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Forecasting the next decade of global opportunities and challenges in emerging technology

Alec Ross is a technology policy expert, former Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and author of the New York Times bestselling book The Industries of the Future. Drawing on its author’s years working in both the private and public sectors on issues involving innovation, public policy, international relations, and communications, The Industries of the Future maps out the sweeping global changes we can expect to see over the next ten years, addressing opportunities, challenges, and difficult questions along the way. Now in its sixth printing, the book covers emerging technologies in fields such as robotics, cybersecurity, genetics, banking, and defense. The New York Journal of Books lauded it as “a riveting and mind-bending book,” and Google CEO Eric Schmidt called Alec “one of those very rare people who can see patterns in the chaos and guidance for the road forward.” Alec is also currently distinguished visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Alec Ross spoke with citybizlist publisher Edwin Warfield for this interview.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Let’s dig in deeper to some of the topics you cover in your book. Tell us about the next ten years of robotics.

ALEC ROSS: One of the most striking things that I saw in my 25 circumferences of the globe researching this book was the rise of robots in Japan. In the United States, and in western societies, we have this deep-seated fear of robots and of bringing to life that which we ought not—from Icarus’s waxed wings to Frankenstein[’s monster]. We have a cultural predisposition against bringing things to life or making things more human. The Japanese don’t have that, and that’s part of why they’re creating so many of the world’s most futuristic robots.

Two that most struck me were Robina and her brother Humanoid, which were robots created by Toyota—yes, the car company—basically to solve the problem of elder care in Japan. Japan has the world’s longest living population, something like 83 for women and 79 for men, and they’re continuing to grow older. And because of relatively low birth rates and extremely restrictive immigration policies, there are literally not enough grandkids to take care of the grandparents. And so there’s now a competition between Toyota and Honda and others to create robots that will take care of the grandparents, from lifting them out of bed to playing the violin for them to entertain them. It’s hard to imagine anything more human or anything more intimate than taking care of elderly citizens, but what’s fascinating is the drive that Japan does have to now see if robots can do this work.

It’s interesting for me to see where the robots of the future are going to emerge from. On the one hand, there are big technology companies, like Uber and Google, who are making very aggressive investments in this space. Uber, for example, has a fairly remarkable facility that they’ve co-developed with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh where in essence they’re trying to replace their most expensive resource, which is their drivers. And so a lot of the drive to create autonomous vehicles is coming through this partnership between Uber and Carnegie Mellon’s robotics labs.

Another example is Google. I think that now that the Google founders have grown wealthier than they know what to do with, their passions have turned in part towards robotics, and they’re interested in taking their capabilities in analytics, in big data analytics, and applying it more and more into hardware. There’s no more interesting form of hardware than robotics. And so, from the Google car to some of the purchases they’ve made of both artificial intelligence and robotics companies, I see robots as being sort of the next greenfield space for Google to really explore.

But taking relatively big companies like Uber and Google aside, I do think that there’s an argument to be made that the most interesting and important robots of the future will come from companies that we haven’t heard of before. They will be start-ups that then become big themselves, just as Uber and Google did in the past, and I have seen examples of this—for example in Israel, where there are venture funds that have been created with nine figures worth of very early stage, high-risk capital. I’ve seen the Israelis, the Swedes, the Germans, as well as the Americans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans do very interesting early stage investing here, the thesis being that just as was the case with the internet—where it was going to be 23-year-olds who are going to build the next big companies—so too will that prove to be the case with robotics. And so the venture capitalists are lined up and investing.

Q. What about robots replacing manual labor? Does automation concern you?

A. When you think about the jobs that have been replaced by automation in the past, they’re principally the jobs of men with strong shoulders, doing work that is manual and routine in ports, factories, mines, and mills. The kind of labor that’s going be displaced in the future, I think, is going be of a much more varied type. First of all, we have to look at what the principal form: the number one occupation among men in the United States is driving a motor vehicle—our bus drivers, our truck drivers, and our taxi drivers—that’s the number one occupation for men in the U.S. If that becomes replaced by driverless cars, the amount of displacement is going to be enormous. Now, I don’t necessarily think this is going to happen in the next 10 years, but it would not surprise me if it began happening in 10 years.

Similarly, there are other jobs that we think of as not necessarily lending themselves to being replaced, but I think that they can, and it’s because the kind of work being done by robots is going from being merely manual and routine to increasingly cognitive and non-routine. In the same way in which we saw bank tellers replaced by ATMs and travel agents replaced by websites, so too do I think that the people who we check in with at the hotel, our lawyers, and even our hair washers at the salon—there are people who are developing automated solutions to all of these things, and it’s remarkable to see it unfold.

Q. Your vision of the future seems decidedly ambivalent. Are you more optimistic or pessimistic overall?

A. Most people who write books about the future they write either utopian or dystopian books. It’s either “we’re going to live to be a 150 years old, happy, wealthy, lacking for nothing,” or written with eyes shut and fists clenched, railing against the future. I think that life is much more up the middle. We’re not going to have a utopian future; we’re not going to have a dystopian future. Life’s a little bit more up the middle, and I’m net optimistic.

Even when I think about robotics and the kind of labor that it can and will displace, we have to recognize what else it’ll do. Like if, for example, safe, autonomous vehicles take over the work of drivers—well, guess what? Three million people die every year in car accidents. That’s a huge number. If suddenly a million or 2 million people aren’t dying, that’s kind of a big deal. Similarly, if our surgeries, which are assisted by robots, are more effective—well, we’re living longer and healthier lives.

Connect with Alec on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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