Abundance is our future | Peter Diamandis

(Applause)

(Video) Announcer: Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked.

Announcer Two: Famine in Somalia. Announcer Three: Police pepper spray.

Announcer Four: Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines.

Announcer Six: Societal decay. Announcer Seven: 65 dead.

Announcer Eight: Tsunami warning. Announcer Nine: Cyberattacks.

Multiple Announcers: Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado.

Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria.

Crisis. Death. Disaster.

Oh, my God.

Peter Diamandis: So those are just a few of the clips

I collected over the last six months --

could have easily been the last six days

or the last six years.

The point is that the news media

preferentially feeds us negative stories

because that's what our minds pay attention to.

And there's a very good reason for that.

Every second of every day,

our senses bring in way too much data

than we can possibly process in our brains.

And because nothing is more important to us

than survival,

the first stop of all of that data

is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe

called the amygdala.

Now the amygdala is our early warning detector,

our danger detector.

It sorts and scours through all of the information

looking for anything in the environment that might harm us.

So given a dozen news stories,

we will preferentially look

at the negative news.

And that old newspaper saying,

"If it bleeds it leads,"

is very true.

So given all of our digital devices

that are bringing all the negative news to us

seven days a week, 24 hours a day,

it's no wonder that we're pessimistic.

It's no wonder that people think

that the world is getting worse.

But perhaps that's not the case.

Perhaps instead,

it's the distortions brought to us

of what's really going on.

Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made

over the last century

by a series of forces

are, in fact, accelerating to a point

that we have the potential in the next three decades

to create a world of abundance.

Now I'm not saying

we don't have our set of problems --

climate crisis, species extinction,

water and energy shortage -- we surely do.

And as humans, we are far better

at seeing the problems way in advance,

but ultimately we knock them down.

So let's look

at what this last century has been

to see where we're going.

Over the last hundred years,

the average human lifespan has more than doubled,

average per capita income adjusted for inflation

around the world has tripled.

Childhood mortality

has come down a factor of 10.

Add to that the cost of food, electricity,

transportation, communication

have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold.

Steve Pinker has showed us

that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever

in human history.

And Charles Kenny

that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent

in the last 130 years.

We truly are living in an extraordinary time.

And many people forget this.

And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher.

In fact, we redefine what poverty means.

Think of this, in America today,

the majority of people under the poverty line

still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators,

television, mobile phones,

air conditioning and cars.

The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet,

could have never dreamed of such luxuries.

Underpinning much of this

is technology,

and of late,

exponentially growing technologies.

My good friend Ray Kurzweil

showed that any tool that becomes an information technology

jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law,

and experiences price performance doubling

every 12 to 24 months.

That's why the cellphone in your pocket

is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster

than a supercomputer of the '70s.

Now look at this curve.

This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years.

I want you to notice two things from this curve.

Number one, how smooth it is --

through good time and bad time, war time and peace time,

recession, depression and boom time.

This is the result of faster computers

being used to build faster computers.

It doesn't slow for any of our grand challenges.

And also, even though it's plotted

on a log curve on the left,

it's curving upwards.

The rate at which the technology is getting faster

is itself getting faster.

And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law,

are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies

available to all of us.

Cloud computing,

what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing;

sensors and networks; robotics;

3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute

personalized production around the planet;

synthetic biology;

fuels, vaccines and foods;

digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I.

I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy

by IBM's Watson?

I mean, that was epic.

In fact, I scoured the headlines

looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could.

And I love this: "Watson Vanquishes Human Opponents."

Jeopardy's not an easy game.

It's about the nuance of human language.

And imagine if you would

A.I.'s like this on the cloud

available to every person with a cellphone.

Four years ago here at TED,

Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university

called Singularity University.

And we teach our students all of these technologies,

and particularly how they can be used

to solve humanity's grand challenges.

And every year we ask them

to start a company or a product or a service

that can affect positively the lives of a billion people

within a decade.

Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students

can touch the lives of a billion people today.

30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous.

Today we can point at dozens of companies

that have done just that.

When I think about creating abundance,

it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet;

it's about creating a life of possibility.

It is about taking that which was scarce

and making it abundant.

You see, scarcity is contextual,

and technology is a resource-liberating force.

Let me give you an example.

So this is a story of Napoleon III

in the mid-1800s.

He's the dude on the left.

He invited over to dinner

the king of Siam.

All of Napoleon's troops

were fed with silver utensils,

Napoleon himself with gold utensils.

But the King of Siam,

he was fed with aluminum utensils.

You see, aluminum

was the most valuable metal on the planet,

worth more than gold and platinum.

It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument

is made of aluminum.

You see, even though aluminum

is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass,

it doesn't come as a pure metal.

It's all bound by oxygen and silicates.

But then the technology of electrolysis came along

and literally made aluminum so cheap

that we use it with throw-away mentality.

So let's project this analogy going forward.

We think about energy scarcity.

Ladies and gentlemen,

we are on a planet

that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy

than we use in a year.

16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface

every 88 minutes.

It's not about being scarce,

it's about accessibility.

And there's good news here.

For the first time, this year

the cost of solar-generated electricity

is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India --

8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees.

The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year.

Last month, MIT put out a study

showing that by the end of this decade,

in the sunny parts of the United States,

solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour

compared to 15 cents

as a national average.

And if we have abundant energy,

we also have abundant water.

Now we talk about water wars.

Do you remember

when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft

back towards the Earth,

in 1990 after it just passed Saturn?

He took a famous photo. What was it called?

"A Pale Blue Dot."

Because we live on a water planet.

We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water.

Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater,

two percent is ice,

and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet,

but here too there is hope.

And there is technology coming online,

not 10, 20 years from now,

right now.

There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials.

And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning,

one of the great DIY innovators,

I'd like to share with you -- he gave me permission to do so --

his technology called Slingshot

that many of you may have heard of,

it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator.

It's able to generate

a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day

out of any source -- saltwater, polluted water, latrine --

at less than two cents a liter.

The chairman of Coca-Cola has just agreed

to do a major test

of hundreds of units of this in the developing world.

And if that pans out,

which I have every confidence it will,

Coca-Cola will deploy this globally

to 206 countries

around the planet.

This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology,

that exists today.

And we've seen this in cellphones.

My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration

of cellphones in the developing world

by the end of 2013.

Think about it,

that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya

has better mobile comm

than President Reagan did 25 years ago.

And if they're on a smartphone on Google,

they've got access to more knowledge and information

than President Clinton did 15 years ago.

They're living in a world of information and communication abundance

that no one could have ever predicted.

Better than that,

the things that you and I

spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for --

GPS, HD video and still images,

libraries of books and music,

medical diagnostic technology --

are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing

into your cellphone.

Probably the best part of it

is what's coming down the pike in health.

Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing with Qualcomm Foundation

something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize.

We're challenging teams around the world

to basically combine these technologies

into a mobile device

that you can speak to, because it's got A.I.,

you can cough on it, you can do a finger blood prick.

And to win, it needs to be able to diagnose you better

than a team of board-certified doctors.

So literally, imagine this device

in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors,

25 percent of the disease burden

and 1.3 percent of the health care workers.

When this device sequences an RNA or DNA virus

that it doesn't recognize,

it calls the CDC

and prevents the pandemic from happening in the first place.

But here, here is the biggest force

for bringing about a world of abundance.

I call it the rising billion.

So the white lines here are population.

We just passed the seven billion mark on Earth.

And by the way,

the biggest protection against a population explosion

is making the world educated

and healthy.

In 2010,

we had just short of two billion people

online, connected.

By 2020,

that's going from two billion to five billion

Internet users.

Three billion new minds

who have never been heard from before

are connecting to the global conversation.

What will these people want?

What will they consume? What will they desire?

And rather than having economic shutdown,

we're about to have the biggest economic injection ever.

These people represent

tens of trillions of dollars

injected into the global economy.

And they will get healthier

by using the Tricorder,

and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy,

and by literally being able to use

3D printing and infinite computing

[become] more productive than ever before.

So what could three billion rising,

healthy, educated, productive members of humanity

bring to us?

How about a set of voices that have never been heard from before.

What about giving the oppressed,

wherever they might be,

the voice to be heard and the voice to act

for the first time ever?

What will these three billion people bring?

What about contributions we can't even predict?

The one thing I've learned at the X Prize

is that small teams

driven by their passion with a clear focus

can do extraordinary things,

things that large corporations and governments

could only do in the past.

Let me share and close with a story

that really got me excited.

There is a program that some of you might have heard of.

It's a game called Foldit.

It came out of the University of Washington in Seattle.

And this is a game

where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids

and figure out how the protein is going to fold.

And how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality.

And it's very important for research in medicine.

And up until now, it's been a supercomputer problem.

And this game has been played

by university professors and so forth.

And it's literally, hundreds of thousands of people

came online and started playing it.

And it showed that, in fact, today,

the human pattern recognition machinery

is better at folding proteins than the best computers.

And when these individuals went and looked

at who was the best protein folder in the world,

it wasn't an MIT professor,

it wasn't a CalTech student,

it was a person from England, from Manchester,

a woman who, during the day,

was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic

and, at night, was the world's best protein folder.

Ladies and gentlemen,

what gives me tremendous confidence

in the future

is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals

to take on the grand challenges of this planet.

We have the tools with this exponential technology.

We have the passion of the DIY innovator.

We have the capital of the techno-philanthropist.

And we have three billion new minds

coming online to work with us

to solve the grand challenges,

to do that which we must do.

We are living into extraordinary decades ahead.

Thank you.

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