
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.
“Exponential Finance, hosted by Singularity University in partnership with CNBC, is an intensive 2-day conference that brings together top experts to inform financial services leaders how technologies—such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, crowdfunding, digital currencies and robotics—are impacting business.”
Ray Kurzweil
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
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.