ABOUT THE AUTHORS

VIVEK WADHWA is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School and a Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering at Silicon Valley. He is the co-author of Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back; The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent; and Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology. He has held appointments at Duke University, Stanford Law School, Emory University, and Singularity University.

Wadhwa is based in Silicon Valley and researches exponentially advancing technologies that are soon going to change our world. These advances—in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence, computing, synthetic biology, 3-D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—are making it possible for small teams to do what once only governments and large corporations could do: solve the grand challenges in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security. These technologies will also disrupt industries and create many new policy, law, and ethics issues.

In 2012, the U.S. Government recognized Wadhwa as an Outstanding American by Choice, for his “commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans.” He was also named one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine; was one of TIME magazine’s Tech 40, the most influential minds in tech; and was second on a list of “ten men worth emulating” in the Financial Times.

Wadhwa teaches subjects such as technology, industry disruption, entrepreneurship, and public policy; he researches the policy, law, and ethics issues of exponential technologies; he helps prepare students for the real world; and he is an adviser to several governments. He is a columnist for the Washington Post, and a contributor to VentureBeat, HuffPost, LinkedIn Influencers blog, and the American Society of Engineering Education’s Prism magazine. Prior to joining academia in 2005, Wadhwa founded two software companies.

ALEX SALKEVER is a writer, futurist, and technology leader. He is the co-author, with Vivek Wadhwa, of Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back. The first edition of The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Can Change the Future was longlisted for the 2017 McKinsey and Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. He also co-authored with Wadhwa The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, which The Economist named a Book of the Year in 2012. In these books and in dozens of articles published online, he explores exponentially advancing technologies such as robotics, genomics, renewable energy, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and driverless cars. He is a columnist for Fortune and previously served as the Technology Editor at BusinessWeek.com and as a Guest Researcher at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering.

Salkerver has served as a senior executive at a number of Silicon Valley startups and as a senior leader at respected brands in technology, most recently at Mozilla, where he served as a vice president. He consults on strategy and marketing for a number of leading technology companies and startups on innovation, artificial intelligence and robotics, the attention economy, and blockchain. He speaks regularly at industry conferences, universities, and schools, as well as to corporations and boards of directors.