The Industries of the Future
ZAKARIA: My next guest says he wishes that, when he graduated from college in 1994, somebody would have told him that the Internet and computers were going to change the world. Well, he's now written a book for the graduates of today, telling them what the next 20 years will bring, which industries will boom, which jobs will grow, which skills will be necessary to compete. It's a book, though, that all of us should read, not just kids. Alec Ross is the author of "The Industries of the Future." Ross was senior adviser for innovation to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Alec Ross, pleasure to have you on.</s>ALEC ROSS, AUTHOR: Thanks for having me.</s>ZAKARIA: So this is the question that everybody wants to know because young people want to figure out what industries they want to go into; people want to know what they should know about to retool; and all of us are interested. So, you know, bottom line, what is the biggest trend you notice when thinking about these industries of the future?</s>ROSS: Well, I think that the story of the last 20 years was the story of digitization. The story of the next 20 years is going to build on that. But what we're going to see are advances in hardware and material sciences and artificial intelligence, creating entirely new trillion-dollar industries. The world's last trillion-dollar industry was created out of computer code. The world's next trillion-dollar industry is going to be created out of genetic code. So now, 15 years past the mapping of the human genome, for example, I think we're three or four years away from unleashing the long-hoped- for revolution in life sciences.</s>ZAKARIA: The other big thing you talk about in the books is the robotics, one of these things that people had imagined would progress more than it has. You know, people thought we would have robots that could clean up the kitchen and, you know, you've got a few vacuum cleaner robots, but what is making it change? What's the new step function?</s>ROSS: The robots from the cartoons and movies of the 1970s are going to be the reality of the 2020s. And there are really two things driving this. The first is there are things that are historically very difficult for robots, like grasping. It might seem straightforward, but it's actually very complex to model out mathematically and algorithmically. But there have been huge breakthroughs in mathematics in just the last 18 months that are now taking what were once complex robotic tasks and are now making them possible, basically allowing us to take robotic work from being merely routine and manual to cognitive and non-routine. And the second big development is cloud robotics. So if C-3PO interrupted us right now, Fareed -- if he walked in here and he said, "Oh, my, excuse me," and, you know, walked off -- walked off the set, in the movie version of that, there would be a lot of hardware and software worrying through that gold-gleaming body. In the real C-3PO of, say, 2025, that will be a cloud-connected device. So if he interrupted us here on the set, he would ping the cloud and the intelligence from the cloud would give him instructions, "Excuse yourself" -- "Excuse yourself in English and go find a seat." What this means as a practical matter is that we don't have to build million-dollar robots to get remarkably sophisticated artificial intelligence. They can be lean machines so long as they're connected to the cloud.</s>ZAKARIA: Many of the robots, driverless cars, replace people. We had Derek Thompson on for The Atlantic, who pointed out that the single most common occupation of an American male is driving a car, bus or truck. Presumably, you say, "Get used to it; there will be a lot more of this."</s>ROSS: This is going to continue to happen. But here's the thing people aren't talking about, Fareed, which is going to be a really big deal. In the past, automation and robotics have replaced blue-collar labor, dominantly manual labor, but the combination of artificial intelligence with new automation technologies is going to displace what I would call low-level white-collar work. Think about my father. I love my father. For 40-some years he's worked as a real-estate lawyer in Hurricane, West Virginia. And what he's done is he's created big stacks of paper for people when they buy and sell a home. That kind of work, which requires cognition but also has a lot of rote work to it, I think, is going to be supplanted by a combination of AI and robotics.</s>ZAKARIA: So young people listening to this, parents listening to this, will wonder what should we do to prepare for this new world?</s>ROSS: I have a 13-year-old son, an 11-year-old daughter and an 8- year-old son. And I really wrote this book to try to light a little path for them. Sixty-five percent of all jobs for children entering primary school today will go into job titles that don't presently exist. And so I have a chapter in the book called "The Most Important Job You'll Ever Have," which is parenting, which focuses on the skills and attributes that today's kids will need in tomorrow's world. And I point out two things, first: interdisciplinary learning. We've got to be able to take science, technology, engineering and mathematics and combine that with skills in the humanities focused on 65 percent of jobs go into jobs that don't exist. this focuses on skills kids need in tomorrow's would recall. I point out two things. first, interdisciplinary learning. We've got to be able to take science, technology, engineering and mathematics and combine that with skills in the humanities focused on persuasion, teaching and other such things. The second thing I would say is language learning, foreign languages and computer languages. The world is growing more global. People who are prepared to work on a 196-country chessboard are going to be those who are best positioned -- and computer coding because, if you are a competent coder, you basically have a few decades' worth of guaranteed employment in front of you.</s>ZAKARIA: Alec, pleasure to have you on.</s>ROSS: Thank you.</s>ZAKARIA: Up next, the one, the only, the great Harry Belafonte on race, Hollywood and America.