Innovation Will Drive Economic Growth in 21st Century
In a recent talk on innovation and economic growth, Senior Fellow Alec Ross discussed important industries of today — robotics and genomics among them — that he predicts will become much more prominent over the next decade.
“It is really remarkable the degree in which what’s happening in robotics right now is going to inform a tomorrow that is largely unrecognizable today in terms of mechanization and in terms of some of the impacts on our workforce,” Ross said. “The robots of the cartoons in movies in 1970s are going to be the reality of the 2020s.”
Ross said that, although robotics has certainly replaced unskilled manual labor, a more nuanced analysis about its actual impact is needed. Ross referred to MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, who make the distinction between cognitive versus manual, and routine versus non-routine.
According to Ross, there is an assumption that robots do manual and routine work. However, he argues that we are increasingly seeing robots doing work that implies a certain level of cognition — like booking an airline ticket.
Ross said it is interesting to see where some of the development of these technologies is coming from. He argued that, while the United States continues to be a leader in robotics, East Asian countries are emphasizing it even more.
For Ross, culture is one of the reasons for this difference. “In Western culture, there are these inherent prejudices against robotics. We are taught that beasts that we create that have human traits are scary. In Eastern cultures, however, these biases are not in place, and robots are being accepted in the workplace and societies,” he said.
Turning to the potential of genomics, Ross pointed out that progress made in this field over the past few years has also been remarkable. “People can now pay about $4,000 to have their DNA sequence and tumor map. The cost three years ago was $100,000,” he said.
Ross, however, warned that not everyone will have access to the commercialization of genomics. “It is going to overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy before it benefits everyday people,” he said.
Ross talked about one of the first attempts to bring genomics to the masses: 23andMe, a genomics and biotechnology company based in Mountain View, California, that for a relatively low cost provides rapid genetic testing to identify potential health risks. Ross argues that these types of initiatives can create more panic than precision.
When asked about who is winning the innovation race, Ross said it is going to skew to a few specific markets.
Ross shared with the audience some interesting data from Telefonica’s Survey of the Millennial Generation. Millennials in Western Europe spend the least amount of time online, with an average of five5 hours per day. In North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia, young people spend up to seven hours online everyday.
In the same study, millennials were asked if they believed they could be an entrepreneur in their country. Western Europe was again a negative outlier, with only 55 percent of respondents being optimistic about entrepreneurship versus 77 percent in the United States and 70 percent in Asia.
“Almost 40 percent of America’s GDP comes from companies that did not exist 35 years ago,” he said. “If economies are going to continue to be built through new firm formation and entrepreneurship, then this simple measure of optimism is telling us something.”
The lecture was part of a series on “21th Century Statecraft.” Ross, one of America’s leading experts on innovation, served as senior advisor for innovation under then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his efforts to maximize the potential of technology and innovation in service of America’s diplomatic goals, Ross traveled to more than 40 countries and advanced the State Department’s interests on a range of issues including cyber security, Internet freedom, disaster response, and the use of technology in conflict zones.
— Valle Aviles Pinedo MIA ’14