
Vivek Wadhwa
Technology & Innovation Author, Academic and Futurist
- Fellow/Professor, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon
- Globally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post
- Founder and CEO, Relativity Technologies
- Former EVP/CTO, Seer Technologies
- Author, Your Happiness Was Hacked
- Author, The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
Technology is creating the most exciting innovations the world has ever seen. It is also causing anxiety about our future. Navigating technological change at light speed is much harder if you don't have a trusted Sherpa to be your guide. Vivek Wadhwa (bio) has become a globally respected voice on advancing technologies and innovation (He was just named Silicon Valley Forum's 2018 VISIONARY AWARD-WINNER. Past honorees include Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Linda Rottenberg, Scott McNealy, Ray Kurzweil, Reed Hastings, Tim O'Reilly, Padmasree Warrior, Anne Wojcicki, Reid Hoffman).
Areas of Expertise
Technology | Strategy | Healthcare | Finance | Robotics | Talent | Manufacturing | Global Markets | Innovation | Disruption | Mobile | Quantum Computing | Block Chain | Future of Work
Vivek Wadhwa
Technology's Great Communicator
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.

Speech Topics
Navigating Technological Change at Light Speed
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How driverless cars are a perfect metaphor for our anxiety over where technology is headed
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What conditions make services or sectors ripe for a giant leap into the future
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Which industries stand to benefit most, and which will be upended
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Why Artificial Intelligence is both the most important breakthrough and the most dangerous technology ever created by man
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When, and if, society will accept robotic caregivers, housekeepers, and even warriors
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Whether cybersecurity can begin to keep up with our ubiquitous connectivity
Disruption and Opportunity: How existing industries will be disrupted and new trillion dollar industries will emerge
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trillion dollar opportunities happen at the intersections of exponential technologies
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disruptions are happening in every industry where technology can be applied
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entrepreneurs can now do what only governments and big corporations could do before
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if they don't disrupt themselves, they will be disrupted by startups from other industries
How Technology Will Eat Medicine: Future of Healthcare
Innovation, Science
Videos
Articles
Washington Post: Apple isn't just satisfied reinventing health care, it's targeting clinical trials as well
Washington Post: Why we should all be thrilled about the FDA starting to embrace innovation
Washington Post: The triumph of genomic medicine is just beginning
Washington Post: Why I'm excited about the promising future of medicine
Washington Post: DNA: The next big hacking frontier
Books
The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
A computer beats the reigning human champion of Go, a game harder than chess. Another is composing classical music. Labs are creating life-forms from synthetic DNA. A doctor designs an artificial trachea, uses a 3D printer to produce it, and implants it and saves a child’s life.
Astonishing technological advances like these are arriving in increasing numbers. Scholar and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa uses this book to alert us to dozens of them and raise important questions about what they may mean for us.
Breakthroughs such as personalized genomics, self-driving vehicles, drones, and artificial intelligence could make our lives healthier, safer, and easier. But the same technologies raise the specter of a frightening, alienating future: eugenics, a jobless economy, complete loss of privacy, and ever-worsening economic inequality. As Wadhwa puts it, our choices will determine if our future is Star Trek or Mad Max.
Wadhwa offers us three questions to ask about every emerging technology: Does it have the potential to benefit everyone equally? What are its risks and rewards? And does it promote autonomy or dependence? Looking at a broad array of advances in this light, he emphasizes that the future is up to us to create—that even if our hands are not on the wheel, we will decide the driverless car’s destination.
"Technology is a great servant but a terrible master. This is the most important book ever written about one of the most significant aspects of our lives--the consequences of our addiction to online technology and how we can liberate ourselves and our children from it."
--Dean Ornish, M.D.
Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology
"[A] solid contribution to the growing popular literature on the subject."―PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From one of Time Magazine's "Forty Most Influential Minds in Technology" comes an essential collection of candid, first-hand accounts of women in technology.
Women in technology are on the rise in both power and numbers, and now it's more important than ever to not lose that momentum, to "lean in" and close the gender gap. Although they make up half of the population, only 14% of engineers in the United States are women. They take the seeds of technological advancement and build something life-changing, potentially life-saving. The future of technology depends on the full and active participation of women and men working together, and it is vital that women are both educated and encouraged to go into the tech sectors.
Hailed by Foreign Policy Magazine as a "Top 100 Global Thinker," professor, researcher, and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, alongside award-winning journalist Farai Chideya, set out to collect anecdotes and essays from global leaders, sharing how their experiences in innovative industries frame the future of entrepreneurship. With interviews and essays from hundreds of women in STEM fields, including Anousheh Ansari the first female private sector space explorer, former Google[X] VP and current CTO of the USA Megan Smith, Ory Okolloh of the Omidyar Network, venture capitalist Heidi Roizen and CEO of Nanobiosym Dr. Anita Goel, MD, PhD, Innovating Women offer perspectives on the challenges that women face, the strategies that they employ in the workplace, and how an organization can succeed or fail in its attempts to support the career advancement of women.
Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain-and How to Fight Back
Technology promises to help us achieve our dreams, connect us to everyone, and free up time--so why are we more miserable than ever? Wadhwa and Salkever show that our unhappiness can be traced to a concerted effort by tech companies to mold our thoughts and behavior to accomplish their goals.
For all its considerable benefits, many argue that technology has been instrumental in eroding security, privacy, and community. But Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever argue that the truth is far more insidious: technology is actively robbing us of our happiness by making us so reliant on it that it becomes an addiction. Tech companies have all the weapons--sophisticated tracking bots, GPS coordinates, and algorithms that determine the optimal ways to distract us to their products and apps--even secret coding that defeats government monitoring and supervision--but Vivek and Salkever now provide us with insights and techniques to fight back. They focus on four key areas: Love, Work, Self, and Society. In each case, they document how the promise of technology has mutated into addiction and despair, and they lay out strategies to take back control by understanding the addictive mechanisms at the root of technology overload.
The Immigrant Exodus
A 2012 ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Many of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth.
Now, Vivek Wadhwa, an immigrant tech entrepreneur turned academic with appointments at Duke, Stanford, Emory, and Singularity Universities, draws on his new Kauffman Foundation research to show that the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented halt in high-growth, immigrant-founded start-ups. He argues that increased competition from countries like China and India and US immigration policies are leaving some of the most educated and talented entrepreneurial immigrants with no choice but to take their innovation elsewhere. The consequences to our economy are dire; our multi-trillion dollar loss will be the gain of our global competitors.
With his signature fearlessness and clarity, Wadhwa offers a concise framework for understanding the Immigrant Exodus and offers a recipe for reversal and rapid recovery.
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