BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Industries of the Future’

OPINION:

THE INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE

By Alec Ross

Simon & Schuster, $28, 320 pages

Alec Ross opens his account of the next wave of the industrial revolution with a description of the casualties of the second wave. As a college student in the 1990s he worked nights mopping up a sports/entertainment venue in West Virginia. His co-workers were coal miners displaced by automation who lacked the educational skills to transfer to relatively high-paying jobs in other industries; they were trapped in minimum wage jobs. If the assembly line and steam power fueled the first wave of the industrial revolution, the automation of dirty, dangerous and mind numbingly repetitive jobs was the second wave. Mr. Ross does a good job of describing the advantages and disadvantages of the third wave, which is just beginning.

The driver of this next wave as the author describes it will be robotics, the digitally driven markets, human genome mapping, and globalization. As with the first two waves, there will be winners and losers. Mr. Ross is well qualified to write on the subject as he traveled extensively exploring globalization’s impact as the State Department’s senior innovation adviser during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary.

Although the innovations he discusses will have tremendous positive advantages, each will have consequences that will be profound, and some of those most adversely impacted may well be members of today’s American middle class. This is particularly true of robotics. As robots become more and more capable, they will not be displacing just assembly line workers and miners. Their improvements in cognition and even creativity may well displace lawyers, design engineers and pilots.

Mr. Ross suggests that the anger against cheap immigrants that is driving much of this year’s presidential election may well eventually be turned against robots because we are getting closer to a thing called singularity; that is the point where robotic artificial intelligences equals, and then exceeds, human capabilities. Scientists differ on when singularity will occur. Some think it is still a long way off, but others think it will occur by 2023, or 2047 at the latest. Whenever singularity happens, the results will be profound. The original advocates of robots saw them as freeing humans from the worst kinds of drudgery, but Mr. Ross can see a time when we are freed from any kind of work. Unanswered is how these unemployed billions will be compensated to survive.

We have already seen some the negative impacts of globalization as well as the benefits of cheaper products. Donald Trump has mined a deep lode of fear of jobs lost to foreign markets, but even formerly cheap Chinese laborers are being replaced by robots. The Chinese have lured and even forced farmers off their land to cities where they fill the need for cheap labor. What happens in those megacities when robots take those jobs? These are questions that the Chinese will have to deal with in the coming decades.

In a similar manner, Mr. Ross examines the pros and cons of an increasingly digital world economy that allowed a nation like Rwanda to go directly from an agrarian society to one of the world’s most advanced post-industrial economies by skipping past analog communications networks and going directly cellular with digital transfer of money. However, the potential dangers of hackers creating electronic-economic world chaos is also discussed.

The author also explores the medical advances being made in mapping the human genome, and its positive and negative societal implications. The growth of human replacement organs in animals is a truly groundbreaking possibility, but the threat of something unanticipated going terribly wrong in a medical lab is something that deserves serious attention.

The weakest part of the book is the chapter on military implications. The author is out of area here, and it shows. However, that is not a great loss as there are a number of books being written on the subject. This book is still well worth reading.

In the last chapter, Mr. Ross talks about how to prepare young Americans, particularly his three kids, to survive in the brave new world. He thinks learning one foreign language, one technical language and giving them a good grounding in liberal arts “how to think” methodology will prepare them. I think he is overly optimistic. Once we go beyond singularity, robots will speak languages and think outside the box better than his kids, and do it cheaper. The real question is how humans will cope when they are no longer needed in the job market at all. There won’t even be floors to mop; computers are already doing that.

• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine colonel who worked on futures issues as chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and later as director of the Marines’ Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities.