Alec Ross was Hillary Clinton ’s Senior Advisor for Innovation when she was Secretary of State, and he helped craft her groundbreaking open internet agenda. Since leaving the State Department, Ross has traveled the world advising businesses and governments on technology and innovation policy. Now, he has assembled his conversations with Davos regulars into a fascinating vision of the future of industry.
The Industries of the Future reads like a portable TED conference at which you have been seated next to the smartest guy in the room. The book is filled with glimpses of cutting-edge biotech research, statecraft, and entrepreneurship. Ross uses his unique set of experiences to weave these disparate stories into a picture of the next decade of innovation. He identifies areas that he sees driving global industrial and social change, including robotics, genetics, the “code-ification” of money, cybersecurity, and the harnessing of big data. Ross writes engagingly, and the book should be compelling whether you follow these fields closely or you still think of Honda as a car rather than a robotics company.
Unlike the typical techno-utopian fantasy or luddite jeremiad, Ross strikes a calm tone, never ceasing to consider the human cost of technological progress. The book begins with Ross’s reminiscence of a summer job spent cleaning a concert venue alongside men left behind by the mechanization of de-skilled labor. And he keeps coming back to this cautionary tale. As he writes about robots caring for the elderly or Airbnb displacing the boutique hotel industry, Ross always insists that technological and social advances go hand in hand. Countries will be left behind, he warns, that do not pair incentives for innovation with equality for women in the workplace and educational reform. Social and economic progress feed each other.
Ross’s favorite companies and stories all meet these dual […]
