Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa is a distinguished fellow at Harvard and Stanford, a technology entrepreneur, and a leading voice on innovation policy and AI ethics. He speaks on the future of technology, entrepreneurship, and the societal impacts of emerging technologies. Vivek has been named one of Time Magazine’s Tech 40 and is a regular contributor to major publications on technology and business.

Globally Respected Innovation Authority

Named Silicon Valley Forum’s 2018 Visionary Award winner (past honorees include Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Reed Hastings), Vivek’s research focuses on robotics, AI, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—and their disruptive impact on companies, industries, governments, and culture.

Distinguished Academic & Researcher

Vivek is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program, leading research on technology’s effects on future employment. He’s also a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering and has held six simultaneous appointments at top universities including Duke, Stanford, Singularity University, and Emory.

Bestselling Author & Columnist

Author of Your Happiness Was Hacked, the award-winning The Driver in the Driverless Car, The Immigrant Exodus (named Economist Book of the Year 2012), and Innovating Women (Financial Times #2 man worth emulating). His Washington Post syndicated column is one of the world’s most popular on technology and innovation.

Serial Entrepreneur & Industry Pioneer

Vivek grew Seer Technologies into a $118 million publicly traded company as CTO and founded Relativity Technologies (named one of Fortune’s 25 coolest companies). Recognized as “Outstanding American by Choice” by the US Government and one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

Navigating Technological Change at Light Speed

Unprecedented advances in technology have now made science fiction a reality. In only a handful of years, we’ve moved to the near worldwide use of handheld computing, the full mapping the human genome, and the advent of drones and driverless cars, to name just a few life-changing developments. This trajectory of technological advancement is only getting faster.

Based on his critically acclaimed new book The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future, Vivek Wadhwa not only explores the amazing technologies that are just now being integrated into our lives and work, but he also shares both the dilemmas and the solutions of technology advancement.  Using his wonderfully vivid storytelling skills, he examines how Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Machines, Robotics, Synthetic Biology, etc. are impacting fields of healthcare, education, transportation, energy development, investment management and more, analyzing the huge benefits as well as the economic and social consequences  He shares a three-pronged assessment that gauges whether a new technology will benefit everyone equally; whether the rewards outweigh the risks; and whether it promotes autonomy or leads to dependency.

Alongside a balanced evaluation of the impacts of both recently arrived technology or developments just around the corner, Vivek examines:

• How driverless cars are a perfect metaphor for our anxiety over where technology is headed
• What conditions make services or sectors ripe for a giant leap into the future
• Which industries stand to benefit most, and which will be upended
• Why Artificial Intelligence is both the most important breakthrough and the most dangerous technology ever created by man
• When, and if, society will accept robotic caregivers, housekeepers , and even warriors
• Whether cyber security can begin to keep up with our ubiquitous connectivity

This might be the most fascinating speech you will ever experience regarding our future.

Disruption and Opportunity: How existing industries will be disrupted and new trillion dollar industries will emerge
Not long ago, you could see your competition coming. Management guru Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe how competition worked: a new entrant attacked a market leader by launching low-end, low-priced products and then relentlessly improving them. Now Christensen’s frameworks have themselves been disrupted…because you can no longer see the competition coming. Technologies are no longer progressing in a predictable linear fashion, but are advancing exponentially and converging. Fields such as computing, medicine, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology are advancing simultaneously, and combining these allows one industry to rapidly disrupt another, before market leaders even know what has hit them.

Practically every industry will be disrupted over the next few years, including finance, insurance, health care, manufacturing, transportation, education, I.T. services, and communications. Very few of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be on that list by the early 2020s. They will go the way of Blockbuster, Kodak, RIM, Compaq, and Nokia.

This is not all bad news, because disruption creates opportunities. New industries will emerge, and companies that lead the change will have the trillion dollar market capitalizations. Business executives need to understand that:

• trillion dollar opportunities happen at the intersections of exponential technologies
• disruptions are happening in every industry where technology can be applied
• entrepreneurs can now do what only governments and big corporations could do before
• if they don’t disrupt themselves, they will be disrupted by startups from other industries

Businesses must learn the new rules of the innovation game and transform their employees into intrapreneurs who think and act like the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are gunning for Goliath.

Vivek Wadhwa will teach the basics of exponential technologies and convergence, provide examples of the disruptions that are under way in several industries, discuss the new rules of the innovation game, and challenge his audience members to think like today’s technology entrepreneurs,  and to build the new billion dollar businesses within their companies.

How Technology Will Eat Medicine: Future of Healthcare
When Apple announced that it was developing a watch that had the functions of a medical device, it became clear that the company was eyeing the $3 trillion healthcare industry; that the tech industry sees medicine as the next frontier for exponential growth. Apple isn’t alone. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Samsung and hundreds of startups also see the market potential, and have big plans.  They are about to disrupt health care in the same way in which Netflix decimated the video rental industry and Uber is changing transportation.

This is happening because several technologies such as computers, sensors, robotics, and artificial intelligence are advancing at exponential rates.  Their power and performance are increasing dramatically as their prices fall and their footprints shrink.

We will soon have sensors that monitor almost every aspect of our body’s functioning, inside and out. By combining these data with our electronic medical records and the activity and lifestyle information that our smartphones observe, artificial intelligence-based systems will monitor us on a 24×7 basis. They will warn us when we are about to get sick, and advise us on what medications we should take and how we should improve our lifestyle and habits. And with the added sensors and the apps that tech companies will build, our smartphone will become a medical device akin to the Star Trek tricorder.

Technologies such as Apple ResearchKit are also going to change the way in which clinical trials are done. Data that our devices gather will be used to accurately analyze what medications patients have taken, in order to determine which of them truly had a positive effect; which simply created adverse reactions and new ailments; and which did both.

Combined with genomics data that are becoming available as plunging DNA-sequencing costs approach the costs of regular medical tests, a healthcare revolution is in the works. By understanding the correlations between genome, habits, and disease – as the new devices will facilitate – we will get closer and closer to an era of Precision Medicine, in which disease prevention and treatment are performed on the basis of people’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.

Vivek Wadhwa will give you a crash course in exponential technologies – such as computing, Artificial Intelligence, sensors, synthetic biology, and robotics – and describe how they will converge and help turn our sick-care system into one that can truly focus on health care.