Facebook's a wonderful, incredible way to bring humanity together. They've brought together 2 billion people in the largest fictional family in history. So young people are starting to empathize with each other through Facebook across the globe. This is wonderful. However, when everyone needs Facebook because it's so successful that everyone's on it, then it starts to look like a global public utility, a public good. Same with Amazon.

When you're sharing the music, you're not buying the CD. When you're sharing that video, you're not buying the TV. But we thought, really, there'd be a firewall. While near-zero marginal cost would impact virtual goods, we never thought it would move over to the physical world.

What type of new economical system can organize this system? There is another sector in our life, that we rely on every single day, that are absolutely essential: the social commons, the social economy. It is all the activity we engage in to create social capital. It doesn't create capital market. Social commons is growing faster than the market place. It is growing faster than the market place. The social commons include any activity that is deeply social and collaborative.

If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn.

What's really clear to all of us in the business community is that GDP is slowing everywhere. And the reason is productivity has been declining now for 15 or 20 years all over the world. So we've got very high unemployment, and it's structural. And it's compounded by real-time climate change - that's really a game changer.

Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.