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>>Salim Ismail: I'm Salim Ismail. I'm the CEO of Singularity University, which is not
quite about uploading your brain. But the last slide was incredibly telling.
This presentation is about how we use accelerating technologies to address global issues, which
we think we found a formula for doing. And the title of the talk is really about
how we're information enabling everything. We've gone from an idea to global awareness
within less than two years. And we're now talking to global leaders about this approach.
The ability to take new technology and address massive innovation is coming upon us very
quickly. We're clearly coming to a world where our communications are digital rather than
analog. For many of you, we're expanding the meaning of what it means to be human. Your
memory now exists in your smartphone, not in your own heads. And this trend is continuing.
As an example, 3-D printers used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today an $800 3-D
printer will print 70% of the parts to make the next printer. And we're fabricating steel
and food using these technologies. But our global challenges and our grand challenges
are also accelerating and also converging. It was noted at our founding conference that
the financial crisis, pandemic, swine flu, et cetera, all these problems are rooted in
accelerating at exponential factors. Our leadership around the world doesn't understand that phenomenal.
We need solutions that can mask that disruption and can scale to solve those problems. And
that's essentially what we study at SU and what we hope we found a formula for.
So what we do is -- so step back for a second. I've been working in this area for about a
decade. I laid out the first realtime web company called Pubsub. I then ran Yahoo!'s
incubator to disrupt the stagnating culture in that company, not that it's a bad company.
I built a company called Angstro. It was interesting. It just got bought by Google last month.
What's interesting about Angstro is that the computing power needed to run our algorithms
didn't exist when we started the company. If you're building a product or service using
today's technology, you may be out of date by the time you get to market.
When you do disruptive innovation, you're often combining two very disparate areas and
converging them together. Stem cell researchers are using those 3-D printers and pluripotent
stem cells to fabricate and create human organs. What we do at SU is we study five accelerating
technologies that are doubling in their price performance anywhere from 18 to 30 months.
And we focus on these because these are scaling at a doubling rate that can allow us to scale
to a global level. We bring together the top thinkers in the world to teach the students
about these technologies. Bob Metcalf, Vint Cerf, et cetera, come in. Yossi comes in to
speak. Many peple in this room have come in and spoken at SU over the time.
We bring them together with the top graduate students from around the world. They're top
of their class academically. They've done something entrepreneurial, and they're leaders
and they're passionate about global challenges. We had 1600 applications for the 80 slots
this past summer. Filtering that was a real challenge. I'll talk about that in a second.
The students spend half the time getting a state-of-the-art view of these technologies.
What's in the labs today? What's getting commercialized tomorrow? But 160 different speakers over
the summer. And then they spend the second half of the summer focused on team projects.
And they form teams. And their challenge is come up with a product or service that will
impact a billion people within 10 years. We want to take that academic rigor and ability
to focus and lift it up to the tectonic plate level of a global issue.
We're now two years old. We've seen mind-boggling innovation come out of it, and you'll hear
from a couple of them later. One is cloud computing with micro satellites within API
to do cloud enablement of satellite access. One of the students was a cloud quantum computing
expert who is working on quantum computing and nanotech.
And we're also piloting new programs to expand our own abilities. To manage 1600 applications
was a real challenge. So we piloted this program with a university in Brazil where they went
to their 10,000 students and said, "Come up with an idea to impact 1 million people and
you'll get to go to SU for the summer." 230 projects got created in two months. And the
best guy came and stayed with us over the summer. His idea was around using Wikis to
enable car sharing and ride sharing, because there's a real traffic problem in Sao Paulo.
So we take these students and we seed them back in their home countries with a completely
transformed view of the world. Imagine we expand that contest we just did in Jakarta,
Mexico City, Shanghai, Tokyo. And we also take leaders, executives and government
leaders, through this program. We've taken them through a week-long course where we give
them, again, a state-of-the-art view. And then they look at these 30 or 40 disruptive
innovations that are coming down the pike and how might that impact their industries,
their companies, their products. It used to be it would take about 20 years
to create a billion dollar company. And we're seeing that happen in months today. Clearly,
the metabolism of the world is increasing at a rapid pace.
And I'd like to leave you with this thought: How will these accelerating technologies impact
you? Thank you.