challenges,
let's solve them. One of the XPRIZES,
I'm going to make it happen one of these days is,
I want to a de-extinction XPRIZE. I want to go back and create the
list of 100 species and we should at least have some ability to bring
those back in a responsible fashion. Listen,
I'm a technological optimist. I admit it, but I at least
want to say there are, if you're passionate about a
problem, let's fix it. Thank you. [applause] Thank you, all right. [00:49:52] Participant: Hello,
how do you see political processes around the world
interacting with this progress? [00:49:58] Peter: I should've had
my friend who introduced me add two more rules, which is,
no questions on politics or sports. [laughter] I don’t know. I just know that the political
system right now is so broken. The idea that I am, first of
all, able to be an expert enough on all the issues being asked
for me to vote at the polls. This is probably one of the most
educated groups ever who actually reads about and looks at all of
the issues and makes the decisions. Majority of the people just go
to the polls and vote, democratic or republican or whatever sign they
happen to see walking into the poll. They vote no on this or yes on that. Such a broken bullshit
fashion because, it is a 200-year old mechanism of
representative governance. Can we change it? Of course. Do I know the best
way to change it? No. I'm I sure that it is not
the way we’re doing it right? Absolutely.
Yes, there’s Blockchain, yes there’s AI, yes there’s 5G
networks, all these things, but I also know that none of the ingrained
institutions will let us. Politics don’t change
gracefully, period. Maybe it’s going to
be in the virtual world,
maybe it’s going to be in space. Let me take these last two questions
and then, we’ll have to break. [00:51:22] Participant: Hi,
Peter, thank you for speaking. I really appreciate it. [00:51:25] Peter: Thank you. [00:51:26] Participant: At
the risk of sounding like one of the negative minds
that you warned against at the end of your talk,
I think you compare a lot of these positive thesis with
dystopian narratives as well. This is one of those
annoying questions that isn’t really a question, but I have a few of these dystopian narratives and I just
want- [crosstalk] [00:51:45] Peter: I think you’re
breaking both rule one and two. [laughter] [00:51:47] Participant:
I definitely I am and I apologize, but I think these
are very real things that- [00:51:53] Peter: Please. [00:51:54] Participant:
- we should talk about. First one, like training social
credits rights, you read about that article about Xi Jinping, you can’t
book public transportation anymore. That’s a case in point. Tech in the wrong authoritarian
hands can go really south. Second, the rise of deep fakes in the
eco-chamber bias reinforcing news. It feels like the
information propagation channels in this country
are very messed up. Seeing like just access to
information is turned into just a complete subjective
victimization of facts. [00:52:25] Peter: Let me
just answer it right here. [00:52:28] Participant: Sure. [00:52:29] Peter: Yes, there’s
lots of shit fucked up, absolutely. [clapping] 100%. That’s not my point. My point is,
you’re more powerful than you ever have been to solve
those things you want. Don’t complain. Go figure out how to solve it. [clapping] I just want to say that.
[applause] [00:52:49] Peter: Thank you. [00:52:53] Participant: Thank
you, Peter. I’ll keep it down to just
like three or four words. Do you have hope for or see
vision for breakthroughs in gender equality and social injustice,
guns, climate change and ocean rise? I live in Typhoon Alley and I
see it every year in Taiwan. Thank you. [00:53:14] Peter: Yes.
Listen, guys, I am clear that we can and must
have gender equality. I am clear that it will happen
in other places and it’s happened in other places first, but it is
something at the end of the day, I am a-- I’m proud to be an American,
I’m proud to be a capitalist, I’m proud to be an entrepreneur,
all those things are true. I also know that I’m seeing
other countries that are just blowing out of the water
in ways I so wish we were. [00:53:54] Participant:
Like New Zealand? [00:53:55] Peter: There’s a list.
I’ve got it. Are we going to have
problems on our environment? Absolutely. Is it too late? I don’t know. Do we have the ability to actually
take it and wrestle it to the ground? If we choose to, yes. I'll just give you one example. We’re working right now
on a cabin extract XPRIZE. Can you pull enough CO2
out of the atmosphere? That’s great. Problem is, it’s got a long tail. Tell me, "Peter, you’ve got all the
money you want, go and solve it." For me right now it’s about
putting up a sunshade. We’ve got the sun,
we’ve got the earth, you’ve got a ground
point in between. Can you put up enough capabilities
to block a fraction of 1% of the four times coming in,
put a thermostat on the planet? Absolutely. Does anybody
have the balls to do that? Ultimately guys, there is
no problem we can not solve. The powers at B may not be
the ones who chose to or can. It doesn’t mean that
you can’t or we can’t. At the end of the day,
the most powerful thing in the universe is the passionate
and committed human mind. It’s an honor to be here. I thank you. I hope you take away from this. [clapping] I hope you take away from this. This is the most incredible
time to be alive. Please,
don’t let anyone tell you no. Go and make it happen. Thank you. [applause]
