Exponential Medicine once again proved to be the best conference done by Singularity University.
I have to say attending four days of Exponential medicine every year turns out to be the highlight of the year. Let’s start by breaking down everything that goes on and why this is the one conference you should attend if you get a chance.
First and foremost, from day one we got to hear from amazing speakers like Naveen Jain, whom we had a chance to interview about his thoughts on exponential technologies and the connection between problems like water shortages and farmland turning out to be a synthetic biology problem. For instance, if we grow synthetic meat using muscle tissue cloning, we would need to farm 90% less cattle, and also use 90% less water for farming grains to feed cattle and thus solve world hunger. It’s insights like this that make coming here absolutely amazing.
Moreover, Naveen jain did an exclusive interview on video with me discussing how some of today’s largest problems tend to be the largest opportunities. For instance the pharmaceutical industry may soon be disrupted with Jain’s latest company Viome, which is focused on your gut health and bacteria and how if you eat for the bacteria in your body, you are able to have a symbiotic relationship with the billions of bacteria in our body that break down so many nutrients and keep us healthy.
Furthermore, at exponential medicine one talk that really blew me away was listening to Eyal Gura, who is one of the founders of Zebra Medical vision, an artificial intelligence company that uses the Google Cloud to do scans for $1 per scan to detect cancer using AI. This is just one such example of using exponential technologies, like AI, smartphones, and the cloud to reduce the cost of diangostics over ten thousand fold to reduce costs for patients, hospitals, insurance and doctors making the cost of diagnostics using big data possible.
http://gty.im/860395352
Finally, the leader of the Exponential Medicine conference, is none other than my good friend Dr. Daniel Kraft, somehow every year he manages to culminate some of the most visionary thinkers, speakers and futurists and often times many contrarians that offer controversial or alternative viewpoints that really challenge the status quo in healthcare.
One such speaker was, Roman Reed, who gave us a very unique insight into stem cell therapy from a very personal viewpoint through a story about his drive to get more innovation to cure his spinal cord injury. Reed founded a company called StemRemedium which connects financiers and scientists to drive innovation and cures in the stem cell space.
Of course finally, my favorite speakers have to be SU’s very own Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil and AI expert Dr. Neil Jacobstein. Once again, Peter gave a very good talk on how innovation in various fields is connected to creating radical abundance in healthcare and how to think of moonshots as part of your business model and innovate 10x.
My good friend Neil Jacobstein gave probably one of the most important talks of the conference on how AI, and machine intelligence will solve almost all of healthcare’s toughest challenges. Today bots are learning at an exponential pace and will soon have the intelligence of a board certified physician as technologies like Google deeplearning and IBM watson improve at an exponential pace. AI used today as narrow AI will soon morph into deep AI and become ubiquitious in much the same way Amazon’s Alexa and Google home have become. Expect your doctor to soon use Alexa to assist diagnostics and control a robot nurse to watch his patients and take your blood. If you believe any of this is science fiction, that’s exactly why you probably should have attended exponential medicine. Much of what used to be science fiction has become science fact.
