The Industries of the Future - Softcover

Ross, Alec

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476753660 ISBN 13: 9781476753669

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Synopsis

The New York Times bestseller, from leading innovation expert Alec Ross, a “fascinating vision” (Forbes) of what’s next for the world and how to navigate the changes the future will bring.

While Alec Ross was working as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State, he traveled to forty-one countries, exploring the latest advances coming out of every continent. From startup hubs in Kenya to R&D labs in South Korea, Ross has seen what the future holds.

In The Industries of the Future, Ross provides a “lucid and informed guide” (Financial Times) to the changes coming in the next ten years. He examines the fields that will most shape our economic future, including robotics and artificial intelligence, cybercrime and cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the impact of digital technology on money and markets. In each of these realms, Ross addresses the toughest questions: How will we have to adapt to the changing nature of work? Is the prospect of cyberwar sparking the next arms race? How can the world’s rising nations hope to match Silicon Valley with their own innovation hotspots? And what can today’s parents do to prepare their children for tomorrow?

Ross blends storytelling and economic analysis to show how sweeping global trends are affecting the ways we live. Sharing insights from global leaders—from the founders of Google and Twitter to defense experts like David Petraeus—Ross reveals the technologies and industries that will drive the next stage of globalization. The Industries of the Future is “a riveting and mind-bending book” (New York Journal of Books), a “must read” (Wendy Kopp, Founder of Teach for America) regardless of “whether you follow these fields closely or you still think of Honda as a car rather than a robotics company” (Forbes).

About this title

About the Author:

Alec Ross is one of America’s leading experts on innovation. He served for four years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the Secretary of State. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and serves as an advisor to investors, corporations, and government leaders. Ross lives in Baltimore with his wife and their three young children. He is the author of The Industries of the Future.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Industries of the Future ONE

HERE COME THE ROBOTS

Welcome your new job takers and caregivers. The coming decade will see societies transform as humans learn to live alongside robots.

Japan is home to the longest-living citizens on earth and the biggest elderly population of any country—and it’s not getting any younger. Japan’s current life expectancy is 80 years for men and 87 years for women and is expected to rise to 84 and 91, respectively, over the next 45 years. Between 2010 and 2025, the number of Japanese citizens 65 years or older is expected to increase by 7 million. Today, 25 percent of Japan’s population is age 65 or older. By 2020, this is projected to increase to 29 percent and reach 39 percent by 2050.

All of those long-living elderly will need caretakers. Yet Japan’s low birthrates mean that what once was a staple of Japanese family life—taking care of one’s grandparents and great-grandparents—will no longer be a viable model at the scale the nation needs. There will not be enough grandchildren.

With Japan’s persistently strict immigration policies curtailing the number of workers in the country, there will not be enough humans around to do the job at all. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare predicts a need for 4 million eldercare nurses by 2025. Right now there are only 1.49 million in the country. Japan allows only 50,000 work visas annually, and unless something drastic changes, the math does not work.

This labor shortage will hit service-industry jobs like eldercare with ferocity and will be exacerbated because caretakers have a high job turnover rate due to low pay and high rates of work-related injury from lifting patients.

Enter the robots.

Our future caretakers are being developed in a Japanese factory right now. Just as Japanese companies reinvented cars in the 1970s and consumer electronics in the 1980s, they are now reinventing the family. The robots depicted in the movies and cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s will become the reality of the 2020s.

Rival Japanese companies Toyota and Honda are leveraging their expertise in mechanical engineering to invent the next generation of robots. Toyota built a nursing aide named Robina—modeled after Rosie, the cartoon robot nanny and housekeeper in The Jetsons—as part of their Partner Robot Family, a line of robots to take care of the world’s growing geriatric population. Robina is a “female” robot, 60 kilograms in weight and 1.2 meters tall, that can communicate using words and gestures. She has wide-set eyes, a moptop hairdo, and even a flowing white metallic skirt.

Robina’s brother, Humanoid, serves as a multipurpose home assistant. He can do the dishes, take care of your parents when they’re sick, and even provide impromptu entertainment: one model plays the trumpet, another the violin. Both versions are doppelgangers for the famous Star Wars C-3PO robot, although in gleaming white instead of gold.

In response, Honda has created ASIMO (the Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility robot), a fully functional humanoid that looks like a four-foot-tall astronaut stuck on Earth. ASIMO is sophisticated enough to interpret human emotions, movements, and conversation. Equipped with cameras that function as eyes, ASIMO can follow voice commands, shake hands, and answer questions with a nod or by voice. He even bows to greet others, demonstrating good Japanese manners. For an elderly patient, ASIMO can fulfill a range of tasks, from helping the patient get out of bed to holding a conversation.

Honda is also focusing much of its research and commercialization on robotic limbs and assistance devices that are robotic but not freestanding robots. Its Walking Assist device wraps around the legs and back of people with weakened leg muscles, giving them extra power to move on their own. In the future, expect to see Honda making robotic hands and arms. Its goal is nothing less than helping paraplegics walk and the very frail rediscover the speed and power of their youth.

Numerous other Japanese companies are pushing the big players like Toyota and Honda. Tokai Rubber Industries, in conjunction with the Japanese research institute RIKEN, has unveiled the Robot for Interactive Body Assistance (RIBA), which can pick up and set down humans up to 175 pounds and is designed for patient comfort: it resembles a giant smiling bear and is covered in a soft skin to guard against injury or pain. Similarly, Japanese industrial automation company AIST has created PARO, a robot baby harp seal covered in soft white fur. PARO exhibits many of the same behaviors as a real pet. Designed for those who are too frail to care for a living animal or who live in environments that don’t allow pets, such as nursing homes, it enjoys being held, gets angry when hit, and likes to nap. When President Barack Obama met PARO a few years ago on a tour of Japanese robotics innovations, he instinctually reached out and rubbed its head and back. It looks like a cute stuffed animal, but costs $6,000 and is classified by the US government as a class 2 medical device.

Japan already leads the world in robotics, operating 310,000 of the 1.4 million industrial robots in existence across the world. It’s turning to eldercare robots in part because it has to and in part because it, uniquely, is in a great position to leverage its advanced industrial technology toward the long assembly line of the human life span. But can robots really take care of humans?

Japan’s private and public sectors certainly think so. In 2013, the Japanese government granted $24.6 million to companies focusing on eldercare robotics. Japan’s prominent Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry chose 24 companies in May 2013 to receive subsidies covering one-half to two-thirds of the R&D costs for nursing care robots. Tasks for these robots include helping the elderly move between rooms; keeping tabs on those likely to wander; and providing entertainment through games, singing, and dancing.

Nevertheless, difficult challenges remain. On the technical side, it remains difficult to design robots capable of intimate activities like bathing patients or brushing their teeth. And most Japanese companies that are developing these robots specialize in industrial motors and electronic automation. They didn’t enter the caretaking field with a keen grasp of how to forge an emotional connection, a crucial aspect of eldercare. Even as they improve, some observers—like Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT—question whether patients will ever be able to form a true emotional connection with robot caretakers. As Turkle warns, “For the idea of artificial companionship to be our new normal, we have to change ourselves, and in the process we are remaking human values and human connection.” If robot nurses catch on, she explains, they may even create a chasm between younger and older generations. “It’s not just that older people are supposed to be talking,” Turkle argues, referring to the goal of creating robots that can hold conversation, “younger people are supposed to be listening. We are showing very little interest in what our elders have to say. We are building the machines that will literally let their stories fall on deaf ears.”

These technical questions (Can a robot brush a person’s teeth?) and almost-spiritual doubts (Can, and should, emotional connections be made between humans and robots?) are both valid. Yet robot technology and applicability continue to advance in Japan, and answers to these questions will likely arise there in the near future. With too few caretakers, I expect robots to become a regular part of the Japanese family system.

If the aging nation can pull it off, robot caretakers will be a boon for its economy and will soon make the jump to the global economy, with potentially far-reaching consequences.

Much of the rest of the industrialized world is on the verge of a period of advanced aging that will mirror Japan’s own. In Europe, all 28 member states of the European Union have populations that are growing older, and in the decades ahead, the percentage of Europe’s population aged 65 and older will grow from 17 percent to 30 percent. China is already entering a period of advanced aging even as it continues to develop. Although its one-child policy is already being phased out, China is now demographically lopsided. Chinese women have on average 1.4 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, resulting in too few young people to provide for the elderly. The notable exception is the United States, where immigration policies partially mitigate the effects of an aging population.

As the populations of developed nations continue to age, they create a big market for those Japanese robots. And caretaking robots, alongside robotic limb technology, may simply be the first in a new wave of complex robots entering our everyday lives. Robots will be the rare technology that reaches the mainstream through elderly users first, spreading down as grandma shows off her next cutting-edge gadget for the kids and grandkids.
THE GEO-ROBOTIC LANDSCAPE

The robot landscape will be vastly differentiated by country. Just as wealthier and poorer citizens reside at different technological levels, so do wealthier and poorer countries.

A few countries have already established themselves as leading robot societies. About 70 percent of total robot sales take place in Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany—known as the “big five” in robotics. Japan, the United States, and Germany dominate the landscape in high-value industrial and medical robots, and South Korea and China are major producers of less expensive consumer-oriented robots. While Japan records the highest number of robot sales, China represents the most rapidly growing market, with sales increasing by 25 percent every year since 2005.

There is quite a gap between the big five and the rest of the world. As both consumers and producers of robots, these countries outpace all others. By way of illustration, the number of industrial robots produced in South Korea, a country of 50 million people, is several times greater than the number produced in South America, Central America, Africa, and India combined, with populations totaling 2.8 billion. Russia is effectively a nonplayer in robotics despite its industrial base. It neither produces nor buys robots to any significant degree, instead maintaining extractive industries (natural gas, oil, iron, nickel) and industrial manufacturing plants that look and function the way they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

The big five’s comparative advantage might even accelerate in the future, for these are the same countries that are most likely to incorporate the next generation of robotics into society, work, and home. They will own the name brands in consumer robots, and they’ll power the software and networks that enable the robotics ecosystem. When I think about this symbiosis, I think about the Internet in the 1990s. It was not just the consumer-facing Internet companies that were born and based in Silicon Valley; it was also the network equipment makers like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. Today Cisco and Juniper have a combined 85,000 employees and $154 billion in market value. The same types of back-end systems will exist in the robotics industry. And the big five countries will benefit from being home to the high-paying jobs and wealth accumulation that go with being out ahead of the 191 other countries around the world. They will produce the Ciscos and Junipers of robotics.

Interestingly, less developed countries might be able to leapfrog technologies as they enter the robot landscape. Countries in Africa and Central Asia have been able to go straight to cell phones without building landline telephones, and in the same way they might be able to jump ahead in robotics without having to establish an advanced industrial base.

The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education. One winner was RoboArm, a project from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria whose armlike structure is made out of plastic and runs on scavenged motors. The ability to generate low-cost innovation based on scarcity of materials is rooted in the concept of frugal innovation, which will be discussed in chapter 6.

As robotics starts to spread, the degree to which countries can succeed in the robot era will depend in part on culture—on how readily people accept robots into their lives. Western and Eastern cultures are highly differentiated in how they view robots. Not only does Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, which holds that both objects and human beings have spirits. As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots can be seen as members of society rather than as mere tools or as threats.

In contrast, fears of robotics are deeply seated in Western culture. The threat of humanity creating things we cannot control pervades Western literature, leaving a long history of cautionary tales. Prometheus was condemned to an eternity of punishment for giving fire to humans. When Icarus flew too high, the sun melted his ingenious waxed wings and he fell to his death. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein’s grotesque creation wreaks havoc and ultimately leads to its creator’s death—and numerous B-movie remakes.

This fear does not pervade Eastern culture to the same extent. The cultural dynamic in Japan is representative of the culture through much of East Asia, enabling the Asian robotics industry to speed ahead, unencumbered by cultural baggage. Investment in robots reflects a cultural comfort with robots, and, in China, departments of automation are well represented and well respected in the academy. There are more than 100 automation departments in Chinese universities, compared with approximately 76 in the United States despite the larger total number of universities in the United States.

In South Korea, teaching robots are seen in a positive light; in Europe, they are viewed negatively. As with eldercare, in Europe robots are seen as machines, whereas in Asia they are viewed as potential companions. In the United States, the question is largely avoided because of an immigration system that facilitates the entry of new, low-cost labor that often ends up in fields that might othe...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1476753660
• ISBN 13: 9781476753669
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320