Go big or go home: a tech guru’s guide to surviving disruption

We need a software upgrade to deal with exponential change, says Peter Diamandis, chairman of the XPrize Foundation and co-founder of Singularity University

When humans evolved on the savannah some 150,000 years ago, the world was local and linear.

Whatever affected us was within a day’s walk, and nothing changed from millennium to millennium. So our brains learnt to make things that were not linear look linear.

Today, however, everything around us changes from minute to minute.

This creates disruptive stress or disruptive opportunity, depending on your point of view. Either way, though, we’re in need of a software upgrade.

To see why, consider this.

The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company today is just 15 years compared with 67 years in the 1920s. And it is predicted that 40 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years’ time.

Kodak – once a USD28 billion company with 140,000 employees – shows the extent of difficulties businesses now face.

Back in 1996, it developed a digital camera, but its board saw the company as being in the paper and chemical business and rejected it. By 2012 Kodak had gone bankrupt with 17,000 employees, put out of business by a technology that the company itself had developed.

We see such Kodak moments over and over again. When Twitter goes public, Blockbuster goes bankrupt.

Our problem is that we are not fully grasping what it means to live with exponential change.

We’re comfortable with the linear world. We know that if we take 30 linear steps – each one covering an identical distance – we end up being more or less 30 metres away from where we started.

It’s a different story when we’re asked to think exponentially.

We find it hard to comprehend that if we take 30 exponential steps, each one double the distance of the previous step, we end up more than one billion metres away from our starting point – or 26 times the circumference of the Earth.

To understand and explain the consequences of exponential change, I co-founded the Singularity University in Silicon Valley which focuses on how technologies are coming together and disrupting business.

My inspiration was the power of Moore’s Law: the discovery in 1965 that the processing capacity of integrated circuits was doubling every year, and would continue to do so. Today, they are 10,000 times faster and 10 million times cheaper – a 100 billion-fold improvement in nearly 50 years.

This, in turn, has given rise to other disruptive technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, whose convergence is creating business models that will transform our lives.

Innovation brings costs down so steeply that what used to be scarce becomes readily available. And plummeting computing costs are bringing more people online.

There will soon be an explosion of discovery and we will end up living in a world of perfect knowledge, where you can know anything you want, anytime, anywhere.

 

planet

This leads me to moonshot thinking, where we attempt to take on problems and challenges which we once thought were beyond us. To me, a moonshot is going ten times bigger when everyone else is going 10 per cent bigger – requiring the rethinking of the business.

Here are three of mine.

Because I went to medical school, my first moonshot is to extend the human lifespan. There is no reason why it cannot be twice or three times longer. So, along with two friends, I founded Human Longevity Inc with the aim of making 100 the new 60. We are using human genome sequencing to create millions of integrated health records which can predict the risk of diseases and devise longevity plans to stop the risks happening.

My second moonshot is to expand human access to mineral resources by using space drones to mine them on near-earth asteroids. We are building full-size vehicles to look for fuel and platinum-group metals in which asteroids are much richer than mines on earth.

The third moonshot is to encourage innovation that addresses the world’s greatest challenges. We did this successfully with the USD10 million Ansari XPrize, which was awarded to a non-government organisation to put three people into space twice in a two-week period. That inspired 26 teams to spend more than USD100 million, and we set up the XPrize Foundation to continue the momentum. We have now given USD34 million in prizes, with another USD82 million waiting to be awarded.

I believe that this is a time of extraordinary opportunity, where if you can see a problem, you can solve a problem. We are living in an era of extraordinary abundance, and we are entering an era of extraordinary innovation.

towards singularity