the organizers for such an extraordinary, fun couple of days.

Let's get started, if I can get the first slide up. Here we go.

So abundance. The future is better than you think. What leads me to that conclusion really

is that we're living in a day and age where small teams of individuals can literally do

what only governments and large corporations could do before.

And I also believe we're living in a did and age where we have the ability to literally

take on and solve the world's grand challenges. And when I say that, many people sort of scoff

at that idea and they say, my God, huge challenges. How can we possibly take these on and solve

them in our lifetime? And the challenge is that we're thinking about

these things using the linear software and hardware of our brains that evolved over time.

If you go back millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years when we were evolving

as humans on the planes of Africa, the world back then would be best described as being

local and linear. When I say that, it is local in that everything that affected you was within

a day's walk. And it was linear in that the life of your grandparents, your parents, you,

your kids, their kids, nothing changed generation to generation, millennia to millennia. So

we evolved our brains in a way of thinking just locally and linearly, and that's the

way we think today. But the fact of the matter is, we're living

in a world that is best described as global and exponential. You know, something happens

in China or India or California, you know about it seconds later, if not milliseconds

later. And it is exponential in that not only is

the life of our parents and you and our kids different, it is different over a few years.

Think about the technologies that didn't exist ten years ago that we are now completely and

totally dependent on. So it's that rapid change that is creating this change, this missed

expectation, if you would. It is this yellow exponential curve, which

is where technologies are coming online, and that red flat line, which is the way our brains

think in a linear and local fashion. And the disconnect between that is really the transformative

potential we as humans now have to take on and solve the world's grand challenges.

Now, what's been driving all of this capability, this extraordinary move forward is, as you

well know, Moore's law. This is a simple plot of computational speed. There is a log scale

on the left, a hundred years across the bottom. And there are two things I want you to take

away from this chart. The first is over these hundred years how smooth and consistent the

growth in computational speed has been. Literally, it is the result of faster computers being

used to build faster computers. It doesn't go up and down with war time and peace time

and boom time and depression. It is literally faster computers building faster computers.

The second thing I want you to take away from this curve is that even though, taking you

back to your high school math, on a log curve an exponential should be a straight line,

it is curving upwards, which is the fact that computers are, in fact, getting faster and

faster at a faster rate. So that kind of capability is driving us across

a whole slew of technologies, infinite computing, if you would, cloud computing, if you would,

sensors and networks, robotics -- we just saw some beautiful demonstrations of that

-- 3D printing, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, digital medicine, nanomaterials,

and artificial intelligence. These are the tools that people have to literally

take on and change the world. And those of you -- I'm curious, how many of you saw the

winning of the game in the United States "Jeopardy" by IBM's Watson computer?

So a small number, but it was an epic event. And A.I. is, if you would, the partner to

robotics we just saw. With that, I would like to show you a short clip because you really

should get a sense of what this kind of capability can now bring this.

[ VIDEO PLAYING ] >>Peter Diamandis: I swear they do that on

purpose. It's literally now -- the technologies that exist allow us to democratize the ability

to change the world, to take on the grand challenges. And at Singularity University,

what we do is we ask graduate students to start companies that can positively impact

the lives of a billion people within a decade. We call that tenth to the ninth impact.

So if you have the ability of small teams to change the world, the question is: How

do you focus them? And we're living in a day and age where the world's biggest problems

are also the world's biggest market opportunities. Solve hunger, energy, water and you make billions

in the process and you get the benefit of the planet.

So I also run an organization called the X PRIZE Foundation. I was inspired by Lindbergh's

flight across the Atlantic to win a $25,000 prize and launch something called the Ansari

X PRIZE for space flight. That was a huge success, opened up a private space flight

industry. We now have Virgin Galactic using the winning technology from this vehicle.

I then went on. We had the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE asking teams to build 100-mile-per-gallon

equivalent cars. 130 teams entered this competition. Three were won, now going into production.

And then recently on the heels of the BP Oil spill, James Cameron had just joined our board

and said, "You got to do something about that." And we put out a challenge because what we

found out is that the mechanism for cleaning up oil spills in the ocean's surface had not

changed between the Exxon Valdez and the spill in the Gulf, 21 years.

We launched the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, $1.4 million of prize money,

asking teams to please figure out how to at least double the rate at which oil was cleaned

up on the ocean's surface. 350 teams entered this competition. The top ten teams went head

to head in the world's largest oil spill cleanup facility. And seven of the ten teams, for

a $1.4 million prize, doubled what had been the existing standards for 21 years. Extraordinary.

One of the teams was a family out of Alaska who built the dad's design.

The winning team was able to increase it 6X, sixfold increase in the oil spill cleanup

rate. You clean it in the ocean before it hits the shore.

But what really impressed me, the concept of what's called cognitive surplus that Clay

Shirky speaks about, was a team that met in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor, I kid you not,

that doubled the existing standards for cleaning up oil. I will show you a short video.

[ VIDEO PLAYING ] >>Peter Diamandis: So the question is: When

you're looking to solve the world's biggest problems, where do you find the solutions?

Because sometimes the expert is the person who can tell you exactly how it can't be done,

right? And it is really people coming at the problem with an orthogonal point of view.

So for us, it's really the challenge to put out to the world and say, These are the biggest

problems. Solve these problems. So where are we going next? Well, we have

the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE. We have 26 teams around the world who are building

private lunar lander vehicles to go back to the moon, bring down the cost of opening the

space frontier by orders of magnitude but, most importantly, to inspire scientists and

engineers, young kids, to go and really create the Apollo of today's generation.

We just launched at CES something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. We

are asking teams around the world to build literally a handheld mobile device that any

consumer can use that you can cough on, talk to, do a finger blood prick and can diagnose

you better than a team of board certified doctors. We expect this to be won in the next

four years. But what gets really, really exciting is that

three months after we launched this in January, we have almost 200 teams from 25 countries

competing for this competition, who I would have never found if I was looking for them.

So, where are we going? We just raised $19 million from the Robin Hood Foundation in

New York, a group of hedge fund managers and bankers to look at X PRIZEs to attack poverty.

And then one of my commitments this year is to launch a series of X PRIZEs in education,

to reinvent how we educate our kids, finally, after a couple hundred years.

So I say with all of what I have learned from SU and X PRIZE is that we are heading into

a world of abundance, a transformative world. People say, Really? Can we really be doing

that? Haven't you heard all the negative views out there?

But, you know, the news media's purpose is to get your attention and they get it by giving

you negative news constantly to your tablet, to your phone, to your newspaper, to your

radio. It is a drug, and they are the drug pusher.

But the fact of the matter is the world has been getting better at an extraordinary rate

and that literally technology has been the mechanism for turning scarcity into abundance.

And I will give this one example which for me was very poignant. The guy on the left

here is Napoleon, III. It is about 1840 and the guy on the right is the King of Siam.

And Napoleon invites the King of Siam over for dinner. And Napoleon feeds his troops

with silver utensils. Napoleon himself is fed with gold utensils, but to impress the

King of Siam, he is fed with aluminum utensils. You see, aluminum back then was the most precious

metal on the planet. Even though it is 8.3% of the earth by weight, all of the aluminum

is bound with oxygen and silicates. It is so difficult to extract from bauxite because

you don't find it pure in the ground, that it was worth more than gold and platinum.

That's why in D.C. the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum because it was

built in that same decade. And then the technology of electrolysis came

along and made literally the ability to remove aluminum so cheap that we use it with a throw-away

mentality. So if you think about that, where technology

is a liberating force, the same thing holds in a lot of other areas.

Energy, we talk about energy scarcity. Ladies and gentlemen, we are living on a planet 5,000

times more energy hits the surface than we consume as a species in a year. It's there,

just not yet accessible. But technology is changing that.

Last year the cost of solar dropped nearly 50%. The technologies are coming online where

solar is growing at 30% penetration a year. If you have abundant energy, you have abundant

water. We talk about water wars and water scarcity, but we live on a water planet. 70%

of our planet is covered with water. Yes, 97.5% is saltwater, 2% is ice. We fight over

half a percent. But in the same way that technology brought aluminum out of bauxite so, too, technologies

coming online right now to make water available and available for all.

Think about this Maasai warrior in the middle of Kenya. This gentleman on a cell phone today

has better mobile com than President Reagan did 25 years ago, right? And if he is on Google

on a smartphone, he has got more access to knowledge, information than President Clinton

did 15 years ago. He is living in a world of information communications abundance.

We talked about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. Imagine Watson, if you would, on your cell

phone giving every kid a personalized education. And, perhaps, for me this is one of the most

impactful parts of the forces driving us towards a world of abundance.

So look at this chart. This is population, the white lines. We've just crossed the 7

billion mark. Those of you who are concerned about population

explosion on this planet, do you know the one way to bring down a population, growth

rate of a country? Educate them and give them great health.

Well, this green line over here is Internet penetration. In 2010, we were just short of

2 billion people connected to the Internet on this planet. By 2020, we're going from

2 billion to 5 billion people. Three billion new minds are plugging into the global conversation.

What do these people want? What are they going to invent? What are they going to create?

What do they desire? They represent one of the untapped resources this planet has to

address and solve our grandest challenges. Ladies and gentlemen, we're living in a day

and age where we have the ability to solve the world's biggest problems. We have the

technology. We have the passion. We have the minds.

So my question for you is: What are you focused on solving because we can bring about a world

of abundance. Thank you. [ Applause ]