Here is the full transcript of Peter Diamandis’ talk titled “Imagining the Future: The Transformation of Humanity” at TEDxLA 2017 conference .
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning, everybody. We are living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. And during our lifetime — during our lifetime that we’re about to see the transformation of the human race. Especially something that blows my mind every time I think about it.
The Acceleration of Change
And the conversation I keep having with my colleagues, my friends, my investors, my community in Silicon Valley goes something like this: “People have no idea how fast the world is changing.” And I want to give you a sense of that, because it fills me with awe and with extraordinary sense of responsibility for how we guide it, what we do with it. This is the computational power of our planet. And over the last 40 plus years, from the 1980s to 2000, we were in a period of what I call deceptive growth, where the growth was slow.
It was beginning to change us, but we didn’t try to feel it yet. And then we enter a period of disruptive growth, where it’s exploding onto the world. And you saw part of the implications from what Jeff Dean was saying. And the implications of that explosive disruptive growth is that we’re plummeting the cost of bandwidth, millions of times cheaper. Computational costs are dropping through the floor. The cost of memory is dropping through the floor. And global connectivity is exploding on this planet.
The Implications of Technological Advancements
Now there are two implications I want to talk about during my presentation that are critically important. The first is that of abundance. And I had a chance to write a book called “Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think.” And here are the facts. The per capita income for every nation on this planet has increased 300%. Our lifespan over the last 100 years has increased two and a half times. The cost of food has dropped 13-fold. Energy’s dropped 30-fold.
And then on top of that, what we’re seeing is the following: Literacy on this planet over the last 100 years is going 12% to 88% across the globe. The cost of transportation going 100 times cheaper. The cost of communications going 1,000 times cheaper. And the cost of knowledge and information, given Google, billions of times cheaper. For every single person.
For a child in Mumbai, having access to knowledge and information as good as the President of the United States had 20 or 30 years ago. A child, the poorest child in Mumbai on a smartphone having access to the same knowledge and information that Larry Page has on Google. So besides creating this abundance and demonetizing the cost of living, what we’re also seeing is we’re about to see the transformation of the human race.
And when I say that, we’re going to change over the next few decades how we raise our children, how we govern ourselves, how we communicate person to person, how we employ ourselves, commerce, entertainment, and we’re about to become a multi-planetary species. And here’s the most amazing thing. It’s happening during our lifetime.
The Driving Forces Behind the Change
It’s happening during your lifetime. It’s happening in the next 30 years. So don’t blink. So what’s driving all this? This is Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel. He and his partner started it in 1958. And by 1965, Gordon Moore had noticed something on the chips that they were producing at Intel, the integrated circuits. And he noticed that the number of transistors per piece of silicon per dollar was roughly doubling every 12 to 18 months. And in 1965, he publishes this paper, and he goes, “you know, this is likely to continue.”
And it’s been known as Moore’s Law. And it’s continued for 50 years. And I want to show you what that looks like. That’s the first integrated circuit, 1958. Here we see two transistors, about a half inch feature length on each. Let’s fast forward to the first commercial product in 1971, the Intel 4004, 2,300 transistors, about a dollar each.
Now let’s fast forward 45 years to Intel’s i7 processor. Here we see a processor that is 330 billion times faster. When you want to understand why the world is getting faster, why we’re able to do the things that we do, it’s right here. It’s that transformation, 330 billion times faster over the course of 45 years. But let me give you another visualization of what this looks like, right? In 1956, this was a hard drive. Five megabytes, $120,000, and if you happen to have your cargo airplane, you could move it from office to office.
Now we probably noticed when this happened, 2005, here’s 128 megabytes for 99 bucks. Pretty extraordinary transformation. But did we notice this? When over the course of nine years, it went to 128 gigabytes, right on schedule, on Moore’s Law for 99 bucks, a thousand times better.
I’m an investor and an advisor in a nanotechnology company that’s focused on doing this a billion times better again, right? We’re talking about all of Google’s data centers in a sugar cube. And if you look at this, this is from my partner, Ray Kurzweil. He’s a co-founder with myself at Singularity University. This is the computational growth plotted on a log scale over the last 110 years.
What we see here on this curve in five paradigms, the last of which is Moore’s Law, what Ray calls this is the law of accelerating returns, that we’re using faster computers to build faster computers to build faster computers, and it’s not slowing down. We don’t see World War I or World War II. We don’t see boom times or recessions, right? And so if it’s likely to continue, what you get is something pretty interesting.
See, in 2023, seven years from now, the average computer we go and buy from Best Buy, if they’re still around, is now calculating at 10 to the 16th cycles per second, which a neurophysiologist will tell you that’s the rate at which your brain does calculations. So what happens when you can buy a human brain for $1,000? Well, it doesn’t slow down, right? Twenty-five years later, now $1,000 buys the computational power of the entire human race. Now your kid’s homework gets really easy.
And what the insight I want to share with you is that these faster, cheaper computers that are going on and on and on are sort of the foundational growth medium upon which all these other technologies are growing. So as computers are getting thousands and billions of times faster, so are these other technologies.
And these technologies, computers, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, AR, VR, synthetic biology, are literally recombining and giving us unexpected convergent consequences. You can be an expert in one area, but actually understanding where these come together and what they do, the new business models, are transforming our planet right here, right now.
The Global Connectivity Explosion
So the first of these, networks, right? This is the world’s population growth over the last 15 years. We’ve just crossed the 7 billion mark. But if you look at Internet penetration, in 2010, we had 1.8 billion people connected on planet Earth to the Internet.
Today, it’s about 2.9. By 2022 to 2025, let’s call it, you know, eight years from now, we’re at a low estimate going to have 5 billion people connected, which means we’re adding 3 billion new minds onto the global economy that have never been accounted for before. But that’s the low estimate. Why? Because this guy at Facebook with drones and satellites wants to connect every single person on the planet.
My friends at Google with Google Loons and satellites and drones want to connect every single person on the planet. Paul Jacobs, Richard Branson, Greg Weiler have just raised a billion dollars to deploy OneWeb, a 648-satellite constellation, in the next six years to connect every single person on the planet. And last week, Elon was announcing with SpaceX a 4,000-satellite constellation to connect every single person on the planet.
So I want you to imagine in the next six to eight years, not 5 billion, but 8 billion connected people. Not coming online like you and I did, right, on AOL at 9600 baud, right? Coming online with a megabit connection or better, with access to the world’s information. We are about to see a massive explosion of innovation like we have not seen yet.
Innovation coming from parts of the world that we would have never thought of. Five billion new thinkers. Five billion new innovators. Five billion new creators, problem solvers, entrepreneurs coming online within this next decade. And it’s not just people, it’s things, right? Last year we had 15 billion connected devices. By 2020, my friends at Cisco talked about the Internet of Things, the low estimate is 50 billion connected devices. And by the way, each one of these devices have a dozen sensors on them.
The Era of Ubiquitous Sensing
We’re talking about heading towards a world of a trillion sensors, where everything is being seen, measured, and known. Fast forward 10 years later, now we’ve got 500 billion connected devices, 100 trillion sensors. Sensors everywhere, in micro drones, on the fabric, inside your body, right? Letting us know anything we want, anytime we want, anywhere we want.
And oh, those sensors on your body and in your body. We’re about to see an explosion in how we think and we connect, we communicate. This is Google’s contact lens that’s picking up glucose in your tears, which correlates to glucose in your blood. But that’s the first step of sort of connecting to your neural system.
The Future of Human Intelligence
There are amazing companies right now, like Kernel, a friend of mine, Bryan Johnson, one of our benefactors at the XPRIZE Foundation, one of my investors, has launched $100 million to be able to connect your brain to the cloud, right? My friend Ray Kurzweil. Your brain is a collection of 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion synaptic connections that make you you and me me.
Now, the last time we had an upgrade of the human brain was two million years ago, when we said our large prefrontal cortex sort of exploded and gave us language and art and the ability to think and think in similes in all of these different areas. But as we start to connect the brain to the cloud, we’re about to see, for the first time ever, an explosion in human intelligence.
Bryan talks about, it’s not AI versus humans, it’s HI, it’s the most important asset we can ever have. It’s the increase of human intelligence. I love this copy of Time Magazine, plugging in the brain into the cloud. But that 2045 is not a right estimate. From the companies I’m seeing, Ray’s estimate is by the early to mid 2030s. So imagine when you need additional memory capacity or a thousand times more intelligence, you can sort of spool it up like your phone does on the cloud today. But by the way, the early 2030s, oh my God, that’s 20 years from now.
The Integration of AI in Daily Life
So what’s the world going to be looking like? We heard about AI, whatever version you want, from HAL to Siri to Google Now to IBM Watson. I prefer Jarvis. I think we’re all going to have a version of Jarvis.
We’ll be talking, we’ll be listening. You’ll give permission to your Jarvis, your personal software shell, to read your emails, watch what you’re eating, listen to your blood chemistries, sort of listen to your conversations because it’s giving you all the information you need just in time. And these AIs are also helping us solve the world’s grandest challenges. On the Google stage last year, I was with the head of the Watson team from IBM on an XPRIZE that Amir, one of the co-organizers here, runs.
And we’re challenging teams to work with AIs to solve the world’s biggest problems. We get frightened about grand challenges because we see them from far away. But guess what? The tools and technologies we have to solve these grand challenges is exploding onto the scene. That gives me the greatest hope for the future. AI is our most important tool ever to solve our grand challenges. And besides all of these technologies, we’re now beginning to understand the software code of the human species, right? Look at this curve.
Revolution in Genomics
That white line is Moore’s Law. It’s the increasing power, the reducing cost of computation. That green line is how fast we’ve gone to sequencing DNA. A hundred million dollars to sequence the human genome in 2000 by Craig Venter, nine months of time.
Today, it’s down to a thousand bucks in two hours. But it’s not just reading DNA. We can now write DNA. We can actually create novel life forms. You can design a life form on your computer, print out a string of DNA, put it into a blank cell and have it boot up for life. And it’s not just writing DNA. CRISPR-Cas9, and unless you buried your head in a sand, you probably have heard about CRISPR-Cas9, right?
It’s the ability to edit our own genomes. To have a disease and say, “Let’s edit that away.” Think about word for your genome. Click, paste, repair. One of the implications that I’m focused on is extending the healthy human lifespan.
Toward an Indefinite Lifespan and Beyond
Through genomics and stem cell science, my two companies, Human Longevity and Cellularity, our mission is to add 30 to 40 healthy years onto your life to give you the aesthetics, the cognition, and the mobility at 60, at 100 that you had at 60. And if you get that, we’re heading towards a world of an indefinite lifespan. These are crazy ideas, but they’re coming because the tools we have to enable them are accelerating faster than we could possibly know. The second implication I want to close with is the transformation of the human species.
We are heading to what I call the formation of a meta-intelligence, and I haven’t talked about this publicly, but I want to share it. And I look at a historical analog to see where we’re going based on where we have been as life on this planet. 3.5 billion years ago, the first life form was a prokaryote. It was a single bag of cytoplasm with a string of DNA, the simplest life we knew.
And over the course of a billion years, that prokaryotic life form developed into a complex life form called a eukaryote. And what it did was incorporate into it technology, the mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus that allowed it to process information energy more efficiently. And so that transformation from a simple life form to a technology-enabled life form is what I believe we are doing right now as we, as humans, are beginning to incorporate technology into our brains, into our bodies. We’re undergoing that same transformation in the first step.
The second step that life took was going from eukaryotic life to multicellular life, collaboration. And we are massively collaborating as we go from small tribes, not connected, to tribes connected by the internet, and soon connected by the cloud, where when I think, I can understand in the purest form of empathy what you see, what you hear, what you feel. The third is the emergence of technology, of intelligence. This is a morula at the early stages of a human embryo, 16 cells that grows into what we are today, a collection of 10 trillion human cells in my body or your body, an emergence of intelligence.
And what we’re about to do is to connect not one, but 8 billion minds, connected in a fashion like never before, that I call a meta-intelligence. And I think as we connect and become a new species, a new creation of 8 billion connected minds, we’re going to look out into the solar system, into the universe, and see many others. I’m reminded, and we’ll close on the notion that 400 million years ago, lungfish crawled out of the oceans onto land. Hasn’t happened since.
Today, we as a species are crawling out of the birthplace of humanity, this fragile planet, to the moon, to Mars, to the asteroids. A million years from now, whatever we’ve become, we’re going to look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that we become an interplanetary species. I believe we have, during our lifetime, the next 30 years, the mission to inspire and to guide the transformation of the human species on and off the Earth. An honor, a pleasure. Thank you.