Hello and good afternoon [Arabic: Salem Alhay-Koom]

I’d like to thank you for your time and thoughts today. The challenge with talking about Disruptive Technologies is that doing so implies I can reliably see them.

Most world-sweeping changes happen with such force that we forget quickly what or how life was before them. And we’re seeing that shift happen more often with internet-based services that proliferate into every aspect of our life. It’s a remarkable time to be involved.

One thing I will share with you is that, especially in large groups, our natural tendency is to reject new ideas. “No” tends to be the simplest, and often in the long run, most correct answer.

But disruptive changes often seem stupid or incorrect in the immediate. How could something disrupt without surprise? Some people give a better answer with the question “Why?” — and accordingly give a new idea some thought.

But, I’ve seen the best evaluators of ideas start with Why Not and try really hard to answer that question first. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by Why Not people.

For the last four to five years I’ve been working primarily in mobile consumer electronics and software. Prior to that I was at UC Berkeley where I studied a mix of mathematics, statistics, and engineering disciplines with the hopes of studying process engineering or aeronautics. In the ensuing downturn of 2007–2009 I found myself jettisoned from such aspirations into the startup world that was quickly becoming the primary place for innovation for the educated but unemployed.

Later on, at Google I was fortunate to work alongside some of the smartest and craziest thinkers I’ve encountered. Google is a complex mix of people, ideas, and resources with aspirations that make even the grandest ideas seem reasonable, and sometimes small.

When Google acquired Motorola in 2012, I jumped at the chance to help be part of the group of people who would build computers that were as powerful as they were cost effective. To be, in some small part, responsible for the computerization of the next 5 billion people on this planet. This seemed like a worthy endeavor.

What I found there was more than just a team building cheap phones. They were part of an ecosystem of people building next generation of computers for everyone, everywhere. What is a phone or computer anyway? Ultimately it’s a processing unit attached to a series of sensors in a housing.

With broadband and wireless communications becoming more prevalent, we, as a society, have developed a vast network of these small but powerful CPUs and their sensors that are distributed everywhere, and to everyone, in the world. How we build, develop, and leverage this network will be the key to the continued success of our species.

Today I will show you a few areas where these computers are being built and deployed, and how they will impact the world in positive ways.

There’s a rise of embeddable computers. And they’re going everywhere. And they’re becoming more responsive than ever.

We know this because everyone is “mobile-first” now. But I don’t mean in your pockets. Or even on your face. Or even on your hands. I mean everywhere. In and on your walls, in your tools, in and on your roads.

A side effect of this phenomenon is that the computers themselves are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Some of my work alongside the Moto X team was to design the most responsive phone. A phone that could sense your presence and deliver information as well as take commands when it was effectively off.

If you haven’t checked out a Moto X, I highly recommend it. We have made strides in that direction, but have plenty of ways to go. But in a world with responsive computers everywhere also means we will have near-instant data capture, which combined with accessible broadband will provide unprecedented information dissemination.

Consider systems like Google Glass, what I’m wearing right now, and Smart Watches, like the Moto 360 on my wrist, among a myriad of other electronics will become the new mobile. Today they may be clunky, awkward, and under utilized.

But they are early models. Each of these form factors have been tried before with probably less success. These are an example of computers becoming cheap and malleable enough that we can shape them to our specific needs.

Perhaps embeddable computers were obvious, looking into the past. As transistor density increased and power consumption decreased we’ve now reached a point where placement of computers is not tied to a room, a desk, or even a pocket. We now easily and cheaply adapt them to fit specific use cases, people, environments, and more in an effort to perfectly embed computers in the world.

Some of this embedded future has been here of course, though crudely. It will require immense investment and thought for the rest of it to become socially acceptable, readily available, and positively available.

In the famous words of Reddit, remember the human.

Here’s a few pictures taken about 1 year and 10 months ago. It was my first day of chemotherapy as I am one of the hundreds of thousands of people diagnosed with cancer in the US, and many more in the world, each year.

When I received my first Glass unit, a prototype, I was likely to be the first person to go through a serious medical situation with such tech. Why was it different than having a phone, though?

Well aside from the attention, I captured non-framed moments. You’ll see here the nurses are concerned about my condition. You can see their concern from my perspective. Perhaps you can feel instead of see the anxiety I had.

The Glass reception has been lukewarm at best. Even I, beyond the novelty, wondered what purpose it would serve when it first came out. Again, the easy answer is No, but in my fight with cancer I had stumbled upon at least one Why

My uncle is a radiologist in Bombay, I’m still used to saying the city the old way, who specializes in cancer treatment. Being a doctor is truly being a student for your entire life. There are always things to learn, like treatments and surgical methods. And these things are generally directly correlated to more lives saved.

The internet has made great strides in making medical training and data more practicably available, but the community is still heavily reliant upon forums, no different than this one, to share research and new methods.

One of the trends that’s quickly becoming common in the surgery field is taping surgeries. Well, not taping them so much as taping them and immediately putting them online with commentary. The idea is to spread examples to help other newer doctors see firsthand the challenges they face mid-surgery. This means better training and knowledge wealth among specialty surgeons which ideally will lead to higher success rates in their respective surgeries.

Before I was to undergo the complete removal of my abdominal lymph nodes I had a unique opportunity to watch the surgery on YouTube. A doctor had strapped a camera to his forehead and over an 8 hour period showed a complicated surgery that required great diligence. Can you imagine such a thing just 5 years ago?

Again, we often forget what life was like before disruptive tech reveals itself.

Now, our best and most cutting edge surgeons can be equipped with mobile computers that are specifically tailored to record information, give vital information on the patient, and be easily used. The data these devices can be almost instantly uploaded and shared with every surgeon, student, patient, caregiver in the world. And each of them will improve their respective jobs by learning from their observations.

And this idea is extensible to any field that requires your hands to be completely available to you while carrying out complex tasks.

And this phenomenon will and should be happening everywhere. As the price of computers and their forms rapidly reduces, we will no longer be confined to adapting workflows to computers that are available. But, we’ll be able to design even more specific computers that adapt to us and our environment.

Think about the actions or sequences that occur for every person every day. How many billion times we need or do something.

This means we can, and should be designing computers to fit into each scenario. We shouldn’t necessarily wait, though it can be useful to do so, for the next large tech company to invent the the next new computing platform.

Computing as a platform should be introduced.

The Moto 360 is another example of an embeddable, or wearable, computer trying to find new and disruptive ways to help us on the fly. There’s a tremendous amount of work to do yet in this space, but we’re seeing people like Eric and his team at Pebble show us that bringing notifications and short but astute actions, like hailing an Uber cab, can be relevant in the right contexts. And their start came from humble roots, having raised over 10M from the crowd-funding platform KickStarter.

And they, along with other computer designers, have already brought millions upon millions of devices into market in the health, fitness, fashion and communication verticals. The opportunities in developing this ecosystem and later building on top of it will be a major focus point in the next 6–12 months, especially as iOS and Android formally enter the space.

One example I’ve seen is a budding security company called Bannerman. Johnny and his team have been exploring methods of using Pebble watches to help security guards coordinate and manage events in a more discreet manner. The possibilities are large, and the experimentation has really only just begun.

In a macro-context we are seeing increasing experiments happening at a city level. When I was younger I loved going to MapQuest.com, where satellite imagery showed me pixelated photos of our home from above, in the sky.

But cities are much more evolved than what satellite photos alone could capture. The subsystems involved in all things roads, transportations, crime, microclimates, activities, and more represent a trove of information that can be used to create more efficient versions of cities — and better planning as they evolve.

Companies like Urban Engines are really digging into this world, both trying to collect and make sense of the enormous data that cities tend to generate.

In the United States there are plenty of urban areas that will need to be redone. For much of the developing world there is an opportunity to integrate these macro-systems, powered by sets of billions or more devices, at the heart of their infrastructure. Unlike established cities, they will leapfrog major upgrades like copper to fiber cabling. They’ll simply start there.

This means the next London, wherever that may be, will be ten times better than the one before it.

Our job moving forward is to help build the appropriate infrastructure, thought process, and social acceptability for these embeddable computers. If we can effectively do that the opportunities ahead of us are massive.

Though as we create better environments for technology I do want to set the reminder that we are not the means for technology. Technology should be the means for us. The advancement of technology is meant to help us live prosperous, humble and meaningful lives.

And so I hope as you think about your important influence you take into consideration this changing technical landscape and work to set up a place where we can better life for people everyday.

Thank you [Arabic: Shukran jazīlan]