Vivek Wadhwa

The pandemic has taught us the incredible power of exponentials. We’ve seen how a small development in a far-off place can set off a series of events which quickly disrupts everything about our lives. But it’s not only viruses that advance exponentially. In the coming years, a range of technologies will create the same sort explosive and transformative changes across industry, society, and government.

What is enabling this new revolution is computer technology’s exponentially increasing pace of advancement. Our smartphones now have greater computing power than yesterday's supercomputers. Every technology that is information-based is advancing on an exponential curve, including, AI, robotics, sensors, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and quantum computing — all becoming smaller, faster, and cheaper.

Advancing technologies can be deceptive because at first because as they advance on a linear scale things move very slowly. Then when the exponential curve trends upwards we are caught off guard and disappointment leads to amazement and fear. This is precisely what is happening with Artificial Intelligence, which as recently as a decade ago was considered a failed technology — after two “AI winters”.

Today, new “large language models” (llms) that power tools such as Chatgpt have surprised even their creators with their unexpected talents. They are about to make obsolete all of the data analytics tools that corporations use, from the tried and tested decisions support systems to the knowledge based and expert systems. This is because they can analyze billions of times more information far more effectively than anything before. Their impact will be akin to the introduction of electricity and everything that has already been electrified will also be “cognified.”

Vivek Wadhwa will explain in simple terms what these emerging technologies are, including:

• What led artificial intelligence (A.I.), the stuff of science fiction, to failure in the ’90s, and the new methods of data analysis and the advent of the GPU that revived it
• Separating fact from fiction: the difference between today’s “narrow” or “weak” A.I. and tomorrow’s artificial general intelligence and superintelligence
• How A.I. can provide the cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness to transform decision-making in everything from stock trading, document review, and financial analysis to security, intelligence, fraud detection, and law enforcement
• Classes of machine-learning strategies — supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement — and their application in business
• Cutting through the hype: the limits and practicalities of business A.I.
• Regulatory and reputational concerns arising from A.I.’s opacity

Attendees will learn of the incredible opportunities we now have to build new billion dollar businesses in trillion dollar industries.

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.

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.