Exponential Finance: Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis

From June 10-11 in NYC, the Singularity University and CNBC partnered up to host Exponential Finance. Many top minds in the fields of STEM were present, and all were there for one purpose – to explain how exponentially growing technologies are impacting, and will impact, business. The two minds which stood out most, no less due to their major accomplishments and contributions in the world of science and technology, were Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis (descriptions of both are provided below).

Ray Kurzweil attended Exponential Finance by means of telepresence. He discussed the nature of exponentially growing technologies, how the Law of Accelerating Returns is the reason why information technologies grow exponentially, and how they’ll eventually not only impact business but in what makes us human. Peter Diamandis, like Kurzweil, went into the nature of exponential growth in technologies, but also most importantly the stages in which each business must recognize and follow to, as Peter put it, successfully ride the exponential wave, as opposed to crashing. These stages are what are known as the 6 D’s of Exponentials – Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize, and Democratize.

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, a computer scientist, an author, and futurist. He is the co-founder of Singularity University and currently works for Google as their director of engineering. He’s authored several thought provoking books, such as The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, The Singularity Is Near, and How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.

As an inventor, Kurzweil is prominently known as being the first to invent a CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. 

Peter Diamandis is an engineer, a physician, an entrepreneur, and author. Best known for being the founder and chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation, he is also the co-founder of Singularity University, co-founder of Zero-Gravity Corporation, co-founder of asteroid mining company Planetary Resources, the co-founder and vice-chairman of Human Longevity, Inc., and much more. He is the co-author of the New York Times best-selling book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, and is currently writing his next book BOLD.

Peter’s success is most notable in the space industry. His co-founding of an asteroid mining company is certainly bold enough, but he didn’t stop there. Through Planetary Resources, he helped establish, alongside the Planetary Community Vanguard, an open-source asteroid search program known as Asteroid Zoo.

Photo Credit: Exponential Finance