SABF 2011 has started!

South American Business Forum has started the activities of its the seventh edition this morning. It started with the institutional opening of its directors of this year: Matías Spanier and Nicolás Loreti. They both expressed their conviction: the union and relationships among participants will bring concrete results to formalize projects and to modify the reality. They encouraged the participants to be active agents on this experience, taking advantage of all the opportunities it can offer them. Finally, the directors thanked to all those who helped make this forum; specially their house of studies, ITBA, sponsors, speakers and participants of this new edition.

José Luis Roces, the vice rector of the ITBA accompanied the organizing team during the opening session. During his speech, Roces recognized the entrepreneurship spirit and the will of the 18 organizers to make this conference happen. On the other hand, he pointed out that this young people are the ones who are prepared the best for the challenge that we face in these exponential times.

Later, the academic opening was in charge of Santiago Bilinkis, co-founder and CEO of Officenet.During his exposition, he transmitted his learning and experience at Singularity University, from the perspective of technological progress. Bilinkis compared the life of man 5000 years ago with the one of nowadays, to show that there are almost no differences in birth, life expectation, brain and physical development. In contrast, today we are living in an exponential world, where power of computers and Moore´s law is used to create science.

He also mentioned the ethical dilemma that arises with the advantages of new technologies. For example, there might be distinctions among humans, according to who has the possibility to pay for improvements of intelligence, orthopedic legs, etc. In terms of Bilinkis:** “The world will change more in the next 50 years than in the last 5000”**.

Finally, he shared with us his thoughts about the life expectancy and the experiments that had tripled it in mice, the step before investigating on humans. According to Bilinkis, “the first person that will live 100 years was already born and we extend our life, eventually, replacing our parts like we replace a part of a car”.