Vivek Wadhwa: The Future is Bright, if We're Cautious | Big Think

The Future is Bright, if We're Cautious

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Singularity University's Vivek Wadhwa why he's both optimistic and pessimistic about the inevitable change that will come about by way of technological advancement. The biggest reason for optimism is that he sees many industries growing at exponential rates thanks to technological innovations. By the 2030s we should have secured unlimited energy, clean vehicles, mass-produced 3d-printed meat, and other mankind-bettering innovations. Of course, there's also a dark side to the development of technologies that cut humans out of from workforce, pose threats as killer viruses, and outpace society's laws and ethics.

It's up to us, he says, to take these tech innovations and work toward solving the problems of humanity rather than creating more of them through selfishness and greed.

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VIVEK WADHWA:

Vivek Wadhwa is a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering. He is a globally syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and author of The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future; 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 of Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, which documents the struggles and triumphs of women. Wadhwa has held appointments at Duke University, Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, Emory University, and Singularity University. You can follow him on Twitter @wadhwa.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Vivek Wadhwa: You know, when I was young I grew up watching Star Trek. I used to dream about tricorders, replicators, these transporters, all these amazing advances we saw. I also imagined I would be using communicators, that I’d have a replicator reproducing all the ice cream and chocolate that I wanted. So I used to imagine a world of amazing things and we had solved the problems of humanity and we were shooting for the stars, and we were exploring new worlds. That's how I thought it would be when I grew up. Look at the world I grew up into, poverty, hunger, despair, where we put each other down, where we're worried about scarcity running out of resources. It's the exact opposite of what I thought we would have when I grew up when I was young. So I, like the rest of the world, became pessimistic. I mean two or three years ago I too was worried about shortages of energy, food, hunger, overpopulation, the world coming apart because of all of the battles we're fighting.

If you read my writing right now I'm the greatest optimist there is. I talk about this being the most innovative decade in human history when we'll solve the grand challenges of humanity. I talk about the Star Trek future we're headed into. What changed over there? What changed was that I started learning about the advances that are happening in technology. In hanging out with people like Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil at Singularity University, I started learning about the fact that computing is moving exponentially and it's causing many other fields to go exponential. We all know about Moore's Law and we've seen how computers advance in capabilities. Indeed our smartphones are more powerful than the greatest supercomputers of yesteryear.

The same advances are now happening in 3-D printing, in artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, and in medicine. And what they're making possible is for us to solve the grand challenges of humanity. I now believe that within the next ten to 20 to 30 years we're going to have unlimited energy. Solar is advancing most predictably but there will be many other technologies that become viable over the next five or ten years, which means that in the 2025, 2030 timeframe we should be in an era of almost unlimited energy. We'll have solar cells or other technologies, which generate energy locally, which lets us power electric cars, which are clean. They let us now produce unlimited clean water. We can grow unlimited food. We can 3-D print meat. So we're headed into an era where technology is going to make it possible for us to get out of this shortage mode we've been in, as well with lots of advances in healthcare.

We already now have sensory-based devices that we carry in our pockets, they're called smartphones......

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