The Industries of the Future
The Industries of the Future, by Alec Ross, Simon & Schuster 2016
Despite the fact that Mr. Ross served under Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, he has presented us with a book that beautifully summarizes key movements in industry, from robots and the human machine in Chapters 1 and 2, though “The Code-dification of Money, Markets and Trust”, and “The Weaponization of Code.” Chapters 5 and 6 at the heart of the book talk about “Data: The Raw Material of the Information Age and “The Geography of Future Markets.”
The industrial sector has been grappling with robots and automation, and how to effectively deploy them - a good piece of the Fourth Industrial Revolution - for decades now. But Ross’s predictions on what he calls the codification of money markets and trust is shocking, very valuable reading for detecting shifts in global currency management.
“When I was growing up, wealthy people had stacks of cash and thick wallets. Today most wealthy people – and increasingly more of the rest of us – are virtually wallet less, or they use a virtual wallet… over the next 20 years, our money will be coded – broken down into 1s and 0s and wrapped within powerful tools for encryption.”
Imagine a world devoid of paper currency and coinage, a changed green landscape that assumes teller-less banks and personal ATMs connected by massive global networks subject to local disasters and local regulations. And its tempered by international trade agreements, frighteningly connected for most consumers, yet it’s coming at us faster than we know.
Ross tempts with us insight as how to best prepare youngsters for the major changes ahead –(the rest of us will simply have to adapt and make do!). Ross quotes former ebay CEO John Donahoe’s advice:
“If I were eighteen right now, I would major in computer science or engineering, and I’d be taking Mandarin…”
Control freaks beware
Specific programming expertise aside, what Ross and the CEOs he is quoting point to is a demand for heightened technical skills and extreme flexibility. For developed and fast developing nations, this should not be an obstacle – it’s a matter for colleges and employment statistics to “get the word out.” But for struggling peoples, Ross urges leaders to “open up and resist control-freak tendencies. The 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak; future growth depends on empowering people.”
Although he sees great economic opportunity opening up in the sub-Sahara, Ross believes that some African nations will continue to struggle with the kind of leadership that does not welcome innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, or independence. Unlike European and American histories, this handicap will continue to drag down African aspirations of economic and national development – a shame really, because it worked for us, and why should it not apply equally successfully to new nations?
Ross warns us that while innovation brings both promise and peril, “advances and wealth creation will not accrue evenly. May people will gain. Some people will gain hugely, but many will also be displaced.” Might he there be predicting the massive waves of immigration moving from embattled Middle Eastern countries up into Europe? “The last 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 countries.”
The Industries of the Future is a thought piece not so much detailing the advances of robotics and automation, for example, but more the movement of global shifts that will present us with very different lifestyles and more technical challenges. Read it with the expectation that Ross sees many disparate pieces which he then assembles into visions that take us halfway there. His expert quotes are invaluable because they illustrate, along the road, the whys as well as the hows.