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Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what’s next for the world: the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next ten years, and how we can navigate them.
While Alec Ross was working as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, he traveled to forty-one countries, exploring the latest advances coming out of every continent. From startup hubs in Kenya to R&D labs in South Korea, Ross has seen what the future holds.
In The Industries of the Future, Ross shows us what changes are coming in the next ten years, highlighting the best opportunities for progress and explaining why countries thrive or sputter. He examines the specific fields that will most shape our economic future, including robotics, cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the coming impact of digital technology on money and markets.
In each of these realms, Ross addresses the toughest questions: How will we adapt to the changing nature of work? Is the prospect of cyberwar sparking the next arms race? How can the world’s rising nations hope to match Silicon Valley in creating their own innovation hotspots? And what can today’s parents do to prepare their children for tomorrow?
Ross blends storytelling and economic analysis to give a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live. Incorporating the insights of leaders ranging from tech moguls to defense experts, The Industries of the Future takes the intimidating, complex topics that many of us know to be important and boils them down into clear, plainspoken language. This is an essential book for understanding how the world works—now and tomorrow—and a must-read for businesspeople in every sector, from every country.
- Sales Rank: #4131 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-02
- Released on: 2016-02-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.10" w x 6.00" l, 1.04 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
"In a world growing more chaotic, Alec Ross is one of those very rare people who can see patterns in the chaos and guidance for the road forward. He has an unusual diversity of expertise that allows him to apply multiple lenses to the world's challenges and dream up the kind of innovative solutions that are changing the world."
—Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and author of The New Digital Age
“A fascinating vision of the future of industry. The Industries of the Future reads like a portable TED conference at which you have been seated next to the smartest guy in the room. The book is filled with glimpses of cutting-edge biotech research, statecraft, and entrepreneurship. Ross writes engagingly, and the book should be compelling whether you follow these fields closely or you still think of Honda as a car rather than a robotics company.”
—Forbes
"The next 20 years are going to be even faster-moving and more transformative than the 20 we just lived through. Predicting exactly what is going to happen is impossible. But thinking systematically and strategically, as Alec Ross does here, about robotics, genomics, and the codification of everything is absolutely critical. Anyone who wants to understand the key forces that are shaping our economic, political, and social futures will benefit hugely from Ross's insights."
—Reid Hoffman, Founder & Chairman, LinkedIn
“It will likely be one of 2016’s most talked about releases, and I predict will take its place alongside other classic tech-and-society books, like Tim Wu’s Master Switch and Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet. It’s that good. His writing reveals not just where industries are heading, but where entire societies may end up as a result. This is important reading. Ross takes on an enormous challenge of making sense of how new technology is changing the world, and does so incredibly well, by any standard.”
—Medium
"This book is a must read for the rising generation and their concerned parents and educators. Alec Ross brings a far-reaching perspective to bear in illustrating the opportunities to be seized in our changing world—across sectors and the globe—and the kind of preparation that will be important to make the most of them."
—Wendy Kopp, Founder of Teach For America and CEO of Teach For All
“A riveting and mind-bending book. If you want to know how to survive and thrive in the fast-paced world of today and how to anticipate the opportunities of tomorrow’s information age as well as how to solve big mysteries, this is a good place to start.”
—New York Journal of Books
"A lucid and informed guide, even on the most technical issues."
—Financial Times
"A brilliant, captivating description of the profound changes that will be ushered in by advances in robotics, big data, and genomics – and of the implications of those developments for employment, wealth distribution, and global trade. Alec Ross combines an extraordinary understanding of future trends with an equally extraordinary ability to describe those trends and explain what they mean for the world in the decades ahead."
—General (Ret.) David H. Petraeus, Chairman, KKR Global Institute; former Commander of the Surge in Iraq and Director of the CIA
"The Industries of the Future is an engaging, clear-eyed look at the benefits and challenges of the coming wave of global innovation. Alec Ross, with his years of passionate work in the public and private sectors, is uniquely positioned to understand and explain where we’re coming from and where we’re going."
—Arianna Huffington
“How can we prepare our children—and ourselves—to succeed in a world of robotics, globalization, and digitally driven markets? In this valuable book, Alec Ross analyzes what it will take to survive and even thrive. The future is already hitting us, and Ross shows how it can be exciting rather than frightening.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators
“Well worth reading.... Mr. Ross does a good job of describing the advantages and disadvantages of the third wave, which is just beginning.”
—Washington Times
“Asks big questions to help prepare us for the inevitable, and is an important read for everyone from businesspeople to parents to teachers.”
—TechRepublic
“Ross offers us an articulate, accessible and engaging blueprint for the prosperity of people everywhere.... Whether you are a business executive considering new investments and navigating emerging markets, or an advocate for human rights issues, this book is your guide to the geopolitical, cultural and technological contexts that will impact your work.”
—Global Daily
“A wide-ranging and smoothly written prospectus on the near future of innovation. It’s a whirlwind tour, incisively covering economics, politics, cyberwarfare, genomics, and the complexities of Big Data—among many other things—in language for the layperson interested in what tomorrow could bring.”
—Booklist
“This astute and enlightening book is generous with insight about what the future holds and how best to prepare for it.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Discerning insights on approaching changes to our economic and social landscapes and solid advice on how we should navigate them."
—Kirkus Reviews
“A very readable discussion of what the future might look like.... This book will have a large audience among general readers of business and technology titles and should also appeal to high school and college students, as well as anyone trying to prepare for the economy of the future.”
—Library Journal
“This book is a worthy addition to the near-future canon.... Ross writes well on what he knows and, like an expensive consultant, he knows a lot about a lot.”
—Mob76 Outlook
“Ross expertly weaves stories from his travels into his projections for the future of innovation.... Ross’s book gives a thorough overview of the exciting developments ahead in healthcare, financial services, and technology. For anyone interested in a glimpse of the future, it’s a must-read.”
—Opportunity Lives
“Ross blends storytelling and economic analysis to give a vivid and informed perspective on how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live.... This is an essential book for understanding how the world works—now and tomorrow—and a must-read for businesspeople in every sector, from every country.”
—Stevo's Book Review on the Internet
“Excellent for those who are curious about what may happen in the future based on today’s innovations.”
—Sandbox Advisors
“A rigorous and revealing exploration of the industries that will drive the next 20 years of change to our economies and societies.”
—Blogging on Business
About the Author
Alec Ross is one of America’s leading experts on innovation. He served for four years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and serves as an advisor to investors, corporations, and government leaders. Ross lives in Baltimore with his wife and their three young children. He is the author of The Industries of the Future.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Industries of the Future INTRODUCTION
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.
—H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (1922)
THE WRONG SIDE OF GLOBALIZATION
It’s 3:00 a.m., and I’m mopping up whisky-smelling puke after a country music concert in Charleston, West Virginia.
It’s the summer of 1991, just after my freshman year of college. While most of my friends from Northwestern University are off doing fancy internships at law firms, congressional offices, and investment banks in New York or Washington, I am one of six guys on the after-concert janitorial crew at the Charleston Civic Center, which seats 13,000 people.
Working the midnight shift is worse than jet lag. You have to decide if you want your work to be the beginning of your day or the end of your day. I would wake up at 10:00 p.m., eat “breakfast,” work from midnight to 8:00 a.m., and then go to bed around 3:00 p.m.
The other five guys on the crew were a tough bunch. They were good guys but beaten down. One carried a pint bottle of vodka in his back pocket, which was done by “lunch” at 3:00 a.m. A scraggly redhead from the hollows, the valleys that run between West Virginia’s hills, was sort of near my age. The others were in their 40s and 50s, at what should have been the peak of their wage-earning potential.
The way country music concerts work in West Virginia is people drink way too much. Our job was to clean up the result. The six of us canvassed the arena with enormous jugs of fluorescent-blue chemicals, which, when poured on the concrete floor, would just sizzle.
The last wave of innovation and globalization produced winners and losers. One group of winners were the investors, entrepreneurs, and high-skilled laborers that congregated around fast-growing markets and new inventions. Another class of winners were the more than 1 billion people who moved from poverty into the middle class in developing countries because their relatively low-cost labor was an advantage once their countries opened up and became part of a global economy. The losers were people who lived in high-cost labor markets like the United States and Europe whose skills could not keep up with the pace of technological change and globalizing markets. The guys I mopped with on the midnight shift were the losers in large part because the job they could have gotten in a coal mine years before had been replaced by a machine, and whatever job they could have gotten in a factory from the 1940s to the 1980s had moved to Mexico or India. For these men, being a midnight janitor was just not the summer job it was to me; it was one of the only options left.
Growing up, I thought that life in West Virginia was representative of life everywhere. You were doing your best to manage a slow descent. But the phenomenon I was witnessing in West Virginia really made sense to me only as I traveled the world and saw other regions rising as West Virginia was falling.
Twenty years after pushing a mop on the midnight shift, I’ve now seen the world and been exposed to the highest levels of leadership in the biggest technology companies and governments around the world. I’ve served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior advisor for innovation, a position she created for me just as she became known as Madame Secretary. Before going to work for Clinton, I served as the convener for technology and media policy on the Obama campaign that beat her in the 2008 presidential primary and had spent eight years helping run a successful, technology-based social venture that I cofounded. My job at the State Department was to modernize the practice of diplomacy and bring new tools and approaches to addressing foreign policy challenges. Clinton recruited me to bring a little innovation mojo to the tradition-bound State Department. We had a lot of success, and at the time that she and I left in 2013, we were ranked as having the most innovation-friendly culture of any cabinet-level department in the federal government. We developed successful programs to address nasty challenges in places as varied as the Congo, Haiti, and the cartel-controlled border towns in northern Mexico. In the background of all this was the role I played building a bridge between America’s innovators and America’s diplomatic agenda.
In this time, I spent much of my life on the road. I saw a lot of the world before and after my time in government, but the 1,435 days I spent working for Hillary Clinton gave me a particularly intense, close-up view of the forces shaping the world. I traveled to dozens and dozens of countries, logging more than half a million miles, the equivalent of a round trip to the moon with a side trip to Australia.
I saw next-generation robotics in South Korea, banking tools being developed in parts of Africa where there were no banks, laser technology used to increase agricultural yields in New Zealand, and university students in Ukraine turning sign language into the spoken word.
I have had the chance to see many of the technologies that await us in the coming years, but I still often think back to that stint as a midnight janitor and the men I met there. The time I spent gaining a global perspective on the forces shaping our world helped me understand exactly why life had grown so rough in my home in the hills and why life was getting so much better for most of the rest of the world.
The world in which I grew up, the old industrial economy, was radically transformed by the last wave of innovation. The story is by now well worn: technology, automation, globalization.
While I was in college in the early 1990s, the process of globalization accelerated further, bringing to an end many of the political and economic systems that defined yesterday’s economies. The Soviet Union and its satellite states failed. India began a series of economic reforms to liberalize its economy, eventually bringing more than a billion people onto the global economic playing field. China reversed its economic model, creating a new form of hybrid capitalism and pulling more than half a billion people out of poverty.
The European Union was created. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, integrating the United States, Canada, and Mexico into what is now the world’s largest free trade zone. Apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa.
While I was in college, the world was also newly coming online. The World Wide Web was launched to the public, along with the web browser, the search engine, and e-commerce. Amazon was incorporated while I was driving to a training site for my first job out of college.
At the time, these political and technological shifts did not seem as important to me as they do now, but the changes that took place while I was growing up in West Virginia and that accelerated with the rise of the Internet have made the lives we lived even just 20 years ago seem like distant history.
Those people in my hometown with worse job security than their parents are still living a better life when you measure it up against what their money can buy today that it could not decades ago, including more and better communications and entertainment, healthier food, and safer cars and medical advances that keep them alive longer. Yet they’ve been through a raft of changes, both positive and negative. And all this change will pale in comparison to what is going to come in the next wave of innovation as it hits all 196 countries on the planet.
The coming era of globalization will unleash a wave of technological, economic, and sociological change as consequential as the changes that shook my hometown in the 20th century and the changes brought on by the Internet and digitization as I was leaving college 20 years ago.
In business areas as far afield as life sciences, finance, warfare, and agriculture, if you can imagine an advance, somebody is already working on how to develop and commercialize it.
The places where innovation gets commercialized are expanding too. In the United States, breakthroughs are coming not only from Silicon Valley, from the Route 128 corridor around Boston, or from North Carolina’s research triangle. They are beginning to come out of Utah, Minnesota, and the Washington, D.C., suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. The breakthroughs will not be exclusively American, either.
After years of growth rooted in low-cost labor, there are promising signs of innovation coming from the 3 billion people who live in Indonesia, Brazil, India, and China. Latin American countries with a face to the Pacific, including Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, appear to have figured out how to position themselves in the global economy. The highest-skilled labor markets in Europe are producing start-ups that make Silicon Valley green with envy, and in tiny Estonia, “the little country that could,” the entire economy seems to be an e-economy.
Innovation is likewise transforming Africa, where even in the refugee camps of the Congo, technologies as simple as the cell phone are connecting people to information and each other as never before. Africa’s entrepreneurs are now changing the face of the continent, fueling development and creating a new class of globally competitive businesses.
Everywhere, newly empowered citizens and networks of citizens are challenging the established order in ways never before imaginable—from building new business models to challenging old autocracies.
The near future will see robot suits that allow paraplegics to walk, designer drugs that melt away certain forms of cancer, and computer code being used as both an international currency and a weapon to destroy physical infrastructure halfway around the world.
This book examines these breakthroughs, but it is not simply a hosanna to the benefits of innovation. Advances and wealth creation will not accrue evenly. Many people will gain. Some people will gain hugely. But many will also be displaced. Unlike the previous wave of digital-led globalization and innovation, which drew enormous numbers of people out of poverty in low-cost labor markets, the next wave will challenge middle classes across the globe, threatening to return many to poverty. The previous wave saw entire countries and societies lifted up economically. The next wave will take frontier economies and bring them into the economic mainstream while challenging the middle classes in the most developed economies.
Across large swaths of the globe, people feel newly under siege by rising inequality and unwelcome disruption. A pervasive sense that it is becoming harder to find your place in the world or get ahead is rattling many societies.
Innovation brings both promise and peril. The same forces that are unleashing unparalleled advances in wealth and welfare may also allow a hacker to steal your identity or hack your home. A computer that can speed up analysis of legal documents can also shrink the number of lawyers in the workforce. Social networks can open doors to form new connections or create new forms of social anxiety. The digitization of payments can facilitate commerce or allow for new forms of fraud.
When I was a college student at the dawn of the Internet revolution, I did not have the slightest inkling of the future that lay ahead. I wish I had been able to read a book back then that took a good stab at what was next. Certainly no one is omniscient, but I have been fortunate enough to gain a glimpse of what lies around the next corner.
This book is about the next economy. It is written for everyone who wants to know how the next wave of innovation and globalization will affect our countries, our societies, and ourselves.
GROWING UP IN THE OLD ECONOMY
To understand where globalization is going in the future, you have to understand where it’s coming from. I grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, a city whose history reflects America’s centuries-long rise as an economic powerhouse from the grime-covered mines that helped fuel its growth. West Virginia was built on coal, much the same way that Pittsburgh was built on steel and Detroit was built on cars. Indeed, it was West Virginia’s connections through coal to the industrial North that led it to secede from Virginia and the more agricultural South when the American Civil War broke out.
West Virginia’s position mirrored that of other mining centers connected to the Industrial Revolution’s first manufacturing bases. In the United Kingdom, Midlands cities like Manchester and Leeds became the industrial base. London provided the finance. Coal came from Wales. In Germany, the Ruhr region near the Rhine River valley became a manufacturing center. Coal came from eastern Germany and Poland.
Today coastal China, particularly the areas around Shenzhen and Shanghai, has become the world’s factory. Its coal comes from western China and Australia. Similarly, mining regions in India’s northeastern peninsular belt, Turkey’s Anatolia region, and Brazil’s Santa Catarina region supply the industrial bases of their emerging economies and other economies around the world. In each region, mining offers a stepping-stone toward greater economic ties and opportunities—at least for a time.
Building on its coal boom, West Virginia developed complementary industries that cemented its position as an industrial supply center and eventually presaged its decline. In the early 20th century, Charleston underwent its second boom: chemicals. The Union Carbide Corporation established the world’s first petrochemical plant in West Virginia in 1920.
With America’s entry into World War II, massive amounts of synthetic rubber were needed to meet wartime demands. Union Carbide, which became the largest employer in West Virginia and one of the top ten chemical companies in the world, launched a period of growth that continued well after the war. Between 1946 and 1982, its revenues increased from about $415 million to more than $10 billion. During that time, it employed as many as 80,000 people globally, roughly 12,000 of them in West Virginia. And as the company continued to grow, so did Charleston. By 1960, its population had grown to 86,000 from 68,000 before the war.
When I was in school, a big percentage of my classmates were children of chemical company engineers. Their families were often the most worldly, arriving from top universities around the country and the globe. And for over a century, the old-economy industrial fields of West Virginia—coal, chemicals, and plastics—were stable, reliable career choices.
My family came to West Virginia when my grandfather, Ray DePaulo, moved from the coal camps of Colorado during the Great Depression. His high school had closed down due to lack of funds, so they just handed out diplomas to everyone, including my then 13-year-old grandfather. Luckily for him, that was still a time when you could make a living with just a high school diploma.
Once in West Virginia, my grandfather became what we’d now glowingly call an entrepreneur. He went door-to-door selling telephones at a time when people were getting phones in their homes for the first time. He ran a garage, a golf course, a restaurant, a bakery, a parking lot, and a house-cleaning business, much of it out of a stall used by car salesmen.
My grandfather understood one of the curious conundrums of globalization: exposure creates not only opportunity but competition, and it can make us question and eventually lose our standing in the world. West Virginia, like so many other industrial centers in America, was just realizing its high point during my grandfather’s lifetime. But its shortcomings were about to be exposed by new competition from new markets and new machines.
I remember, as a kid, about halfway into the drive between Charleston and my father’s law office was a town named Nitro. As soon as we passed Nitro, my brother, sister, and I would all start squirming and squealing in our seats, repulsed by the stench from the chemical factories that surrounded us.
My mother, in the driver’s seat, would just breathe it in and matter-of-factly say, “That’s the smell of money.” She identified this horrid smell with jobs—and potential clients for my dad.
In the old economy, this was the smell of money not just in Nitro but in places like Gary, Indiana; Newark, New Jersey; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Today that same smell now shrouds industrial sites in China, India, and Mexico even as it still lingers in some of the old industrial centers of America.
The Kanawha River Valley, which runs through Charleston, was known as “Chemical Valley.” For almost a century, Chemical Valley hosted the highest concentration of chemical manufacturers in the United States: Union Carbide, DuPont, Monsanto, the Food and Machinery Corporation (FMC), and many, many others.
At night, the valley looked from above like something out of a futuristic film with its towering steel structures of the chemical plants lit up with little lights. The smoke released into the night sky added an orange glow, the whole scene eerily reflected by the river—a river that seemed not to have a single fish or other living animal in it. I never questioned why as I was growing up.
The town of Nitro, 14 miles downriver from Charleston, is named for nitrocellulose, or gunpowder, bringing a literal meaning to the term boom town. Nitro was built up during America’s mobilization for World War I, when the United States faced a critical shortage in gunpowder production. The US government poured more than $70 million into building the plant, known as Explosive Plant C, as well as the public structures for the surrounding town. The war ended in November 1918, just after the first shipment of explosives went out.
That was not the last time Nitro participated in a war mobilization. In the 1960s, the former Monsanto chemical plant in Nitro manufactured the herbicide Agent Orange, used by the US military to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War. Dropping this chemical in the Vietnamese jungle harmed the health of more than 1 million Vietnamese and 100,000 American combat veterans, and it produced birth defects in more than 100,000 children.
It was an ugly trade, but for a while, for the local region, my mother was right: the smell of Nitro meant money. The money did not keep coming, however. Ultimately the very industries that built Charleston and West Virginia also led to their decline.
In the case of the mining industry, mechanization wiped out the need for coal mining by hand. To be a coal miner went from carrying a pick and shovel to operating a machine that could do the job of hundreds of humans. For the chemical industry, globalization meant that businesses could locate their plants in places with fewer environmental regulations and less expensive labor. The chemical companies moved their operations to India and Mexico.
Leaving home became the practical option for many Charlestonians. From 1960 to 1990, Charleston lost 40 percent of its population. By 1988, West Virginia’s unemployment rate was close to double the national average. There were fewer children of engineers in my classes as their parents were transferred out of the state or out of the country.
Charleston and West Virginia were representative of cities and states all over the world grappling with postindustrial decline and globalization. Handcuffed to their existing resources and manufacturing industries, these areas flourished through years of stable economic growth. But once the boom ended, they were hit hard with rapid capital and population flight. Their manufacturing facilities, once drivers of wealth, today are dormant steel structures on the city skyline. The steel mills of Pittsburgh shuttered. Detroit’s population declined from 1.8 million to 700,000 as its car industry faced new competition from Tokyo and Seoul.
American cities were not the only ones to suffer. Manchester, the world’s first industrialized city, lost 50,000 jobs in the 1970s. The coalfields in southern Wales went under, with the last one closing in 2008. The port of Marseilles was ravaged by new competition and saw its population decrease by 150,000 people.
By the time I was in college, the only chemicals that provided secure jobs in West Virginia were the ones that sizzled as they hit the floor of the Charleston Civic Center.
THE RIGHT SIDE OF GLOBALIZATION
As West Virginia faced a decades-long economic descent, those same forces of globalization and labor migration were having positive impacts elsewhere. In India and China, together 40 percent of the world’s population, the changes have been eye-popping.
In the 30 years from 1982 to 2012, India’s poverty rate dropped from 60 percent of the population to 22 percent. Life expectancy surged from 49 years to 66. When I was growing up, India was the country of Mother Teresa and famine. Today it is a country increasingly defined by technology, global services, and a fast-growing middle class.
The changes in China have been even more dramatic, with its poverty rate plummeting over that same period from 84 percent to 13 percent, pulling roughly 600 million Chinese out of poverty. With an economy 25 times larger than it was 30 years ago, China has become the second largest economy in the world after the United States.
What was bad for industrial America and Europe was very good for India, China, and much of the rest of the world. As globalization and innovation challenged the lifestyles of many of those living in industrial cities and states in the West, it bolstered the economic growth of up-and-coming nations. Beyond developing nations, individuals and states all over the world that took advantage of the wave of technological innovation flourished. Our most valued commodities have gone from salt and sugar to chemicals and fuels to data and services. The regions that provide those now lead the global knowledge economy. Twenty-five hundred miles from Charleston, West Virginia, several trillion dollars of wealth was generated in Silicon Valley in addition to products that fundamentally changed the way everyone reading this book lives.
THE INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE
The book I know my parents or grandparents wish they had read in the 1960s would have described what globalization was going to do to the world. The book I wish I had read as I left college more than 20 years ago would have told me what the Internet and digitization were going to do to the world. This book explores the industries that will drive the next 20 years of change to our economies and societies. Its chapters are built around key industries of the future—robotics, advanced life sciences, the code-ification of money, cybersecurity, and big data—as well as the geopolitical, cultural, and generational contexts out of which they are emerging. I chose these industries not only because they are important in their own right but because they are also symbolic of larger global trends and symbiotic among each other.
“Here Come the Robots” and the “The Future of the Human Machine,” chapters 1 and 2, explore how cutting-edge advances in robotics and the life sciences will change the way we work and live—with enormous, but unequal, impact on our livelihoods and our lives. As robots increasingly occupy the world alongside us, the global economy will undergo a revolution spurred by artificial intelligence and machine learning that could be as consequential for labor forces as the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions that preceded it. At the same time, dramatic advances in life sciences will allow people to live longer and healthier lives than ever before—at least those who can afford it. The economic returns in robotics and life sciences will likewise be unevenly distributed between those who are well positioned to create or adopt these new breakthroughs and those who may be left even further behind. In response, societies will need to find new ways to adapt.
“The Code-ification of Money, Markets, and Trust” and “The Weaponization of Code” (chapters 3 and 4) examine how the increasing application of computer code to new areas of the economy—in the virtual and physical worlds—will transform two spheres that are traditionally state monopolies: money and force. Rapid progress often comes with greater instability. The application of code to commerce will provide new opportunities for the proverbial little guy in any part of the world to receive, hold, spend, or transfer money. At the same time, from the vantage point I had in Secretary Clinton’s office and the White House Situation Room, I saw the future of an industry that has gone from being a small back-office IT function to one of the fastest-growing and most disruptive industries in the world: the weaponization of code. Together these developments may bring new opportunities, but they will also increase the ability of bad actors to cause systemic damage to the international economy.
“Data: The Raw Material of the Information Age” and “The Geography of Future Markets” (chapters 5 and 6) examine both the expansiveness that big data will allow and the constraints that geopolitics will place on the global marketplace. Whereas land was the raw material of the agricultural age and iron was the raw material of the industrial age, data is the raw material of the information age. The Internet has become an ocean of jumbled, chaotic information, but now there is a way to connect this information and draw actionable business intelligence from it. Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems.
At the same time, the industries of the future will both be created within the current geopolitical structure and transform it. In the 20th century, the dominant divide between political systems and markets was along the axis of left versus right. In the 21st century, the dominant divide is between those that have open political and economic models and those that are closed. New competition and political necessity have created a series of hybrid models around the world, and these final two chapters explore what markets will be future sources of sustainable growth and innovation and how business leaders can make informed choices about where to invest their time and resources.
Throughout the book, we explore competitiveness—what it takes for societies, families, and individuals to thrive. Among the world’s most innovative countries and businesses there is an emerging cultural consensus on how best to strengthen their most critical resource: their people. And there is no greater indicator of an innovative culture than the empowerment of women. Fully integrating and empowering women economically and politically is the most important step that a country or company can take to strengthen its competitiveness. Societies that do not overcome their negative cultural legacies regarding the treatment of women will founder in the next wave of innovation. The world’s most restrictive countries have been absent from the most recent wave of innovation, and they will not be home to industries and businesses of the future without making real changes. Innovation doesn’t happen in closed environments, and innovative companies will continue to steer clear of countries with regressive policies on gender.
Last, the book looks forward to explore what interventions we can make in our children’s lives to best prepare them for success in a world of increasing change and competition. Parenting is the most important job that a person can have, and our children will grow up to inherit a world that looks much different from our own. We can draw from the wisdom of the innovators profiled in these pages to prepare both ourselves and our children for what’s coming in the next economy—for the economy that begins now.
Most helpful customer reviews
37 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Informative and Accessible
By Book Shark
The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
“The Industries of the Future” is an informative and accessible book about the next economy and how this next wave of innovation will affect our societies. Leading expert on innovation and former Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Alec Ross, explores the industries that will drive the next 20 years of change. This 320-page insightful book includes the following six chapters: 1. Here Come the Robots, 2. The Future of the Human Machine, 3. The Code-ification of Money, Markets, and Trust, 4. The Weaponization of Code, 5. Data: The Raw Material of the Information Age, and 6. The Geography of Future Markets.
Positives:
1. A well-researched, well-written book.
2. An interesting topic in the hands of a gifted author: the industries of the future that will transform our societies in the next 20 years.
3. A good format. The book includes six chapters each covering topics of interest such as: robotics, advanced life sciences, the code-ification of money, cybersecurity, and big data.
4. Factoids abound throughout this book. “About 70 percent of total robot sales take place in Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany—known as the “big five” in robotics.” “With 78 organs, 206 bones, and 640 muscles, not to mention up to 25,000 genes, our bodies are complicated machines.”
5. A fascinating look at robots and where there are more likely to emerge.
6. Concepts worth discussing, singularity. “Within the robotics community, the future of technology is wrapped up in the concept of singularity, the theoretical point in time when artificial intelligence will match or surpass human intelligence.”
7. Cool technology for the near future. “There is ample reason to think that robodrivers will be safer than we are now. Accidents are caused by the four Ds: distraction, drowsiness, drunkenness, and driver error.”
8. The future of genomics. “Genomics is going to have a bigger impact on our health than any single innovation…”
9. The dark side of genomics, designer babies.
10. Insightful information on coded money. “He views Square as a product that can help these struggling areas incubate new businesses. “The part I think Square plays is making commerce easy,” Jack says. “Not payments but commerce, so that anyone can make a start and then easily run and then easily grow.” It’s a commerce company for the little guy.”
11. The impact of mobile phones. “In 2002, only 3 percent of Africans used mobile phones. Today that number is over 80 percent and growing at a faster rate than any other region of the world.”
12. Cyberattacks, the Wild West. “There are three main types of cyberattacks today: attacks on a network’s confidentiality, availability, and integrity.” “
13. The impact of digitization. “The digitization of nearly everything is poised to be one of the most consequential economic developments of the next ten years.” “Gosler’s is not a lone voice. James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, warned Congress in February 2015 that cyberattacks pose a greater long-term threat to national security than terrorism.”
14. The future careers with the most demand, cybersecurity. Find out why.
15. The role of big data for the future. “Even more impressive, though, is the role that big data might be able to serve in significantly reducing hunger, probably the longest-running challenge for humanity.” “Precision agriculture also offers the promise of a major reduction in pollution.”
16. In the final chapter, Ross talks about what it will take to compete and succeed in the industries of the future.
17. Cities as innovation hubs. “An important aspect of what makes major cities thrive is infrastructure, along with the analytics programs that allow people to use that infrastructure more efficiently.”
18. The clash between open and closed societies. “The principal political binary of the last half of the 20th century was communism versus capitalism. In the 21st century, it is open versus closed.”
19. The empowerment of women. “In 2013, China led the world in the percentage of women in senior management positions—51 percent. Half of the world’s wealthiest female billionaires live in China.” “It turns out that Rwanda is the only country in the world with a democratically elected parliamentary body that is majority female.”
20. A solid conclusion section that brings it all together.
Negatives:
1. Notes not linked or referenced.
2. No formal bibliography.
3. A minor technical error, genomics will have the biggest impact in the 21st century not the 20th.
4. Lack of charts and diagrams to complement the solid narrative.
5. There is nothing really new or earthshattering in this book.
6. It’s intended for the masses so it will come at the price of technical depth.
In summary, it’s always fun to take a peek into the future. Ross does a good job of covering the most noteworthy technologies of the future and explaining the implications to our society. The book would have been better served by complementing the narrative with diagrams and charts. Lacks technical depth but for the layperson this is a worthwhile book to read, I recommend it.
Further recommendations: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” by Klaus Schwab, “The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “Race Against the Machine” by the same authors, “Rise of the Robots” by Martin Ford, “Our Final Invention” by James Barrat, “Tomorrowland” by Steven Kotler, “Singularity Is Near” by Ray Kurzwell, “The Price of Inequality” by Joseph Stiglitz, “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoglu, and “Saving Capitalism” by Robert B. Reich.
148 of 171 people found the following review helpful.
It's fine
By Rachel Braddock Bayles
First, the good. These are interesting topics. It's good to be reminded of how much has changed in the last couple of decades. This is a fun read with some interesting stories. If you read the newspaper, you will find nothing new here. But getting a 10,000 foot view of the world can be a useful way to orient yourself.
He also points out the troubling aspects of what he's highlighting, and at no point in the book does he come across as being way off base. His ideas about the future are probably as valid as any popular writers.
Next, the "needs improvement." The book is peppered with cringe-worthy throwaways about who the author has hobnobbed with. It's fine that he starts off in the introduction elaborating on all he's seen and done. But then he reminds us again and again that he knows important people. When I first started reading the book, I thought the author must be in his late 20's, and that might account for him coming across as insecure. But then I read his bio and saw that he is in his 40's. I'm not saying we don't all have moments of insecurity, but for a writer to wear his on his sleeve like this is terribly offputting. Who was the editor that let him embarrass himself like this?
If you are buying this book to answer the "how do we prepare our children for the future" question, don't bother. It's the same answers you've heard before. Raise them to be technologically literate and comfortable in a multicultural world.
In reading his biography, it's clear he's done a lot of good things and his heart is most likely in the right place. Not a lot of schmucks volunteer for Teach for America or try to help the disadvantaged. But his record speaks for itself, so why the self-aggrandizement?
97 of 116 people found the following review helpful.
There's Better Books on the Future. Nothing New Here
By L
Well intentioned: author is perfectly qualified to talk about the subject, however there's not a lot of new information here. Grabbed a few things out of here, but mainly a bunch of examples already cited elsewhere. I was hoping for some possible solutions or speaking in definite terms. If you're already an avid and frequent reader on future tech (I.e. Robots, cybersecruity growth, etc) than there's not a lot new. I'd recommend checking out something like Bold or Raw Deal instead.
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