Thoughts from our recent conversation with Alec Ross on his new book, Industries of the Future, which can be listened to on the Newshour podcast page here or on iTunes here.
We frequently hear about automation and artificial intelligence encroaching on paid labor, and many of us want to know about the future of work. Recently, Alec Ross joined Financial Sense to discuss his new book, The Industries of the Future, a number one best-seller on Amazon.
Ross’ book deals with coming changes to industry and labor that will likely impact everyone in the near future. He wrote the book as an educational exercise, he said, with the goal of offering people today a guide that his parents and grandparents wish they had in the 1960s, or he himself desired in 1980s and '90s to understand how society would be impacted by the internet, for example.
“I was an inner-city schoolteacher in the 1990s, when, like everybody, I witnessing this technology-led transformation of the economy, and the way that people transacted business,” he said. “I was also watching the loss of America’s industrial and manufacturing base.”
Informed by this experience, Ross started a business with three friends to help people become more competitive in the emerging digital environment. Afterward, he did a four-year stint as the Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, followed by his current job as a distinguished visiting fellow at John Hopkins’s University.
In his work, Ross has been constantly forced to ask what comes next. He believes the last 20 years have been dominated by digitization and the rise of the internet, but now another cycle may be starting. His book focuses on the future of the life sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data and cyber security, and, lastly, on what he refers to as the codification of money, markets, and trust.
“There are many industries, like advertising for example, or publishing, that have really been significantly impacted by digitization,” Ross said. “There are many more (industries) that haven’t been transformed, like the legal profession. I look at a number of industries that I think are the next wave of internet-based disruption.”
Ross sees a large commercial role for robotization in the very near future, as soon as 2020. As revealed in a new video, Google's Boston Dynamics has successfully developed humanoid robots capable of walking, maintaining balance, handling objects, and other tasks useful for a wide range of applications.
This is only the beginning, he noted, as cloud-based robotics will allow complex processes to be carried out away from the physical machinery allowing for increasingly cheaper, faster, more efficient robots.
“(A robot) can be a lightweight device, and what that means is that it can be inexpensive...and more affordable...than to hire a human,” he said. “Human and robots have diametrically opposing cost structures. Robots are all CAPEX (capital expense) and no OPEX (operating expense), and humans are little CAPEX, but lots of OPEX.”
This is all occurring against the backdrop of a shift in what’s driving economic progress forward. While physical resources and labor dominated past ages, the current and coming age requires a new way of thinking.
“Land was the raw material of the agricultural age, iron was the raw material of the industrial age, and data is the raw material of the information age,” Ross said.
What Ross finds interesting is that 90 percent of the world’s data has been produced in the last two years. As we are generating oceans’ worth of data, the next opportunity is to be able to use that to have a positive effect in business settings, he added.
Nearly all areas of human labor will be affected, and he expects even farming to be completely transformed in the coming paradigm shift.
“I think that farming is going to go from a caricature of people in overalls to an industry of people looking at screens and reading software,” he said. “The field of agriculture is able to grow much more sophisticated by virtue of analytics programs being brought to it.”
There may be pushback from labor movements, he noted, and he thinks that people often tend to see the future in either a utopian or dystopian light. This isn’t how the world works, he said.
His book is mostly optimistic about the future, but it doesn’t shy away from the thorny issues and setbacks on large swathes of society. Regions where automation is causing the greatest displacement of human labor may, once again, see human protests and outrage similar to the Luddites of the 19th Century.
That being said, many of the revolutionary advances in genomics and biotechnology Ross outlines paint a much more optimistic view of the future in terms of health and the early diagnosis of illness. As he writes, "the last trillion-dollar industry was built on a code of 1s and 0s. The next will be built on our own genetic code."
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