Vivek Wadhwa

Technology & Innovation Expert, Futurist

Vivek Wadhwa

Technology & Innovation Expert, Futurist

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Biography

Vivek's background is impressive — an entrepreneur, academic, author, keynote speaker wrapped into a wonderfully vibrant and charismatic package. His research is focused on the critical advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials, and how these advances are creating disruptive changes for companies, industries, governments and the culture at large.

Vivek just rejoined Harvard as a Distinguished Fellow, Harvard Law School, Labor, and Worklife Program, where he will help lead a critical three-year research project on the effects of technology on future employment and work. This will be the first study on how technology will affect the core foundations of our economy.

He is also currently a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering, he teaches on CMU's Silicon Valley campus about the latest exponential technologies; technology convergence and industry disruption; risks and regulation; and the new rules of innovation. Vivek was also a Director of Research at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University, and Fellow at Stanford University's Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Harvard Law School, and Emory University. Remarkably, he has held as many as six simultaneous appointments at top universities.

Vivek's syndicated column for The Washington Post is one of the world's most popular columns on all things technology and innovation. His newest bestselling book is Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain — and How to Fight Back. Previous books include the award-winning, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future, he also wrote The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, which was named by The Economist as a Book of the Year of 2012, and Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, for which the Financial Times named him #2 on its global list of the top ten men worth emulating.

This talent for communicating the complexities of global technological advancements in simple, almost poetic ways have made Vivek one of the most in-demand keynote speakers in the world. He gives more than 100 talks every year to the most prestigious and powerful audiences, including world leaders, CEOs, industry organizations, universities, entrepreneurship groups, and a multitude of national science and engineering academies.

He started his career as a software developer and gained a deep understanding of the challenges in building computer systems. His experience as Vice President of Information Services at investment banking powerhouse CS First Boston (CSFB), spearheading the development of technology for creating computer-aided software-writing systems, was so successful that CSFB decided to spin off that business unit into its own company, Seer Technologies. As its Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Wadhwa helped grow the nascent startup into a $118 million publicly traded company.

The explosive growth of the Internet afforded Vivek with an even greater opportunity to help businesses adapt to new and fast-changing technologies, and founded Relativity Technologies. As a result of his vision, Forbes.com named Wadhwa a Leader of Tomorrow, and Fortune declared Relativity one of the 25 coolest companies in the world.

In 2012, the U.S. Government awarded Wadhwa distinguished recognition as an "Outstanding American by Choice", for his "commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans". He was also named one of the world's "Top 100 Global Thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine in that year; in June 2013, he was on TIME's list of "Tech 40", one of forty of the most influential minds in tech; and in September 2015, he was second on a list of "ten men worth emulating" in the Financial Times.

Speaker Videos

The Future of Work is No Work

Speaking Reel

TEDx: in Conversation with Ralph Simon (Virtual Event)

TiECon 2015: The Future of Technology

TEDx: Opportunities For Women In the Exponential Era

TEDx: Engineering Education and Innovation

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Speech Topics

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 cybersecurity can begin to keep up with our ubiquitous connectivity.

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

Disruption & Opportunity: How Existing Industries Will Be Disrupted & 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 the 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, healthcare, 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 underway 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 24x7 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.