Human Thoughts vs Speed of InnovationㅣSingularity Group

In this conversation, we explore the story of Singularity Group, built in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil, one of the most influential futurists on the planet, and Peter Diamandis, the serial entrepreneur and futurist. Singularity Group is an innovation company that believes technology and entrepreneurship can solve the world's greatest challenges. They provide virtual and in-person leadership development, education, innovation programs and consulting for visionary individuals and organizations. They aim to transform the way people and organizations think about technology and the future, and enable them to create and accelerate initiatives that will deliver business value and positively impact people and the planet.

Watch the full interview now on EO's YouTube channel! Below is the complete transcription of the interview. Minor edits have been made for clarity and readability.

Dermot Mee: My name is Dermot Mee. I'm the chief operating officer of Singularity Group. Singularity Group is an educational organization founded at NASA Ames Research Center here in Mountain View, California. We have a mission to have a positive impact in the world utilizing exponential technologies. We believe that we can positively impact a billion people over the next five years through these efforts.

Darlene Damm: I'm Darlene, the VP of Community and Impact. Singularity Education Group was founded in 2008 by Ray Kurzweil, who is a very famous futurist and works on the futurist team at Google, and Peter Diamandis, who's an MD, PhD researcher and serial entrepreneur.

Peter read Ray's book, called The Singularity Is Near, and after reading it, he realized that the implication of this accelerating technology is that most universities aren't able to keep up. Most companies aren't thinking about technology properly, and there needed to be a new institution to bring this knowledge to entrepreneurs specifically, so they could disrupt these industries and solve the world's major problems.

Darlene Damm: Gordon Moore helped invent the first microchips, and he noticed the chips were becoming twice as powerful while the cost was becoming fifty percent less every eighteen months. This was back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when he was observing this pattern. If you have a product or a service that can do twice as much for half the cost, and that cost is falling toward zero over time, it's like having a superpower.

Dermot Mee: The principle that exponential change is happening, and that technology is becoming more and more advanced, means that things which weren't possible a year ago, most people think won't be possible for five or ten years. But we believe that with the exponential rate of change, those things will be possible faster.

So we're always trying to focus people on a bigger dream, because we believe the tools will emerge faster than we expect. That's been proven with Moore's Law for almost a hundred years now, demonstrating the price-performance curve, so that people who can't imagine that possible future also can't build it.

We're always emphasizing that the tools will emerge. You just need the imagination and the drive and determination to use them to build the solutions of the future.

Darlene Damm: I know when I was in college, we were divided into techies and fuzzies. The techies were the engineers, and the fuzzies were the art history majors, and we were categorized that way. We grew up in a world where working with technology was initially very limited to a few people.

When I came to Singularity, I'm a history major. I worked in the nonprofit sector. I'm not a technologist. Do I belong here? What am I doing? Then one day in the classroom, the instructors told us we had to build these robots, Lego Mindstorms robot projects, which lots of kids use today.

But I hadn't used them before. I remember working on the robot, and we ran out of time, so I stayed up all night just trying to build it. Then I got the robot to work. It moved by itself and did things. Suddenly I realized I could use technology, even though I was in my thirties. I was an adult who'd gone through school, gone through education, gotten a master's degree, and had my career set. And then I changed.

Dermot Mee: Every genius was considered an idiot the day before his idea was proven. So we try to encourage entrepreneurs not to worry about profitability and cost initially, and really think about the solution they're building and the impact it will have on society. If you're twenty years too early, you may not be able to build a sustainable business. But if you're three, five, eight years too early, we believe the technology will come toward you, not just the price performance, but the integration of technologies. We've proven, over many examples, that the price-performance curve will turn these companies into viable businesses. It'll just take some time.

Darlene Damm: Historically, technology was expensive, it was big, and it would break a lot, so it wasn't used in the field of international development or humanitarian assistance. Then digital technologies came along, which suddenly billions of people had access to. When people have access to technology, they solve their own problems.

We had a student come to Singularity in 2016, a schoolteacher from Myanmar, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a broken education system. She went home and started her country's first online education system, which now has 500,000 students getting an education through her company. She knew the problem, but suddenly she had new tools she could use to reach hundreds of thousands of kids.

Dermot Mee: I'd say our foundational program, the Global Solutions Program, focused exclusively on entrepreneurs, has led to probably sixty-plus companies being founded on the principle of exponential technology solving major problems. That's allowed the acceleration of multiple industries.

The drone industry: Matternet was one of our early companies. That small group of entrepreneurs helped found the legal structure by which the drone industry exists in the United States today. They were able to challenge the Department of Transportation and guide the government on how to lay out rules so drones could be used commercially. It's a tiny company with a huge ambition, for drones to be part of the economy and part of delivering medicines, with that last-mile transportation ability. One of our great achievements was challenging the infrastructure and changing it, so we could pursue what is now a multibillion-dollar industry of drones and drone transportation.

Another good example is Made In Space, a startup that put the first two 3D printers on the International Space Station. They envisioned a future where we'll be living in space, and where we'll therefore have to manufacture in space. This was almost ten years ago now. They convinced NASA to put 3D printers on the International Space Station, and they've done thousands of material science experiments on how we'll manufacture with different materials in space. That was a massive contribution to science, and to humanity's ability to live off the planet. You don't have to be an expert anymore. You just have to know what your desire is, and you can find that expert through this interconnected, hyperconnected world we're living in.

Dermot Mee: Singularity Group was founded on the belief that the world's biggest problems represent the world's biggest opportunities. Our mission remains unchanged, but our methods have evolved exponentially. Initially, people come to Singularity to learn about technology, about social problems, about exponential thinking.

The challenge for corporations and businesses today, if you look at the history, is that the tenure of a company on the S&P 500 is dropping every year. In the fifties, companies were on there for forty, fifty, sixty years. Now they're on there for eight, ten, twelve years. The lifespan of a company is shrinking because technology is overrunning them constantly, so we help them implement it to achieve their mission more successfully.

The challenge for most leaders is that they're busy driving their business day to day. Most corporations don't look much past the next quarter, maybe the next year, so it's difficult for them to take the time to anticipate massive change or disruption in the future. What we do is give them the space and time to observe and learn about how fast technology is changing, so that when they return to their organizations, they can tell people to pay attention.

We ask these leaders to step back for a week, really think about the implications, and then go back in and make radical investments inside their companies, in these technologies and in the types of people they've met at these courses. We actually think they should hire differently: for optimistic people, for people with a higher vision of the organization's ability to solve problems in the future. Taking people out of the day to day, giving them an optimistic view and a real understanding of the potential of these technologies in their businesses, lets them think deeply about the decisions they'll make over the next few years as leaders, and how those decisions will change the trajectory of their company. It'll help them anticipate disruption and hopefully survive it, and it'll help them spot opportunities where they could branch off into other industries.

Darlene Damm: If you go back to the creation of the computer, even here in Silicon Valley, there was a big argument: should computers be protected the same way we protect a nuclear weapon? Should only governments and universities have access to computers? In Silicon Valley, there was a movement to put the computer on the kitchen table, in every house. That debate was going on decades ago. Now we obviously have computers on our kitchen tables and in our pockets. The technology has become easier to use.

Dermot Mee: I grew up farming in Ireland. I went to primary school, secondary school, and university there, and studied biochemistry, with a master's focused on biotechnology. Then I came to the United States and worked in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry for maybe five to eight years.

My first introduction to advanced technology was being asked to help build a process automation lab. I basically replicated the work of a hundred scientists with robotics and computer programming. Through that experience, I realized the massive benefits of automating these processes, letting scientists do more research, more thoughtful research, while the manual process was run entirely by robot. We took a hundred scientists out of the lab and replaced them with a robotic system and four technicians. Those four technicians produced five times more samples than the hundred scientists had. The cost saving was about a million dollars a year, forever. That completely changed my perspective on implementing technology to solve problems, so humans could focus on what they're much better at.

I then moved to work for a couple of other startups after leaving the lab. We were just entering the phase where biology was being digitized, what we now call digital biology. For me, the sequencing of the human genome was probably the first step toward personalized medicine. I believe that in the very near future, everybody will have their genome sequenced at birth, and over time they'll be given personalized medical and health direction, so they can live the healthiest life possible. Health care will change from being a disease-focused industry to being a wellness-focused industry.

We believe there's potential to apply technology to solve climate change, to truly make energy free. If you have free energy, the cost of food production and everything else becomes much more manageable, and it allows people to move into a phase of life where they can spend much more time on intellectual and philanthropic pursuits, helping people around the world live better qualities of life. With the proper application of technology, we believe the overall quality of life for everybody in the world can be improved dramatically.

I think the technological trajectory is very positive, and we're confident these things can happen. I think the geopolitical issues are probably what's limiting the positive impact of a lot of technology today. We're hoping that as a generation grows up with a deep passion for sustainability and wellness, that will also change the construct of governments, and therefore the policies, in a way that lets this technology have that impact.

Dermot Mee: There is absolutely a culture of optimism in the United States. The United States was built by optimists, and there's a long tradition of believing that an individual not only has the right, but the responsibility, to build their own future. That's a unique characteristic, and I think it's been the foundation of the entrepreneurial spirit here, which has carried forward into technology.

But the other thing I've seen all over the world is that when curious people try to solve a problem that's important to them personally, that's what motivates entrepreneurship. Stripe was founded by two Irish guys. Stripe is one of the largest payment platforms in the world. The problem they were trying to solve was that they were building a video game and couldn't find a way to charge for it. None of the banking systems, nothing that existed back then, would let two kids charge their friends to use their system. So they said, well, maybe we can hack together some way to solve that problem. One of the largest payment processing systems in the world was built by two kids trying to solve a problem.

My message to entrepreneurs is: find something you're passionate about, and try to solve that specific problem. Don't try to build a company, don't try to build a huge empire. Solve a very specific problem, and you'll find there are lots of other people with the same problem who'll pay for your solution. I think that's universal. I've met entrepreneurs in every part of the world, and the ones who've been successful have been passionate about solving a problem. Find what motivates you personally, or in your country, in your culture. What motivates you to solve a problem will allow anybody to build a successful business.