6Oct2016
The exponential growth of ubiquitous computational power is the oxygen fueling today’s growth and it’s leading to greater human empowerment, democratization and the ability to uplift humanity.
That’s the view of entrepreneurial powerhouses Des Traynor and Peter Diamandis, who sat down with MTV Live Stage host news anchor Peter Nyman to summarize their understanding of the current juncture of human and technological development.
Listed by Fortune Magazine as one the world’s 50 greatest leaders, Diamandis pointed out that in the past, only governments and large corporations were capable of doing what single individuals can do today. It means that anyone can solve problems.
“As entrepreneurs we have access to billions in capital, technology and the number of people working to solve problems is increasing at an amazing rate,” Diamandis noted. As more people work to solve problems, they will inevitably uplift humanity, he added.
An exponential increase in computational technology is the fundamental driver of the potential to change the world, supported by a corresponding development in Artificial Intelligence, AI. “By 2029 we should see AI more powerful than humans, reinventing itself and accelerating,” Diamandis projected.
But the progressive improvement of human lives doesn’t mean entrepreneurs will run out of problems to solve. “Problems and human needs will exist for some time. People will always want amenities to be better, faster, cheaper,” observed entrepreneur and strategist Des Traynor.
Most importantly the technological disruptions we are witnessing today will also upend the traditional power structures we have become used to. It means that the mechanisms previously controlled by states – media, food, education, utilities and other resources – are increasingly decentralizing, demonetizing and democratizing. “The genie is out of the bottle,” Diamandis declared.
Traynor noted that the democratization trend has also impacted on the sphere of entrepreneurship. “Today you don’t need a lot of money, you can find the right people via the internet, and you don’t need to be in a particular location,” he pointed out.
The transformation of business models means that large corporates are are becoming an endangered species and present-day economic theories haven’t even begun to factor in these tectonic shifts.
“Fortune 500 data show that 451 of the top companies have disappeared over 40 – 50 years. You can’t preserve old business models if we are to build the future,” Traynor added.
What this means for incumbents, is that the value of their core products will fall to zero if they don’t reinvent. They need to borrow from the Google and Apple playbooks and disrupt their upstream and downstream adjacencies by building new ecosystems of entrepreneurs, the pair agreed.
