THE INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE
Alec Ross
Simon & Schuster
320 pages; Rs 1,364
Alec Ross, distinguished visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins and an expert on innovation, provides an array of exciting facts "for those who would be interested to know how the next wave of innovation and globalisation will affect our society and ourselves". During the 1,445 days he served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his job was "to bring innovation mojo to a tradition-bound State Department'. He travelled 500,000 miles and spoke to innumerable people in several countries.
Exploring which industries might drive the next 20 years of change to our economy, Mr Ross says they are robotics, genetics, data, the code-ification of money and defence. His last chapter concedes that the most important job anyone has is that of being a parent, so how best can we prepare the next generation?
For sure the El Dorado will lie at the intersection of information technology and biology. Will artificial intelligence advance to AGI (artificial general intelligence)? If it does then human intelligence would have been exceeded, a point called a "singularity" by American author Ray Kurzweil. However one must note that AI itself has died about four times in the last five decades - too much hype, according to some experts.
On the flip side, others feel AGI is not far away and we could experience Mr Kurzweil's prediction of the "rupture in the fabric of history". Mr Ross reveals his predilection by writing about robots for human tasks, which involve "situational awareness, spatial reasoning, dexterity, contextual understanding and judgment".
The economic value of robotics, genetics and AI is no longer in doubt. Writer David Gilbert recently reported in the International Business Times that IBM's Watson, which five years ago beat a human in Jeopardy, is "now set to provide IBM a huge future engine".
Mr Ross points out that car accidents are caused by 4 Ds: distraction, drowsiness, drunkenness and driver error. Google's self-driving cars have already driven two million miles with only 11 minor accidents, all caused by human error. "We accept 1 million road deaths per year but will cavil at a few hundred thousand accidents through driverless cars," Mr Ross rightly observes.
In the powerful chapter on genetics, Mr Ross quotes the example of the gene, ACP1, which produces a protein that has been found to be excessive among those people contemplating suicide. Trials are being developed to produce a pill that can be administered to those contemplating suicide. Gosh!
A second example is a controversial start-up, 23andMe. It offers anyone a testing kit with which predictive analysis of genetic health risks can be done.
A third example is "xenotransplantation," which means modifying a pig genome so that a pig embryo can grow up with organs that can be harvested and transplanted into humans. Considering the human body has 25,000 genes, 640 muscles, 206 bones and 78 organs, the future market for pigs appears to be explosive!
Such developments will inevitably raise complex questions of ethics and psychology. This is where a philosophy of science steps in, because advances will be limited by what humans learn to do with them. Trust, security and singularity need not slow down such technologies going mainstream. As eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, says, "a new form of algorithm-generated trust" is already developed. It allows people who don't know each other to transact business because the intermediary is trusted, for example, AirbNb and Bitcoin.
However, Mr Ross has his focus on learning and culture, not on inequality and unemployment. According to Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots, "relentless technology advancement will drive us towards greater inequality and rising unemployment."
It is good to recall the pessimism when we faced similar questions in the last century. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes had predicted that "electrification and internal combustion engines would lead to an increase in material prosperity but also technological unemployment." In 1964, a group of scientists and sociologists reported to US President Lyndon Johnson that "cybernation results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which will require less and less human labour."
Northwestern University Professor Robert Gordon counts as the most persuasive pessimist about exaggerated forecasts of technology. He considers human well-being to be the real test of technological change. According to his book, The Rise and the Fall of American Growth, "the period 1870-1970 was a special century when electricity, flush toilets, cars, planes, radio, vaccines, clean water, antibiotics, all transformed living and working conditions in a way that no other 100 year period in world history has." In comparison he feels computers and internet generate marginal improvements. (I can't help observing that the same period brought two catastrophic world wars, climate change and severe water depletion.)
A person like me is certainty deeply curious about what the world will be like in 2045. Mr Ross has written a book well worth the reader's money and time. My intuition is represented by Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs. "Something is clearly happening here, but we don't know what it means. And by the time we do, we may well have been replaced by algorithms, like everybody else."
The writer is an author and corporate advisor
