Keynote & Workshop Topics:
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Technology
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Opportunity Pounds: The Future of I.T. in Health Care
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Opportunity is not knocking in applications of IT to health care; it is pounding down the door. Ever since the Human Genome Project showed the value of using computers in medical research, new research techniques and new IT applications are starting to cause health care management and new breakthroughs to move at in silico speeds instead of in vitro speeds. Richard Worzel, best-selling author and one of today's leading futurists, surveys the landscape of tomorrow, and highlights:
• How health care will change over the next 25 years, and why it absolutely must;
• How a global medical warning system will gather instant-by-instant reports on the health status of close to 4 billions people, and what the implications for future research and data mining;
• The basic building block of such a system will be invisible in 25 years’ time, but is already in evidence today;
• The new kinds of research tools that must be used to deal with data overload that is rising by orders of magnitude every five years or so;
• And the emergence of help from surprising, even unexpected sources.
Richard compares the advances of the next 25 years with the advances in medicine made between 1860 and today. 'We will look back on the way we practice health management today, and compare it to the use of leeches and blood-letting of earlier eras,' he says, 'And this has major implications for all the players, including governments, patients, pharma companies, and health care practitioners.'
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Life & IT: The Revolution Begins
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You have only to look at the changes that IT have wrought in the world over the last 10 years to see how changes in technology can produce significant changes in business, social, psychographic, governmental, and interpersonal relationships. Now, if you consider that Moore’s Law has been shown to be too conservative, and that the pace of change is not only accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is increasing, it becomes clear that the non-technological changes ahead of us due to IT will be even more startling. In a very real sense, the IT revolution so far has merely achieved lift-off.
The consequences will be far reaching. Business will continue to experience steadily rising competition, and the only successful response will require both innovation and far-seeing forward planning. Individual life will be affected in the way people interact – and fail to interact – with each other, coupled with the accelerating erosion of privacy and community. Governments will continue to lag, both in their use of technology, and in their regulation of it, leaving embarrassing and potentially dangerous gaps for groups seeking to exploit and distort social and economic activity. The biosciences will experience a significant acceleration of discovery, leading to remarkable advances in medical diagnosis, treatment, and cures, while biotechnology will transform industry into a greener, more productive offshoot of agriculture. Computer companions, acting as smart butlers or avatars will become commonplace, as will genuine robots, in both functional forms, and as human simulacra. And the rapid advance of technology will cause a further spreading of the bell-curve of human ability, producing significant winners and losers along the way. The results will be exalting, humbling, dangerous, and enlightening.
Richard Worzel holds a degree in computer science, is a Chartered Financial Analyst with broad experience as an institutional investor, a strategic planner, and one of North America’s leading futurists (as well as a comprehensive professional member of the World Future Society). In this far-ranging presentation he will draw on his IT, business, planning, and futurist credentials to outline the vast potential for the constructive and disruptive impact of the future of IT in our daily lives.
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Grabbing Change by the Horns: Will Transformation Mean Evolution, Revolution, or Annihilation?
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Not only is the rate of technological change accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is increasing. Meanwhile, the ripple effects of technology in social, economic, political, and business affairs are making it harder to foresee and manage change. Richard Worzel, leading futurist and strategic planner, as well as a Chartered Financial Analyst and best-selling author, leads this exploration on the issues and impact of change in technology, including:
- What are the discontinuities ahead in IT, and how will they affect governance?
- How will IT have to change to cope with both new technologies, as well as rising expectations from the general public?
- What non-IT factors will influence the changes ahead, and how will they feed-back into IT management?
- How is government going to change, and how should policy makers prepare for these changes? and
- How long will the recession last, what happens afterwards, and how will that affect both expectations and resources in IT management?
You will walk away with a roadmap of tomorrow's world, one that will help you make the unavoidable transformations ahead be constructive rather than detrimental.
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Tracking the Downstream Effects of Technology
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It's clear that technology is advancing with unprecedented speed, but what is less clear is what effects these advances will have on business, government, consumers, and society. Yet the downstream effects - the secondary, tertiary, quaternary effects and beyond - of technological developments are almost always more significant than the immediate impact of the technology itself. For instance, refrigeration extended life expectancy; the invention of air travel revolutionized warfare, helped produce McLuhan's Global Village, spread new diseases with unprecedented speed, and boosted global terrorism; computer games lead to childhood obesity and health problems and may be eroding the socialization skills the allow society to function; and the Internet is redefining the way business is conducted as well as revolutionizing politics.
In this intriguing and interactive look at advances yet to come, futurist Richard Worzel will outline the pivotal technologies, and involve participants in a series of structured exercises to identify not only what technological developments will be key, but what the downstream, ripple effects of these technologies will be.
'You cannot look at the future in vague, general terms and get useful results,' says Worzel. 'Accordingly, we will break the future down into well-defined, specific segments, and assess what changes may come in these segments, and what effects they will have. The introduction of these techniques will give conferees a tool box that they can take away with them and use repeatedly in assessing the future.'
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The Future of IT: Are We Up to It?
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Most technology professionals accept Moore's Law as gospel, yet it's actually too conservative. Not only is the rate of change in technology accelerating, but the rate of acceleration is increasing as well. Some analysts believe that 20 years from now, computers will be a billion times faster than they are today. Whether they're right or not, it is certain that the changes that will be wrought by information technologies over the next 20 years will be much more significant than the changes of the last 20 years. This raises the question: Are we up to the task?
Futurist and strategic planner Richard Worzel holds a degree in computer science, and wrote his first computer program in 1959. In this challenging keynote presentation, he assesses the changes we've experienced, looks out at the changes to come, and gauges the social, commercial, and personal implications of tomorrow's technology. Along the way he identifies the key, and unsuspected bottlenecks that will restrain our progress, the threats with which we'll have to deal, and weighs the effects of information processing in IT, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and new frontiers beyond this. This startling keynote will shake your preconceptions about the future ahead of us, and help you re-evaluate your strategy for tomorrow.
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Numinous Technology: Lurking Hazards, Hidden Significance
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Computers have shrunk from behemoths that filled entire buildings and cost millions of dollars to nifty toys that cost hundreds. And the sociological, commercial, and strategic implications of this revolution go 'way beyond the obvious technological impacts. The downstream effects on corporate organization, management, HR, purchasing, and most other organizational activities will be dramatic. The effects on culture and society will be pronounced, and of a nature that many will find threatening. And the consequences for the power structures of governments and organizations will be far-reaching. More than just a review of technology toys and trinkets, this keynote looks at the underlying implications of technology, and how it is changing our actions, our assumptions about the way the world works, the way we interact with each other, and even the way we think.
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