This guest post is written by Vivek Wadhwa, VP of innovation and research at Singularity University.

You often hear Silicon Valley moguls say, “We wanted flying cars; instead, we got 140 characters.” They believe we’ve run out of ideas and that innovation is dead; that mobile and social-media technologies are our last hurrah. Not surprisingly, those are the kinds of startups they mostly fund.

It’s an open secret in Silicon Valley that venture capitalists make investment decisions based on their gut feelings and instincts — what they call “pattern matching.” And who matches the pattern of a successful social-media CEO? Mark Zuckerberg, of course — the young, male college dropout. That’s great for the boys wanting to cut school, but it means other groups are left out — in particular women, Hispanics, and blacks. Attend any major tech event in the Valley, and you’ll notice their dearth.

I have been working with Singularity University as its VP of innovation and research, to encourage women to think big and help change the world. We want to do what we can to level the playing field and so are holding the door open for women applicants to our forthcoming graduate studies program, which teaches exponential technologies.

I have written extensively about the challenges that women in tech face: how they are commonly discouraged during childhood from becoming engineers and scientists; the struggles they face in male-dominated tech companies; and the way they are stereotyped and mistreated by some investors when they look for startup funding. This is despite the fact that male and female entrepreneurs show virtually no difference in motivation, education, and capability. Indeed, Kauffman Foundation’s analysis showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men, and Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men.

But here is the good news. The pessimists who claim innovation is dead and mankind is doomed are dead wrong (pun intended). And the bursting of the social-media bubble has shown they are making the wrong investment decisions. As I explained in a previous post, this is the most innovative decade in human history. The future is not going to be one of dire shortages and stagnation; it is more likely to be one in which we debate how we can distribute the abundance and prosperity we’ve created.

Several technologies are advancing at exponential rates and converging, in fields such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials. These advances are making it possible for small startups to solve humanity’s grand challengesn— including energy, education, water, food, and health.

I discussed some of these advances in my recent TEDx Bay Area Ignite talk.

In these rapidly evolving fields, the young male college dropouts who excel at social-media app-building have no advantage. Those with experience and education — particularly in fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — have the edge because they can work across disciplines and see the big picture.

Women are primed to lead in this new era. Girls now match boys in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men. Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women’s participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women has grown almost tenfold.

It is not just the women who can lead; it is also entrepreneurs all over the world. There are few experts in these emerging fields, and the cost of developing technologies and starting companies has dropped dramatically over the past few years. Anyone, anywhere, can build the billion-dollar businesses in the new trillion-dollar industries that will emerge.

At the upcoming Women 2.0 “the next billion” conference, I will be presenting the results of our new research on women in tech. My team at Stanford and Lesa Mitchell of Kauffman Foundation surveyed 500 women entrepreneurs to learn what motivates them and why they took the leap into entrepreneurship. This will also provide insights into a book I am writing on how to encourage more women to become entrepreneurs, to think big, and to help solve humanity’s grand challenges. It is they who are going to save the world, after all.

[Photo credit: Semisatch/Shutterstock]

Sadly, the President is repeating the mistake he made with Obamacare — going for all or nothing. As a result, if we get any immigration reform at all, it will be unpalatable to both sides. It will take months or years to negotiate and will be messy. And while the political battles rage, tens of thousands engineers, scientists, and researchers will return home and Silicon Valley will suffer.

On Nov 30, the house voted to pass a bill called the STEM Jobs Act, that will make it easier for foreign students graduating with advanced science and math degrees to gain permanent resident visas. The bill, which was introduced by  House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, sweetened the deal for Democrats by adding a provision that provides for the reunification of families of foreign workers who are in the U.S. legally. But the Republicans demanded a price: the elimination of another visa category which is commonly called the “diversity lottery.” This provides 55,000 visas every year to randomly selected applicants largely from Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and parts of Eastern Europe.

The White House statement said that the administration “is deeply committed to building a 21st-century immigration system that meets the Nation’s economic and security needs through common-sense, comprehensive immigration reform.” However, it was opposed to the Republican legislation because it does not “meet the President’s long-term objectives with respect to comprehensive immigration reform.”

I agree that we need comprehensive immigration reform and that diversity is important. I don’t like the idea of sacrificing the diversity visa. But the lack of diversity isn’t a critical problem for the U.S. today. It may have been, when the diversity lottery was first enacted twenty years ago. Right now, a bigger problem that the country faces is that its economy is the doldrums and unemployment is high; the most innovative and dynamic sector of its economy is facing talent shortages; foreign students and skilled workers that it is educating are being forced to leave the country because they can’t get visas; and we won’t let foreign entrepreneurs start companies that employ Americans.

A better strategy for the President and the Democratic Party is to take the low-hanging fruit — to pass legislation that the Republicans agree with. They can surely negotiate improvements to the STEM Act that makes it more acceptable to them. And then they can negotiate on a Dream Act, a temporary farm-worker bill, and a Startup Visa — all which urgently needed. The diversity visa can always be reinstated as part of comprehensive immigration reform — whenever the President is able to negotiate this.

After the thrashing the Republicans received from Hispanics and Asians in the elections, the party is clearly on the defensive about immigration. It needs to show that it has “evolved” in the same way that Fox commentator Sean Hannity says he has.  So it is taking incremental steps. The STEM Act is probably the best legislation that the Republicans can come to consensus on right now. The party has only started “evolving,” after all, and winning over the hard-liners will take time. In an email to me, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va, wrote that the Republican Party is “serious about immigration reform, that’s why as part of the STEM Act, they included a provision that helps reunite families of permanent residents who have applied for their own green cards but are currently caught up in a bureaucratic backlog.” To me, this seems like a very reasonable first step.

I hope that the President doesn’t sacrifice another crop of science, technology, and engineering graduates in the hope that he can get the perfect immigration bill. The limited public support that Obamacare received shows that in the current political climate, there can be no such thing.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations. You can also follow him on Twitter — @wadhwa.

[Top image credit: jongjet303/Shutterstock]

I told them to not to waste resources on catching up, but to instead leapfrog India. Indian industry is a victim of its own success and is trying to defend a sinking turf. That is one of the reasons I canceled my trip to India this month — the Indian industry confederation NASSCOM was unable to focus on the future.

I say this because the I.T. departments that India’s outsourcing companies sell to are losing their power. With users having home access to iPads, social media, and downloadable apps—all of which are more sophisticated than what I.T. departments usually offer — user departments don’t need I.T. as much as they used to. They are themselves choosing solutions from companies such as Salesforce.com, Google, and Microsoft — which use cloud computing to provide the infrastructure. As a result, the hundred-million-dollar outsourcing deals are fewer and further between. And the trend toward user control is accelerating.

My advice was that Mexico target another emerging market, one that is likely to be bigger than I.T. services and that it is in the catbird seat to own. It can leapfrog Indian I.T., which is busy defending its outsourcing turf and has become complacent because of its size.

The opportunity is to help America re-automate its manufacturing industry. I have written previously about Chinese manufacturing’s having peaked and about why it is nearly certain that manufacturing will come back to the U.S. Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing are going to savage China’s labor-cost advantage.

Take the Baxter robot (pictured above), which Rethink Robotics announced recently. It has two arms, a face that displays simulated emotion, and cameras and sensors that detect the motion of human beings that work next to it. It can perform assembly and move boxes — just as humans do. It will work 24 hours a day and not complain. It costs only $22,000. It’s just one of many advances to come.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri, and computer systems that can make human-like decisions. A.I. technologies are also finding their way into manufacturing and are powering robots such as Baxter.

A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products. 3D printers can create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1,000. Soon we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. In the next decade we may be 3D-printing buildings and electronics.

These technologies are becoming available and cheap, but America’s manufacturing plants aren’t geared up to take advantage of them. This is what opens the opportunity for Mexico. It can set up automated factories across the border that manufacture at costs comparable to China. Mexican services firms can master the new technologies and help American firms design new factory floors and program and install robots. This is a higher-margin business than the old I.T. services.

Rather than focusing on yesterday’s markets and technologies, Mexico’s firms could be focusing on tomorrow’s advances and become America’s automaton workshop. With Mexico’s growing skilled workforce and its proximity to the U.S., this could be a big win for Mexico and for the U.S.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations. You can also follow him on Twitter — @wadhwa.

Linda Glenn, the veteran’s attorney, says that after extensive effort, she was able to convince the insurance adjuster that the device was an extension of his body that functioned as his lower limb and lower-torso muscle. She and her co-counsel Mark Senter argued that modern-day prosthetics, which include implants, transplants, embedded devices like pacemakers, and wearable devices, are not inanimate, separate objects like wheelchairs.

So, the airline offered a better settlement, which the veteran accepted. Glenn documented this test case in the Annals of Health Law. The names of the parties involved were changed to protect the veteran’s privacy.

Advances in technology are changing who we are and what we are. Today’s bio-engineered devices and exoskeletons are just a start. Over time, they will become larger components of our bodies, playing more critical roles. As the Glenn case on human-machine mergers shows, modern-day business practices lack an understanding of changes in technology.

But this is the tip of the iceberg. Preeta Bansal says that law and ethics, too, lag behind advances in technology. Bansal is former White House general counsel and senior policy advisor and prior to that served as Solicitor General of the state of New York. She asks how existing rules of liability will be applied when a self-driving car, such as the autonomous vehicle Google is designing, hits a pedestrian (that’s blind driver Steve Mahan test-driving Google’s car above)? Will robotic devices with attributes of human sentience be subject to criminal laws – either as victims or perpetrators? To what extent will individuals have the right to control the collection, maintenance, dissemination, and accessibility of private information?

Bansal says that with the rise of exponential technologies – such as those in computing, medicine, and synthetic biology – we are facing the threat of exponentially increasing gaps in our legal, governance, and ethical frameworks. Profound legal and ethical issues are emerging around not only the definition of life, but also dignity, including the nature of personal privacy, the value of human labor and work in a world of artificial intelligence and robotic devices, and issues of equity and access to rapid technological change.

The widening gap between the time a problem appears and the moment a legal and ethical solution can be reached creates opportunities for exploitation. Bansal notes three specific sets of questions that we must confront before this gap can be filled.

First, who should fill the governance gap — individuals, governments, or other institutions? Individuals are innovating today at a level and rate at which only governments and corporations could before. Should they also self-regulate concomitantly in light of the gap? Just as innovation is becoming increasingly do-it-yourself, is there a need for greater do-it-yourself regulation to ensure the development and responsible deployment of exponential technologies? How do we develop and accelerate the mechanisms for achieving social consensus around legal and ethical norms?

Second, what is the correct unit of governance? In the Internet era, will there be pressure for some decline in the nation-state as the relevant governing unit in some areas, and is that appropriate? Will other certain transnational institutions or identities (e.g., religious or ethnic) start to govern how we define the legal and ethical challenges presented by advancing technologies? In prior eras, technological changes hastened profound changes in governance – such as the printing press hastening the decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of the nation-state.

Third, what are the correct institutions of governance? Courts or legislatures? Bansal notes that common-law courts historically have played an important role in times of rapid technological advance, because they can fashion rules based on actual individual circumstances and allow the law to develop on a case-by-case basis – rather than trying to anticipate all scenarios, as is often required when trying to enact prospective legislation.

Whatever the answer to these questions, it is clear that accelerating technological change must bring about accelerating adaptation or change of legal, ethical, and regulatory norms. The invention of the printing press, the steam engine, and the railroads led to explosions in developments to the world’s governance and legal and frameworks. We are on the cusp of a similar era of change.

This story originally appeared on WashingtonPost.com. 

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations.