Vivek Wadhwa

AI & The Incremental to Exponential Opportunities

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.

Disruption & Opportunity

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

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.