In 10 years, innovation that’s now being nurtured and mined at companies all over the world will have led to enormous changes in how people live their lives and how companies operate, remaking the global economy. That’s according to Alec Ross , former innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton during her term as U.S. Secretary of State, who lays out the thesis in his new book, The Industries of the Future .
According to Ross, a decade hence, robots will take care of the elderly, displace Uber drivers , release radiation inside the human body to treat cancer, and automate sedation of patients undergoing colonoscopies, among other tasks. Automation will kill many jobs but create other jobs as well as economic value.
Ross, a distinguished visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University, said that advances in genomics will enable doctors to target cancer cells with unprecedented precision using personalized medicines, diagnose tumors from a blood test and predict who is at high risk of suicide with much better accuracy than current methods.
Meanwhile the technology underlying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, blockchain technology, will greatly reduce the friction in financial and other transactions.
As the weaponization of code grows more lucrative and more destructive, cybersecurity will grow into a large industry.
And big data , he said, will eliminate language barriers and thereby accelerate globalization on a massive scale. Big data will transform consumer banking. It will also increase food production by improving agricultural techniques, which in turn promise a major reduction in air pollution.
I talked to Ross about what these developments will mean for CIOs and other technology leaders.
This interview has been edited for length. How should CIOs and other C-level execs prioritize all the technologies that you cover in your book? […]
