The world economy stands at a 200-year inflection point – a wrenching transition from the industrial age to the information age that will transform our economy, roil our society and polarize our politics for the foreseeable future.
That's the assessment of Alec Ross, the author and former innovation advisor to the US Secretary of State whose keynote address kicked off the 2016 DLA Piper Global Technology Summit. He spoke to a crowd of more than 200 entrepreneurs, investors and service providers who gathered for the Summit's first-day program, entitled Garage2Global and focused on the challenges and opportunities facing today's technology startups.
Ross, himself a successful tech entrepreneur, spoke at length about the coming revolutions in genomics, robotics and data regulation, cautioning that each would create winners and losers and inflict social disruption as entire industries, and the livelihoods they support are automated. And yet Ross is no pessimist; in fact he argued that the coming disruption will have a good outcome.
"If you look across hundreds of years of history, every precedent indicates we will replace those jobs," he said. "But the next five years are going to be messy."
That messy period, Ross believes, is what economists call an Engels Pause – a transition period between one economic age to another. Western economies suffered through similar tumult during the shift from the agricultural age to the industrial age in the early 19th century – a period that led to the Communist Manifesto, multiple revolutions in Europe and the controversial, sometimes violent formation of labor unions in the US.
That period too was driven by technological change. And Ross sees the same shift occurring now, from an industrial-based economy to one built around information. To illustrate the glory and the difficulty of the current transition, he told a story about autonomous vehicles.
Once a skeptic on the viability of self-driving cars, Ross paid a visit to the Googleplex, where the search giant's founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, invited him into the backseat of one of their prototypes. The vehicle started driving around the parking lot, then picked up speed and then, to Ross's surprise, sped up and rolled onto the 101 freeway. At this point, Ross recalled, he was both terrified and furious.
"I'm thinking somebody's going to die," he said. "Either I'm going to get killed or I'm going to get back there and kill them."
Of course, the trip ended without incident. Ross saw the power of the technology to transform and vastly improve an activity that hundreds of millions of people do every day. But for many of those people, driving isn't just a utilitarian activity – it's a job. In fact, driving a vehicle employs millions of American men without college degrees. So while autonomous cars could make driving safer and increase productivity, it could also create enormous hardship.
And those jobs are just some of the endangered. Artificial intelligence will devour 6 percent of American jobs in the next four years, Ross said. That includes not just physical labor and mundane tasks – many of which have already been replaced by machines – but cognitive, non-routine functions.
That's why, Ross said, the constraints around expansion of technology like autonomous vehicles won't be technical or economic, but cultural and political. The resulting political conflict will not take the form of left vs. right, he argued. Rather, it will manifest as a conflict of those who advocate for open vs. closed societies.
In that environment, Ross said, business leaders – and particularly technology leaders – have a responsibility to rise above the conflict and show government what is possible.
"Technology can demonstrate solutions without putting on a red or a blue cape," he said. "But we have to stay above that partisan infighting in Washington."
In pursuing groundbreaking solutions, Ross ended by encouraging the technologists in the room to make mistakes of commission, not omission – another hopeful note, given that taking chances is what the technology community does best.