Byron Reese

While audience members once commonly asked, “What should I teach my kids to make sure they have a job in the future,” today, says Byron they ask, ‘What do I need to learn to stay relevant in the future?’ And, ‘How do I keep from falling behind?’ Everyone agrees that technology is changing the world. The question is how should we change in response to it? In this talk, Byron tells the story of technology’s advancement from the invention of language until today. He explores what’s to come in the next decade, and examines what we individuals can do to make the most of changing times.

What skills are useful to have? Which technologies should we adopt? How will technology affect the workplace, the home, and society in general? In this empowering talk, Byron suggests that the future is not going to be a frightening place where humans become displaced, but rather “one in which the things that make us human become incredibly valuable. We are entering a world of more choice and more opportunity than ever before,” says Bryon, and “the best response is to expand our dreams and expectations, not our fears and concerns.”

In this compelling talk, Byron demonstrates how current technological changes will ultimately bring about the end of poverty, disease, hunger, ignorance, and war. Byron explores how these historical problems of humanity are fundamentally problems of technology, and thus will have technological solutions, solutions we will find much sooner than is commonly believed.

The world has, throughout human history, changed. Almost always, this change is for the better. Through civilization, we have raised life expectancy, the standard of living, access to education, and political liberty. How has this change been brought about? Largely through the actions of individuals driven to change the world. This talk focuses on how that change happens and looks at how virtually any individual can literally have worldwide effect on the history of the planet.

More data is created every day that was created in the entire 19th Century. And within that data lies to the answers to the vexing problems of life. Automatic computer programs will scour the data for associations that will be turned into algorithms to optimize every decision we have to make in life. And while we may not always choose to do those things, it will effectively make every person on the planet vastly wiser than the wisest person who has ever lived. In the future, no one will ever need to make a mistake again. While this sounds like a technical talk, the wide use of real examples makes it suitable for any audience.

What would you have foreseen seven years ago? There were no self-driving cars or Apple watches. Would you have seen the transformative effect that tablets and smartphones would have? The next seven years will have much more change than the prior seven years. We know this. And this is the change we need to begin preparing for.

TECHNOLOGY & EDUCATION – “THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION”

The University system is a 12th Century French invention that remains to this day largely unchanged from it origins in the Middle Ages. Our K-12 system is a 19th Century German invention designed to produce homogenous factory workers. It too remains unchanged since the late 1800s. Now, we find ourselves in a world that has changed in ways no one expected. Now, the two most important job skills are teaching yourself new skills and working collaboratively with a team, neither of which are taught in our existing framework. How should education change? How will it? What skills will ensure that a person can economically contribute in a world of radical technological change?