By Nancy Dahlberg / ndahlberg@miamiherald.com
Peter Diamandis believes we are heading toward the most extraordinary time in human history.
“That’s the world we live in today, a guy or gal in a garage can really start a company that can touch the lives of a billion people,” Diamandis, the CEO of the X Prize Foundation, told the social entrepreneurs and enthusiasts at the Continuity Forum, the Americas Business Council Foundation’s annual conference held Thursday and Friday at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami.
The reason this can happen is because the exponential growth of technology. Take the transistor, he said. “There’s been a 100-billion fold price-performance improvement over four years and it’s rocking our world.”
But it doesn’t stop there, said the CEO of Singularity University who studies artificial intelligence. In the future, sensors will be molecular in size and woven into everything that is produced. “Technology is that force that takes what is scarce and makes it abundant,” said Diamandis.
The X Prize is currently offering a $15 million challenge to build a piece of software to bring a child anywhere from illiteracy to basic reading writing and numeracy in 18 months. “My goal is that it goes on every single device manufactured, so every device going out there in the world is a teacher,” said Diamandis, the author of Abundance.
All kinds of big ideas were in abundance at the sold-out conference, attended by about 400. The event brought together a diverse lineup of speakers, including a Nobel prize winner in economics, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a world-renowned neuroscientist, a 20-year-old shark advocate, authors, environmentalists, political activists and artists.
Along with the thought-provoking TED-style talks, 23 fellows from Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs, gave short presentations on their scalable companies and nonprofits that take aim at poverty, environmental challenges, healthcare, education reform and economic development. The abc* Foundation, through a partnership with Ashoka, will select three and give them $100,000 grants and two years of support.