6Oct2016
From business model disruption to addressing the world’s grand challenges, Peter Diamandis believes exponential technologies are creating an extraordinary future.
Instead of buying into today’s generally pessimistic world view, Peter Diamandis believes now is the best time to be alive – and he has the data to prove it.
“We are living in a time in where nothing is impossible – we have the chance to make our grandest dreams come true. We are rapidly shifting from a local, linear world towards global, exponential growth – and technology is the bedrock on which our future is being built,” said Peter Diamandis during Thursday morning’s opening session.
“Within the next 20 years, we will reinvent the way we do business” he continued. “Businesses that stay on top of this tsunami of change will be those that use exponential technologies to create new ways of interacting with employees and consumers.”
These exponential technologies – driven by ever increasing, cheaper computing power – have increased lifespans, improved food production, energy efficiency, lowered child mortality rates, increased literacy and more.
These same technologies have also eroded the importance of traditional business assets – infrastructure, IP, equipment, and have instead democratised access to tools that are creating an entirely new business landscape driven by agile companies that iterate rapidly and create game-changing new business models.
However, in order to remain in the driving seat of change, Diamandis underlined the importance of exponential thinking for the business world. “Take 30 linear steps, and you kind of know where you’ll end up. Business leaders need to think where they’ll be in 30 exponential steps – if you misplace a step, it’s impossible to catch up,” said Diamandis.
This is why Diamandis thinks some of life’s great challenges may well be met in the near future. With thousands of businesses now working on space exploration, extending the healthy lifespan (a hardware and software problem, according to Diamandis), expanding humanity’s access to resources, and more, these fields of exploration are set for their own periods of revolution.
“We are going from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. We are now routinely shooting for 10-fold improvements instead of 10 percent, and we now attack every problem as if it were solvable. As a CEO, I can’t think of any other time I’d like to be alive.”
@johnathancozzi
