"You don't have to be able to build a car to drive a car, but you do need to understand their capabilities. Exponential technologies are the same: they don't need to be intimidating."
Kathryn Myronuk is an expert on accelerating technologies and how they empower world-changing teams. She connects people from diverse STEM and impact fields with new tech-enabled capabilities, helping people cross-pollinate toolkits and mindsets to work at scale on SDGs. She mentors startups and entrepreneurs, sits on advisory boards including several startups and the tech-policy non-profit ADA-AI, and volunteers on climate projects and science education (STEM on Stage with Humanity Needs Dreamers).
A founding team member, staff, and faculty at Singularity University, she helped build their innovative programs and curriculum. As staff, she participated in the early formation of SU’s groundbreaking approach to experiential learning: designing and co-creating curriculum, classes, and workshops for SU’s flagship 10-week Global Solutions Program and SU’s many shorter programs, working with track chairs, speakers, teaching fellows and participants to test and track results. She managed SU's curriculum guidebooks, curating and maintaining examples--fundamental research through commercial applications, startups through large companies-- to help diverse participants understand the exponential, interdisciplinary and international components of their own experiences and goals. As faculty, she was the inaugural track chair for Synthesis & Convergence, and also chaired the Finance & Economics track. She was on the core team that launched SU's Science Fiction Design practice. Her research featured in Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (2005) and Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler's Abundance (2012).
She's given keynote talks on six continents covering synthesis & foresight, the power of the beginner and effective interdisciplinary teams (understanding the failure modes of experts), and the complex factors affecting the future of jobs (economic climate change). She designs and facilitates workshops and conversations on tools to promote effective permanent cross-pollination and prevent silos in companies and organizations, using tools such as Science Fiction Design / Futurecasting. She has a BS in Zoology and MS in Agricultural Economics, both from UCDavis.
"AI, Computing, Robotics, Biotechnology, Medicine, Manufacturing have been set on an exponential course. Individually and together, these technologies are already creating change at a scale the world has never seen. With a cross-disciplinary approach, this talk will examine exponential economic impact. What are new responses to change made possible by the causes of change?
"New technologies will bring unemployment" is a claim that's been made for decades: why are technologists and economists saying that this decade is different? What new technologies are behind the estimate of a billion jobs lost in the next 10-20 years? With a cross-disciplinary approach, this talk covers what we know and what we don't know -- and should know-- about exponential disruption of jobs. Can we use these same technologies to prepare for disruption? Why might we want to speed up the transition?"