Joe: A few years ago, two Oxford professors studied over 700 jobs to see which ones could be taken by robots. Their conclusion? Forty-seven percent of all American jobs are at high risk. Lewis: Wait, forty-seven? That's not a typo? Nearly half of all jobs? That's… terrifying. Is this just more sci-fi speculation, or is there something real to this? Joe: It’s very real. And it’s the central question in Alec Ross's book, The Industries of the Future. What's so compelling is that Ross isn't just an academic theorizing from an ivory tower. This is a guy who spent four years as Hillary Clinton's Senior Advisor for Innovation. Lewis: Oh, wow. So he was in the trenches. Joe: Exactly. He traveled nearly a million miles to 41 countries, visiting everywhere from Silicon Valley labs and global power centers to refugee camps in the Congo. He saw the future being built, and in some cases, being torn down. The book became a bestseller on five continents because it offers this incredibly rare, on-the-ground perspective of the next wave of change. Lewis: Okay, so he’s seen the front lines of this technological revolution. That gives his predictions some serious weight. Where does he even begin to unpack something so massive? Joe: That's what makes the book so powerful. He starts not in a high-tech lab, but in his own past, with a mop in his hand.

Lewis: A mop? That’s not what I expected from a top government tech advisor. Joe: It’s the perfect starting point. Ross tells this story from the summer of 1991. He was a college kid working as a midnight janitor in Charleston, West Virginia. It was a town whose industrial base—coal and chemicals—had been hollowed out by the last wave of globalization and automation. Lewis: I can picture it. The kind of place where the good jobs have already left. Joe: Precisely. He describes his coworkers as this 'tough bunch' who were just 'beaten down.' They were in their 40s and 50s, their skills no longer valuable, their options gone. He says the only secure jobs left were the ones cleaning up the mess from country music concerts. He realized he was looking at the 'losers' of the global economy—people whose livelihoods had been replaced by machines or outsourced. Lewis: Wow. That's a powerful image. It’s the human side of these big, abstract economic shifts that often gets lost. It’s not just a statistic; it’s people’s lives. Joe: And Ross argues that the next wave of innovation, driven by robotics and AI, is going to hit the middle class in developed countries just as hard. He points to the story of Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones. In 2011, the founder, Terry Gou, announced a plan to buy one million robots to supplement his one million human workers. Lewis: A one-to-one replacement. That's stark. Joe: It gets worse. Gou’s justification was chilling. He said, "As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache." Lewis: Oh, come on. That's just… bleak. But isn't this just about efficiency? Aren't some of these manufacturing jobs repetitive and grueling anyway? Maybe robots taking them is a good thing. Joe: That's the classic argument, and there's some truth to it. But Ross points to what an MIT professor called "the great paradox of our era." Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet, at the same time, we have a falling median income and fewer jobs. Lewis: So the economic pie is getting bigger, but fewer people are getting a slice. Joe: Exactly. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast that our skills and organizations can't keep up. The janitors in West Virginia were the first wave. The next wave, Ross warns, could be paralegals, accountants, even some journalists—anyone whose job is primarily about aggregating and applying information. The robots are coming for the white-collar jobs too.

Lewis: Okay, so on one hand, code is taking jobs. But Ross also talks about how it's creating entirely new worlds. Let's talk about money. What does he mean by the 'code-ification of money'? Joe: It’s the shift from physical, tangible currency to purely digital, code-based systems. Ross uses a great story to illustrate the problem this solves. It’s about a glassblower named Jim McKelvey who was trying to sell a beautiful, hand-crafted glass faucet for $2,000. Lewis: A glass faucet? I'm intrigued. Joe: Right? But the customer only had an American Express card, and McKelvey, as a small artist, couldn't process it. He lost the sale. He was frustrated and told his friend, Jack Dorsey—who had just left a little company called Twitter. Lewis: I think I see where this is going. Joe: You got it. That single lost sale sparked the idea for Square, the little white dongle that lets anyone accept credit cards on their phone. It eliminated the friction. But Ross argues this is just the beginning. The next step is to eliminate the banks and even governments from the equation. Lewis: And that's where Bitcoin comes in. Hold on, 'blockchain.' Everyone throws that word around. In simple terms, what is it and why does it matter? Joe: Think of it as a public, digital ledger. A giant, shared Google Doc that everyone can see but no one can change without everyone else agreeing. Every transaction is a new entry, a 'block,' which gets added to the 'chain.' It's transparent and, in theory, un-hackable. It creates trust without needing a bank or a government to verify things. Lewis: Okay, a public, un-hackable Google Doc for money. I get that. But if it's so secure, why do we keep hearing about people's Bitcoin getting stolen? Joe: That's the crucial distinction Ross makes. The blockchain itself has never been hacked. The problem is the infrastructure around it—the exchanges, the digital wallets. He tells the story of the Mt. Gox exchange, which was like the Wild West of Bitcoin. In 2014, it collapsed, and 850,000 bitcoins, worth nearly half a billion dollars at the time, just… vanished. Lewis: So my digital money could just… disappear? That doesn't inspire a lot of trust. Joe: Exactly. It’s the promise and the peril. But the weaponization of code goes far beyond theft. Ross details the 2012 Shamoon cyberattack on Saudi Aramco, the world's largest energy company. It wasn't about stealing money. It was about pure destruction. Lewis: What happened? Joe: A rogue employee, likely linked to Iran, walked in with a USB drive. The virus he unleashed didn't steal data; it erased it. It wiped the hard drives of 35,000 computers, replacing the data with an image of a burning American flag. It was a digital apocalypse designed to bring the company, and potentially a huge chunk of the global oil supply, to a grinding halt. Lewis: That's terrifying. It’s not just about losing your savings; it’s about turning the digital tools we rely on into weapons that can cause real-world chaos. Joe: And that’s the new reality. Ross argues that cyber has become the fifth domain of warfare, alongside land, sea, air, and space. But it’s a domain with no rules, no Geneva Convention. It's a digital free-for-all.

Joe: And this question of trust and risk isn't just for individuals or companies; it's for entire nations. This leads to Ross's final, and maybe most important, point: who is going to win in this new world? Lewis: It seems like the winners would be the countries with the most money and the biggest armies, right? The US, China... Joe: You'd think so, but Ross argues the key determinant won't be size or military might. It will be a country's culture of openness. To prove his point, he presents this fascinating natural experiment that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union. Lewis: An experiment? Joe: Two neighboring countries, Estonia and Belarus. In 1991, they both started from the same place: economic ruin. But they made opposite choices. Belarus, under its autocratic leader, chose control. It remained a closed, state-run economy, a relic of the Soviet era. Lewis: And Estonia? Joe: Estonia chose radical openness. They embraced technology, made internet access a human right, and put government services online from day one. They started teaching first-graders how to code. They created an 'e-residency' program, allowing anyone in the world to start a business in Estonia digitally. Lewis: So Estonia is the scrappy startup that bet everything on open-source and agile development, while Belarus is the old corporation still running on COBOL and refusing to connect to the internet. Joe: That's a perfect analogy. And the results are staggering. Today, Estonia's GDP per capita is 15 times what it was and it's a global innovation hub—it's where Skype was born. Belarus has stagnated. Ross uses this to show that you can't just build a 'Silicon Valley' by throwing money at it, which is what Russia tried and failed to do with its 'Skolkovo' project. You need the underlying culture of freedom, trust, and openness. Lewis: It’s a powerful lesson. You can't command-and-control your way to innovation. It has to grow organically, in an open environment. Joe: And that openness extends to people. Ross argues that the most important step a country can take to be competitive is to fully empower all its citizens, especially women. He contrasts the rising role of women in Chinese business with the struggles they still face in Japan's rigid corporate culture, suggesting it's a major reason Japan's economy has stalled.

Lewis: This is a fascinating tour of the future, but it's also kind of overwhelming. What's the takeaway for us, for our kids? How do we prepare for a world that's changing this fast? Joe: That's exactly where Ross ends the book. He says that for all the talk of geopolitics and technology, the most important job any of us will ever have is being a parent. And in that role, we need to equip the next generation for this new reality. Lewis: So what do they need? Joe: He boils it down to three key fluencies. First, multicultural fluency. The world is more interconnected than ever. Understanding different languages and cultures isn't a soft skill anymore; it's a core competency. Second, technical fluency. Learning a programming language like Python, he argues, is as fundamental as learning Spanish or French. It teaches you a new way to think. Lewis: And the third? Joe: Analytical skills. As routine tasks get automated, the real value will be in managing the computers, asking the right questions, and understanding complex problems. It's about the blend of science and humanities—the ability to see both the data and the story. Lewis: It’s a call to move beyond the old silos of education. Joe: Absolutely. And it’s a call for responsibility. He brings it all back to that janitor's closet in West Virginia. He says the obligation of those with power and privilege is to shape policies that extend opportunities to as many people as possible, to ensure the benefits of this next wave of innovation don't just flow to a select few in Silicon Valley or Shanghai. Lewis: So it’s not just about adapting to the future, but actively shaping it to be more equitable. Joe: That's the core message. Ross leaves us with a choice. We can either adapt and build a more inclusive future, or we can watch as the gap between the winners and losers of this next great transformation grows even wider. The question is, which side will we be on? Lewis: A question we all need to be asking. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.