The Industries of the Future

by Alec J. Ross

Moreover, while weak artificial intelligence, whereby robots simply specialize in a specific function, is currently advancing exponentially, strong artificial intelligence, whereby robots demonstrate humanlike...

scientists need a better understanding of the brain before these advances progress beyond winning a game show.

“Robots are going to become increasingly human. But the gap between humans and robots will remain—it’s so large that it will be with us for the foreseeable future.”

The level of investment in robotics, combined with advances in big data, network technologies, materials science, and artificial intelligence, are setting the foundation for the 2020s to produce breakthroughs in robotics that bring today’s science fiction right into mainstream use.

As Sebastian Thrun, founder of the Google Car Project, explained, “There was no way, before 2000, to make something interesting. The sensors weren’t there, the computers weren’t there, and the mapping wasn’t there. Radar was a device on a hilltop that cost $200 million dollars. It wasn’t something you could buy at RadioShack.”

Anthony Levandowski described the shortcomings of the earlier electric models in this way: “We don’t have the money to fix potholes. Why would we invest in putting wires in the road?”

Today, however, almost every major car company is researching and building its own version of a driverless car. But the company at the forefront is not a t...

Google X, has been working on the driverl...

While much of the technology is proprietary and secret, the company has disclosed a few of its most prominent features. Among other technologies, the Google car includes radar, cameras to ensure that cars stay within lanes, and a light detection and ranging system. Infrared, 3D imag...

Google has hired the former deputy director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Ron Medford, to be its director of safety for self-driving cars.

The average American spends 18.5 hours a week driving, and Europeans spend about half that. Any time not spent behind the wheel is time you can spend using a Google product.

Accidents are caused by the four Ds: distraction, drowsiness, drunkenness, and driver error.

that’s in all likelihood a significant step forward, especially if a human driver and the programmer can work together.

Uber, the mobile app that connects passengers with drivers for hire, has turned the taxi market on its ear. But what happens when that market is challenged by robots? Uber has already built a robotics research lab stuffed with scientists to “kickstart autonomous taxi

the delivery driver may be replaced by Amazon’s airborne delivery drones or automated delivery trucks. UPS and Google are also testing their own versions of the delivery drone. Two and a half million people in the United States make their living from driving trucks, taxis, or buses, and all of them are vulnerable to displacement by self-driving cars. It’s hard to wrap your head around all the changes this might mean. I met the CEO of a company that develops high-tech access control systems (like the new parking garage system at the airport that tells

The degree to which delivery drones fill the sky or driverless cars fill the streets will eventually be determined not by whether it is feasible technologically and economically—at some point it will be—but by whether humans accept the changes they bring about. Who would you rather trust behind the wheel: a friend, a parent, a person—or a black box that you can’t control?

In 2013, 1,300 surgical robots were sold for an average cost of $1.5 million each, accounting for 6 percent of professional service robots and 41 percent of the total sales value of industry robots.

The robot translates a surgeon’s hand into more precise “micromovements” of the robot’s tiny instruments. But at a cost of $1.8 million, it’s only available to the wealthiest hospitals and institutions.

Johnson & Johnson’s SEDASYS system automates the sedation of patients undergoing colonoscopies, easing the over $1 billion cost of sedation each year.

The services of anesthesiologists typically increase the price of surgery by $600 to $2,000. SEDASYS, already approved by the Food and Drug Administration and going into hospitals today, would cost only $150 per procedure. It would not eliminate anesthesiologists altogether. Instead, like autopilot, systems like SEDASYS merely aid the doctor, enabling an anesthesiologist to monitor ten procedures taking place simultaneously as opposed to having an anesthesiologist in each operating room.

Instead of radiation from an external source, which damages healthy living tissues along with cancer, these robots release a radio beam inside the body that emits radiation into cancer cells with pinpoint accuracy.

Using 3D printing, a medical engineer can even create a customized implant that can travel through a patient’s body to fit perfectly where it’s needed.

With the pressure on insurance companies and health care providers to lower costs, I worry that there will be market forces pushing robots into the operating room at times when a patient is better served by a human being.

Across the globe, 70 million people have severe hearing and speech impairments. There is rarely a medical solution to being deaf or mute, and people with these disabilities often live at high levels of social exclusion. While I was traveling in Ukraine, a group of engineering students in their twenties showed me a shiny black-and-blue robot glove called Enable Talk that uses flex sensors in the fingers to recognize sign language and translate it to text on a smartphone via Bluetooth. This text is in turn converted to speech, allowing the deaf and mute person to be able to now “speak” and be heard in real time. With advances like Enable Talk’s robot inserts and robot sensory enhancement, robotics might not just aid medicine; the distinction between human and machine itself could start to become blurred.

Through his robot, Christian leaves the building for fire drills. He walks the halls and stands in line with the students. And students talk to Christian, the sick, homebound 12-year-old, by talking to his robot.

Ten years ago, the advances now entering operating rooms and classrooms would have been nearly impossible to foresee.

like Ken Goldberg’s radiation-emitting nanobots or Honda’s Walk Assist robot that enables otherwise wheelchair-bound people to walk.

Jellyfish cost the world’s fishing and other maritime industries billions of dollars annually—$300 million in South Korea alone. Then the Urban Robotics Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology created JEROS—the Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm—a large, autonomous blender that hunts and kills jellyfish at a rate of up to one ton of jellyfish every hour.

The term robot was coined in a 1920 play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, by the Czech science-fiction writer Karel Čapek. But its name betrays deeper historical roots. Robot derives its etymological roots from two Czech words, rabota (“obligatory work”) and robotnik (“serf”), to describe, in Čapek’s conception, a new class of “artificial people” that would be created to serve humans.

In this light, robots are a sign of technological advancement but also an updated version of the slave labor that in past centuries people used to exploit other human beings.

Terry Gou, announced a plan in 2011 to purchase 1 million robots over the next three years to supplement the approximately 1 million human workers he employs. Gou has come under fire for his factories’ poor working conditions and labor mistreatment. Many workers live inside the factory itself and work up to twelve hours a day, six days a week. But what happens to Gou’s 1 million human workers when they have 1 million robot coworkers? While the robots are designed to work alongside humans, they’re also designed to keep Gou from having to hire more humans, effectively ending job creation in his factories.

“As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

“Black Lives Matter”

Now service industry jobs are also at risk—precisely the jobs that were shielded from job loss in the last wave of mechanization.

Two Oxford University professors who studied more than 700 detailed occupational types have published a study making the case that over half of US jobs could be at risk of computerization in the next two decades.

Forty-seven percent of American jobs are at high risk for robot takeover, and another 19 percent face a medium level of risk.

When I was growing up, my mom worked as a paralegal at the Putnam County Courthouse in Winfield, West Virginia. Her job largely consisted of rummaging through enormous 15-pound books looking for specific information on old court cases and real estate closings. The books were so heavy and the stacks so high that my mom used to conscript me and my little brother to help her.

Today my mom’s job is largely computerized.

I now think the same thing about my dad, an attorney who’s still working at age 77 with a storefront legal practice just off Main Street in Hurricane, West Virginia.

The role of the lawyer litigating a case in front of judge and jury is not going to be mechanized. But the majority of what most lawyers actually do—developing and reviewing contracts, preparing stacks of paper in legal language to codify the sale of a house or car—these functions will disappear for all but the largest and most complex transactions.

Panasonic created a 24-fingered hairwashing robot that has been tested in Japanese salons. The robot will likely be installed in hospitals and homes as well. It measures the shape and size of the customer’s head and then rinses, shampoos, conditions, and dries the customer’s hair using its self-advertised “advanced scalp care” abilities.

50 percent of American adults have spent time working in a restaurant; 25 percent say it was their first job. More than 2.3 million people are currently employed as waiters or waitresses in the United States.

If entry-level restaurant jobs are reduced or eliminated, how much harder will it be to get a first job? How about a second?

travel agents were replaced by travel websites.

The Chinese government is taking a two-pronged approach: focusing on developing employment by investing heavily in the industries of the future while keeping labor costs low by continuing a forced urbanization policy. In 1950, 13 percent of China’s population lived in cities. Today, roughly half the population has been pushed into cities, and the government aims to push that statistic to 70 percent by 2025.

Absent continued movement of people from rural China to the cities, the cost of labor will continue to go up; it’s simple supply and demand. If the cost of labor continues to rise, China will lose its special advantage in the global marketplace.

Jobs that previously would have gone there have instead begun to move to even cheaper labor markets like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

In 1908, 51,777 workers were employed in West Virginia mines; today only 20,076 people work the mines. Foxconn’s employees are the coal miners of today’s economy.

How societies adapt will play a key role in how competitive and how stable they are. The biggest wins from new technology will go to the societies and firms that don’t just double down on the past but that can adapt and direct their citizens toward industries that are growing.

Many countries, particularly those in Northern Europe, are strengthening the social safety net so that displaced workers have hopes of reemerging in a new field. That means taking some of the billions of dollars of wealth that will be produced from the field of robotics and reinvesting it in education and skills development for the displaced taxi drivers and waitresses.