xprize founder. spaceflight, medical diagnostics, and radical break thrust. >> can we interface the brain with computers? i don't think any of this is dpobl. >> as the chair of singularity university. >> you are worried about quarterly returns, also worried about some kid in the garage coming up with technology that you weren't expecting that puts you out of business.

>> i caught up to peter in new york. on the 10th anniversary of the xprize foundation, a board i sit on. people will know about that because of the contest to get the spaceship into space that actually spurn spurred this. tell me about it. >> my passion has been to get people into space, i gave up on nasa as being the mechanism to call me there. back in the 1990s, i read a book called the spirit of st. louis. i found out in 1927 when lindburg played that flight, he didn't do it on a whim, he did it to win a $25,000 prize. i thought that innovation could

be spurred by applies. this $10 million prize for the first person to build a spaceship privately that could carry three people into space. the point is we announced it in '96. it was won in 2004, ten years ago. we had 26 teams around the world that spent $100 million to build up this $10 million prize. and burt rutan, backed by bill gates. built it. >> that became being spaceship 1. >> and richard branson built virgin galactic. >> i've got a mold of spaceship 1 signed by you. where did you get the $10 million from? >> we got it from the ansari family. under the arch in st. louis announcing this $10 million

prize, actually didn't have $10 million back then. the xprize foundation was based on extraordinary exponential technologies. the first one who does this, i don't care where you went to school, you solve this, you win. >> a lot of people think of the biggest things we do, they cost money and cost years and years of research. rightly or wrongly, people associate that with things government should be doing. >> yep, yep, it's changing. we're heading into a period of time where we'll solve our grand challenges. i believe there isn't a problem we can't solve. it used to be you would only go to governments. government's i don't know was handling only the big problems.

then it turned into government and big companies. but today, powered by cloud computing and artificial intelligence and clou robotics, the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities, as well, right? you want to solve hunger , sanitation, whatever it might be, help a billion people, more and more people are trying to knock those things off. >> there is an interesting termnology, these are things that are market failures. something that the government nor the free market has come up with a solution to by themselves. they need a perverse prize. >> one of the prizes that you've reported on before was the oil cleanup prize that wendy schmidt

funded. it turns out between roughly 1990 when the exxon valdez occurred in alaska and the bp spill spurred in 2010, the cleanup technology had not changed. why is that? why isn't it getting better? why can't we clean it up faster? it turns out when the oil spills occurred, the local companies would hire the fishermen to clean it up faster and faster, but there was no innovation there. we ended up funding a $1.5 million prize that wendy -- >> they couldn't get the spill dealt with. >> it was crazy. >> james cameron had just joined our board of trustees. many if you can just double the rate of owl spill cleanup you

would earn thes 1. the $1.5 million. top 10 teams went head to head, the wing team increased it 600 percent. six fold increase. why wasn't that done years earlier. >> by the world's largest companies with engineers. >> there are market failures. sometimes i define the expert as the person who defines it as something that can't be done. we'll go to the nonexpertsd exerts -- nosh experts. most of which allows you to drive really true break thrust. the day before the break threw, it would be afternoon incremental improvement. so i ask the question, where inside the government do we try

crazy ideas? we don't. >> we're both star trek fans. >> yes. >> one of your competitions now is the tri-quarter. to replicate the tri-quarter. >> gene rodden denberry, the cell phones we have now is better than the one on the communicators. but the triquarter, paul jake obzjacobs,the chairman and kerrf qualcomm, and i have lunch. and i told him we have a vision for the triquarter. he says let's do it. we're offering the $10 million for a team that can build a hand held mobile device, right, something for a mom or dad, not for a nurse or doctor, a mom in the middle of kenya or dad in

the middle of the bronx, whatever it may be, understands language, ibm is watching computer on the cloud, you can cough on it and go the rna or dna are analysis of your sly hav slierv sasaliva.trying to take your dos job? well in the u.s. alone, we're going to be short over 100,000 doctors by 2020. we can't build enough medical schools or train enough doctors. african has 25% of the health burden and 1% of the doctors. >> in many cases they invest more in trying to win that prize than the prize is worth. >> yes, much more.

the winning team spent $26 million for the $10 million prize. we typically cumulatively for all the teams get four tiemsd th --time the prize money. when i was with the head of coca-cola, head of g.e -- >> basically always trying to raise money. >> but i can help them see how they can innovate in a different way. and my point is that today if you're focus on innovation inside the four walls of your company, you are dead. you have to open source innovation. while you may be larry page with 50,000 brilliant employees at google, out of hundreds of millions of people with good innovations today. >> the prizes are engineering driven. how do you translate the success into social policy? >> a lot of these are very concrete engineering objectives.

even with the qualcomm triquarter prize, we have a partnership with the fda, the government is like whoa how do we keep up with that? when we had the spaceflight prize, i had meetings with the head of the faa, to try and change the rules because the rules for private spaceflight didn't exist at the time. >> right. >> we actually drove the formation of the commercial spaceflight, not only to plow humans to come back but humans to go into space. when your iphone, your ann droid becomes your doctor, the fda is regulating it somehow. >> i'm on board with apeter

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>> welcome back to "talk to al jazeera." i'm with peter diamandis, he runs the xprize foundation which offers big cash prizes to those who can solve the world's problems. one of these things is singularity university. explain to me what glaifort glaifort singularity university is. >> what's going to come to the market in the next two years, ai, 3d printing, all these different technological areas that will give us the levers to change the word. we crated singularity university. we have a 3,000 applicants for 80 spots every year. we have an executive program. that the top companies send

their executives to. coca-cola, sap, cisco. >> what is this to do? >> if you are a ceo of a publicly traded company, you are worried about corporate returns. and you are worried about a kid in a garage that is going to come up with an idea that puts you out of business. >> you brought up the word exponential. you say that growth is linear, but exponential -- >> exponential growth, is, linear thinking, when we were evolving as a human specious, nothin --species it was the sam. we are local minute yar thinkers. if i tell you take 30 paces linearly, you end up 30 paces

down the road, but if you take exponential steps, you've gone around the world 36 times. because we are a linear thir in a world -- thinker that our world is growing in a exponential way, you can go out 24 months from now at a best buy and buy a computer that's twice as fast for same dollars that you did this year, right? and all of these technologies, synthetic biology, 3d printing, artificial intelligence, robotics, are doubling in power in 18, 24 months. >> whereas we are wired to think 1-2-3 four. >> right. that's where the incredible issue for an entrepreneur comes into play. >> so ray

crosewell, the term scholar thinking, do you share that view? >> i slayer the view in a small way. the term singularity, the rate of change is going to become so fast in our future that we are unable to see beyond that horizon. sort of the singularity in time, it comes from a physics phenomenon in the black hole in the event horizon. i believe that we are transforming what it is to be human. we sequenced the human genome, we are now beginning to sequence every cancer that has come out, we are a programming machine, how that works and how to fix it. so i think we're going to start span. what happens when 100 is the new 60? >> i see those billboards that say the person born this year will live to 100 or more. >> i think it's going to change a

lot, change significantly. >> have you figured out how we can pay for all of this? we can't save up enough money to live to 80 these days. >> when you think about it, your productive years as an earner of the tax base or creating the value of the society, you hit your peak in early 40s, 50s, 60s, and retirement. what if that peak could continue? i 30 we're going to increase the gnp of a nation by having people who are productive live longer. to your earlier points, we are beginning to create brain-machine interfaces. the idea how do you plug the brain into the internet, cortical implants, to use light to stimulate neurons. can we map the brain? to the detail where we start to map memories? can we interface the brain with

computers? i think any of this isn't impossible. >> the future is better than you think, says xprize founder and chairman of al jazeera america gives you the total news experience anytime, anywhere. more on every screen. digital, mobile, social. visit aljazeera.com. follow @ajam on twitter. and like aljazeera america on facebook for more stories, more access, more conversations. so you don't just stay on top of the news, go deeper and get more perspectives on every issue.

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>> you're watching "talk to al jazeera" with peter diamandis of xprize fame. let's talk a little bit about a book you wrote which did very well, called abundance.

there's not enough stuff in the world, we don't produce enough food and resources. that was one part of your book, you were turning that thought on its head. we have lots of stuff out there, we don't distribute it properly but we've got it. >> i was seeing the world very differently. with my role as chairman of xprize and singularity university, over the last 100 years if you think about it, the human life span has more than doubled. per capita income for every nation on this planet has more than tripled, energy has reduced 20 fold, transportation, 100 fold, communications a thousand fold, right? cheaper, right? what's causing this amazing change over the last 100 years? it's not politicians, or we've gotten smarter, brain

upgrades, it's technology, what makes things scarce into abundant. the rarest metal in the world back in the 1840s was aluminum. and even though aluminum makes up 8.3% of the earth by weight, it is bound by oxygen and silica, to produce box i produce bauxite. electrolysis made it so cheap to ex tract aluminum from bauxite, we live in a world five times more energy, in the form of solar energy, not just usable form yet. but amazing break throughs there. in california, we have the

largest body of water in the world miles from l.a. again, technology coming online right now that will allow us to take saltwater and make it into pure drinking water. this is a world where the resources are not properly distributed. technology can help that. you know, one last example i'll give is the notion that a masai warrior in the middle of kenya last better calm than president obama. has more accessing to are knowledge and he information than president clinton did. >> which means we could find geniuses in the world where we never knew about before. >> you could have a mozart or an einstein who would never rise because they were never discovered. now in a world that we're

connected like this, those geniuses can be generated, brought to the forefront of humanity. >> the world's not enough for you here. a couple of years ago, you got involved in something like planetary resources. you are thinking about ways to mine precious materials from other planets. what's that about? >> i've always been a fan of space, the ultimate frontier. years from now, we'll look at these next few decades as a moment in time that the human race moved irreversibly off the planet. elon musk and richard bezos -- >> these are people you are talking to? >> investors and supporters and tbord members and such. the realization is what has driven humanity to explore frontiers is access to resource

he right? the chinese silk road, the european settlers looking to the new world for gold and spices. ing americans going west -- americans going west to look for land and timber. near earth are many asteroids that come near earth. sometimes they hit us. that's not a good thing. but some of these asteroids are rich in fuels, hydrogen and oxygen, and precious metals. the technology now exifts to be able -- exists to be able to find them, prospect them and extract materials for earth or space. and my co-founder eric anderson and i hired a team out of jpl, chris lewicki who is our president, the team who built spirit and

curiosity, the rover on mars right now, and we are building the technology that is out in. we have an amazing group of backers. >> is this something that just interests you or is this something rich people do? >> these asteroidal resources are word billions of dollars. they are not scarce they are reachable and they are extractible. and in success it will bring down the price of these metals that allow us to have these electronics for everybody's batteries and all the technologies that we need. >> a guy like me didn't realize you needed to carry all your music around at once, i think that case in which you could carry six cds was just fine. are i'm not looking for the next best thing, or the greatest innovation you could see, i'm satisfied with the world we're in. you're not. what is that we don't think about?

>> we turn these into many xprizes, are one of the xprizes we are looking to launch this prize. it is the notion of imagine a competition for team building software that could be resident on any smartphone this can take a child, anywhere in the planet if they're middle of some place that no schools no teachers no electricity and take them from ill literacy -- illiteracy to be able to learn and speak and code. >> because in your head, that means little kids all over the world becoming smart students who then invent more stuff. so your chance he in the world are -- chances in the with world are greater because everyone is educated. >> reduce population growth, making the populace healthier and better educated.

nobody wants to lose their children. war comes down. people start caring more, start inventing, starting solving problems and it is a positive amazing many thing that happens. and the roddenberry family, to hop into a single person device, electronic autonomous helicopter, to take from point a to point b, people say, where are flying cars? they are coming. in the united states it may be a luxury, but in places like africa, where there are no roads, or the roads are out because of a flood, you're toast. africa skipped the land line phone generation, went straight to mobile. imagine if africa skipped roads and went straight to aerial. crazy ideas, right? tell people the biggest market for smartphones would be africa,

they would tell you you're nuts. >> good to see you pal. >> good to see you too. >> i look forward to doing this for many more years. . >> this is al jazeera america. live from new york city with are a look at today's top stories. a deal signed between the government and opposition of ukraine, but some worry the deal won't end the violence. but was it even a true compromise? one of the foreign ministers who brokered the deal said if the opposite session don't accept the plan they will all be dead. protests in venezuela are spreading as the opposition prepares for mass rallies. and after months of negotiations, the