Harnessing the promise of the future
How to secure a place in an increasingly changing world
This is so much more than a business book. Alec Ross’s highly readable The Industries of the Future is really about the world of the future and how innovations are creating industries that will make or break societies and, indeed, entire countries.
The author’s clear, wide-ranging analysis will reach anyone — parent, student, teacher, employee, business leader, entrepreneur — concerned about securing a place in an increasingly changeable world.
Ross brings a global perspective af- ter four years (and 41 countries) as senior adviser for innovation for Hillary Clinton when she was U.S. secretary of state. He profiles several soon-to-be trillion-dollar industries, most already hurtling toward mainstream: robotics, genomics, digital money and big data analytics. Businesses that don’t adapt will perish, he states bluntly. Taxi companies and small hotel chains are already losing to Uber and Airbnb. Banks that still think they’re repositories of money instead of data companies will succumb to digital systems. Whatever the future of Bitcoin, the blockchain technology behind it — essentially a huge public ledger — will prevail.
What about careers? “If any college student asked me what career would most assure 50 years of steady, wellpaying employment,” writes Ross, a father of three young children, “I would respond, ‘cybersecurity.’ ”
What if you want to be a doctor? Then you’ll need to learn about nano-robots to treat disease. Lawyer? Technology will replace you in straightforward transactions such as real estate. Translator? A machine will do it faster. Farmer? Then you better use precision agriculture if you want to compete. What about learning Mandarin? Maybe, but only after you’ve learned a more important language: code.
Ross covers the usual big players (China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, India, Silicon Valley) but also cites the surprising emergence of Estonia and, soon, Rwanda as knowledgebased economies. Canada gets three mentions, all negative: the Nortel fiasco, our flirtation with MintChip digital money and our tendency to have our intellectual property ripped off.
Only those nations that empower women will thrive, Ross writes — ironically, interviews with men dominate the book. Near the end we briefly meet two women, a Pakistani entrepreneur and an Estonian inventor, but I would have liked to hear from more female innovators. In his section on genomics, Ross doesn’t even mention that the revolutionary gene-editing technology was co-discovered by two women.
Innovations will continue to change the world in breathtaking ways. The Industries of the Future does an impressive balancing act of cautioning us about the peril while exciting us about the promise. Marcia Kaye (marciakaye.com) is an award-wining journalist.