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.

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.

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.

Techno-Vision:
How We Will Solve Humanity's Grand Challenges
Vivek discusses advances that are happening in technology that are making it possible to solve humanity's grand challenges and present a vision for a future that entrepreneurs can make happen.

Many people are fearful that the future will be one of shortages and scarcity and that because of a burgeoning population and dwindling resources, our future is grim.

This couldn't be further from reality. This is the most innovative period in human history. Technology is advancing so rapidly that soon we will be able to solve some of humanity's grand challenges. Imagine a world with unlimited food, water, and energy -- in which we prevent disease rather than cure it and in which our lifespans increase along with our wisdom and knowledge. This is what is possible, not in future centuries, but in the next two decades.

Why Innovation Isn't Dead:
A Look at Our Technology Future
There is a lot of pessimism about the future. Some people argue that other than advances in computer-related fields, technological progress has actually stalled out -- the internal combustion engine, invented in 1876, still rules our highways; the cancer death rate has barely changed since 1971; today's Internet was actually designed in the 1960s. There are fears that world wars will break out over water and energy shortages and that our standards of living will drop.

This couldn't be further from the truth. Vivek Wadhwa will discuss why he believes that this will be the most innovative decade in human history. He will explain how exponentially advancing technologies -- in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3-D printing, medicine and nanomaterials -- will enable us to start solving humanity's grand challenges.

These technologies will disrupt entire industries and provide opportunities to create new ones.

For example:
• Combination of 3-D printing and robotics will cause manufacturing to return to the U.S.
• Advances in DNA sequencing and synthetic biology will make it possible to engineer drugs for the individual and create personalized stem cell lines
• Autonomous, self-driving cars will revolutionize urban transport
• Low-cost tablets and artificial-intelligence-based learning systems will change the teaching paradigm and bring education to the world's masses
• Star Trek-like tricorders, holodecks and replicators will become a reality
• These advances aren't going to come from governments and large research labs but from small groups of motivated people.

The Next Wave Globalization:
China, India and How the U.S. Can Keep Its Competitive Edge in the Midst of Globalized Innovation
Academics, policy makers and business executives say that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education and is losing its global advantage because China and India graduate more engineers. They cite poor test results, declining international rankings and decreasing enrollment in the hard sciences. They believe the remedy for U.S. competitiveness is to graduate more engineers and scientists.

America has reason to worry, but the problems aren't its graduation rates or international rankings. China and India's advantages are much different than we understand. They may graduate large numbers of engineers, but the quality of the education is so poor that they have to be retrained when they start work. To continue to lead, America has to focus on its core advantages and not try to be like its new global competitors.

Wadhwa will discuss:
• How global engineering graduation statistics are deceptive and India and China don't have the advantages they are believed to
• The on-the-ground reality in R&D and innovation in India and China -- how India is becoming a global R&D hub despite its weak education system and how China excels in imitation, not innovation
• How Indian industry adopted the best practices in workforce development of western corporations and perfected these
• What the U.S. can learn from its global competitors
• How the university research system -- one of America's strengths -- has major flaws
• Why immigrants -- which gave the U.S. its greatest advantage -- are now returning home
• What makes an entrepreneur and how we can fuel greater innovation

What Makes an Entrepreneur & How Can We Make More of Them?
The legends of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other high-tech entrepreneurs have fed a stereotypical vision of innovation in America: Mix a brainy college dropout, a garage-incubated idea and a powerful venture capitalist, stir well, and you get the latest Silicon Valley powerhouse. That's Hollywood's version of technological innovation; unfortunately, it's also the one that venture capitalists try to fund and government planners seek to replicate. But these individuals are not America's typical entrepreneurs and that is not the way to build innovation systems.

In this talk, Wadhwa will dispel some common myths such as:
• America's typical tech entrepreneurs are in their 20s
• Entrepreneurs are like top athletes: They are born, not made
• College dropouts make better entrepreneurs
• Women can't cut it in the tech world
• The way to build an innovation system is to create a tech park next to a research university and to add industry subsidies and venture capital.

He will detail the extensive research that his teams at Harvard, Duke and UC Berkeley have completed on what makes an entrepreneur, and the grand experiment that he helped launch in Chile to create an innovation system there.