Sponsored by Offit | Kurman, Attorneys at Law, KatzAbosch, CPAs & mindgrub

Click here for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5

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: A significant portion of your book focuses on big data. How crucial is information in shaping the future?

ALEC ROSS: The raw material of the Agricultural Age was land. The raw material of the Industrial Age was iron. The raw material of the Information Age is data. He who owned the land controlled the land during the Agricultural Age had the political power and the economic power. He who owned the factories and controlled access to the natural resources during the Industrial Age had the economic power and the political power. He or she who own the data, control the data, and can draw meaning out of the data during the Information Age are those who are going to create the industries of the future.

The 5 zettabytes of information—that’s ten to the 21st power of bytes—that we now create every year is a sort of Pacific Ocean of information from which we can draw meaning. If you think about it, it’s really remarkable. The earliest form of data, the earliest form of recorded human information, was a painting on a cave wall. If you take the sum of all of the information created from painting on cave wall to the year 2003, we now create that every two days. Every two days, we create the amount of information we created from earliest humankind to 2003. So, what does that mean in practical terms, in business terms? What it means is that we can use information to transform old industries.

I learned about the potential of big data in agriculture and, of all places, the North Island of New Zealand. Apparently, there are a lot more dairy cattle in New Zealand than there are human beings, and the way in which these Kiwi cattle farmers became massive exporters to China was through figuring out how to use big data analytics and apply that to the centuries’ old form of dairy farming.

They created this thing called pasture meter, which combines laser technology and GPS, and it takes 18,500 measurements per field. With that information, they know exactly where to water, they know exactly where to fertilize, they know exactly where to put feed for their cattle, in these vast 10,000-acre cattle ranches. While that might seem slightly ridiculous—to be able to get little precision measurements about, well, this square foot wants exactly this much water and this much fertilizer, and, you know, that pasture needs exactly that much cow feed—well, what it did is within one year of pasture meter becoming reality, exports to China went up 498%.

This changed the job of being a dairy farmer in New Zealand from being that of a guy in overalls with big, thick calluses on his hands practicing farming the exact same way his great-grandfather did, to now, honestly, they look more like software engineers, where they’re hunched over their iPads pulling in and drawing out data and getting much more precise information about how they can be better farmers.

Those kinds of analytics tools are not going to just transform industries like advertising or electioneering or searching for information. What they’re going to do is they’re going to take old manufacturing, industrial, and agricultural processes and change those.

Q. What big challenges do you think these tools will solve?

A. The oldest challenge for mankind, going back to day one of humanity, has been hunger. Today, 2016, in a world of 7.2 billion people, there’s still an estimated 800 million people who don’t get enough food to eat every day. Now, I’m not so utopian as to believe that precision agriculture is going to cure hunger. I don’t know necessarily that any one thing is going to cure hunger. But, in the same way in which the Green Revolution after World War II dramatically helped expand life expectancies, increase birth rates, increase health and nutrition, so too do I believe that precision agriculture can help bring better farming methods to places that are really rough—for example, in India where a third of the world’s people who live in severe poverty live. And so I’m very hopeful about the mainstreaming of precision agriculture and what it can do to help alleviate poverty.

If data is the raw material of the information age, then it can be the basis for helping to address some of our grand challenges. Think, for example, about the language divide. It would not surprise me if in 10 years from now, if somebody is speaking to us in a language we don’t understand, we can say, “Wait a moment,” put a little piece of hardware in our ear—a little ear bud—and then as people speak to us in a language that we don’t understand the voice we will hear in our ear will be the language that we want to hear. How is that possible? Because of big data analytics. As people speak at the speed of sound, what they’re saying is being translated into our smartphone being connected by Bluetooth to the device in our ear, so I could imagine it doing things like reducing the language barrier. Similarly, if you think back to the work of Bert Vogelstein and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University on our ability to draw meaning, the data that we now have access to in the form of the 25,000 genes that the building blocks for humanity, our ability to process and draw meaning out of the enormous amount of genetic material that we all have presents, in my opinion, the best chance that we have to cure cancer.

Finally what I would say is that I think there are probably some unimagined products and services that we don’t even recognize a need for today, but I can’t help but think that there’s probably some 19-year-old somewhere looking at a problem through entirely different eyes than I see the problem—as somebody 25 years older than her—and who is going to build a billion dollar business out of it. So, I do think that this data is truly the raw material for tomorrow’s economy.

Connect with Alec on LinkedIn

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Founded in 1969,  KatzAbosch is one of the largest CPA and business consulting services in the Mid-Atlantic region. Our mission is to provide the highest quality accounting, tax, financial and management consulting services to our clients. We understand the needs and challenges of our clients and we have made it our obligation to create, grow and protect asset value. The experts at KatzAbosch offer a full service solution while maintaining a tradition of ethics and incorporating the latest technology and unique business practices. Excellence in an industry often begins with how those closest to the company—its clients and employees—feel about it. For these individuals, KatzAbosch is a place where people and businesses excel and prosper. Our advisors can meet all of your service needs including; Audit & Accounting, Business Valuation & Litigation Support, Consulting, Estate Planning & Administration, Financial Institution Services, Forensic Accounting & Fraud Examinations, State and Local Tax (SALT), Taxes & Planning.

Mindgrub was founded in 2002 by a teacher-turned-technologist, and since then we have devoured every project to come across our plate. We are a team that solves client challenges by harnessing the newest technologies. We are not here to churn out code and pixels, we are here to pioneer new methods of learning and user interaction. You can see us leading the way at conferences like SXSW, TEDx, and NAB.

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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