#SUSASummit: Peter Diamandis opens SingularityU South Africa Summit

Peter Diamandis – Executive founder of SingularityU.

Diamandis started by thanking Mic and Shayne Mann for their efforts to build SingularityU in South Africa, saying that if more people did the same, Singularity could be in up to 180 countries around the world.

Diamandis explained that, amidst the Covid pandemic, we in a period of rapid change. The speed at which technology is accelerating is now accelerating too. Exponential technologies are hitting the planet like an asteroid strike. Slow, cumbersome companies who are not agile are not able to keep up. Agile entrepreneurs, the exponential entrepreneurs, however, can pick up the pieces and create an incredible future. They are doing things more cheaply and much more quickly. This is the world that Ray Curzwell and Diamandis think and teach about.

Diamandis explained that Covid-19 has accelerated how fast the world is changing. His last book; The future is faster than you think that looks at the future of business, came out in January this year. A lot of the changes projected in this book have already happened.

He continued that a variety of Covid vaccines will come and bring us back to a sense of normalcy. However, many things will never go back as we have only moved forward to where we would have been anyway, more rapidly. For example:

• How we educate our kids. The notion of education is being reinvented by artificial intelligence (AI).
• Healthcare is being moved from the hospitals into the home. Technologies e.g. wearables will transform this future. Healthcare will move from “sick care”, to keeping you healthy
• Retail
• Where you work

These curves have been accelerated.

Diamandis explained that his biggest lesion during this pandemic has been that fearfulness never does you any good. Your purpose is to learn and educate yourself. The pandemic has also shown him that we can go from scarcity to abundance very quickly, referring to the ventilator and personal protective clothing situations which changed overnight.

Diamandis concluded by saying that Singularity is so powerful because this community thinks in a different way. You need a mindset of abundance, an exponential mindset, that moves away from scarcity to a perspective of abundance. This is where you will find people with mindsets of longevity, purpose and moonshot thinking. When you solve problems, you create abundance.