The Entrepreneurs We Can’t Afford to Lose
Date: July 11, 2012
Washington Post
July 11, 2012
Immigrant entrepreneurs have not only helped build the U.S. economy and, by extension, the country, they hold the key to our future success.
We already know from the pioneering research of Singularity University vice president and Washington Post columnist Vivek Wadhwa and Berkeley’s School of Information Sciences dean Annalee Saxenian how important immigrants have been to the high-tech community.
Echoing a theme developed in an Oct. 2011 e-book by MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee titled Race Against the Machine , Wadhwa has also argued that this century promises even more rapid technological innovation than the last one. Across multiple fields — genomics and medicine more broadly, artificial intelligence, and robotics — the exponential power of computing promises innovations we cannot yet conceive of but seem very much within reach based on past trends.