Alec J. Ross > Quotes

“there is no greater indicator of an innovative culture than the empowerment of women.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“the next wave will challenge middle classes across the globe, threatening to return many to poverty. The previous wave saw entire countries and societies lifted up economically. The next wave will take frontier economies and bring them into the economic mainstream while challenging the middle classes in the most developed economies.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Not only does Japan have an economic need and the technological know-how for robots, but it also has a cultural predisposition. The ancient Shinto religion, practiced by 80 percent of Japanese, includes a belief in animism, which holds that both objects and human beings have spirits. As a result, Japanese culture tends to be more accepting of robot companions as actual companions than is Western culture, which views robots as soulless machines. In a culture where the inanimate can be considered to be just as alive as the animate, robots”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“The near future will see robot suits that allow paraplegics to walk, designer drugs that melt away certain forms of cancer, and computer code being used as both an international currency and a weapon to destroy physical infrastructure halfway around the world.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“venture capital funding in robotics is growing at a steep rate. It more than doubled in just three years, from $160 million in 2011 to $341 million in 2014.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“That is why China is not just relying on forced urbanization to produce low-cost labor; it is also investing heavily in the industries of the future. There needs to be investment in growing fields like robotics but also a social framework that makes sure those who are losing their jobs are able to stay afloat long enough to pivot to the industries or positions that offer new possibilities.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“The African Robotics Network (AFRON) offers a good model. A community of individuals and institutions, AFRON hosts events and projects to boost robotics-related education, research, and industry on the continent. Through initiatives like its 10 Dollar Robot Challenge, AFRON encourages the development of extremely low-cost robotics education.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“My grandfather understood one of the curious conundrums of globalization: exposure creates not only opportunity but competition, and it can make us question and eventually lose our standing in the world.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Serendipity fades with everything we hand over to algorithms. Most of these algorithms are noiseless. They gently guide us in our choices. But we don’t know why we are being guided in certain directions or how these algorithms work. And because they constitute the value of a company’s intellectual property, there is an incentive to keep them opaque to us.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“the market for consumer robots could hit $390 billion by 2017, and industrial robots should hit $40 billion in 2020. As”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Private companies now collect and sell as many as 75,000 individual data points about the average American consumer.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“The world in which I grew up, the old industrial economy, was radically transformed by the last wave of innovation. The story is by now well worn: technology, automation, globalization.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“And they came to be included in a culture and community that placed the computer science engineer at the highest level of social status.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Creating opportunities for individuals is only the first stage -- the real promise is empowering individuals to leave a lasting impact on their own communities and countries.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“H. G. Wells, “Adapt or perish.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“If international norms and treaties are not agreed to, setting definitions and boundaries for cyberconflict, a cyberwar is just as likely to be fought between a country and a company as it is between two countries. This”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“They marketed it as “Airbed and Breakfast.” It helped them pay the rent and launched the idea for Airbnb: a”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Imagine the kind of quantum leap that human culture would undertake if we were all suddenly given a direct link to the knowledge and experience of everyone else on the planet—if, when we made a decision, we were drawing from not just our own limited experience and expertise but from that of billions of other people. Big data has enabled this quantum leap for the cognitive development of robots.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“The last trillion-dollar industry was built on a code of 1s and 0s. The next will be built on our own genetic code.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“the nonphysical nature of cyberconflict has also made the private sector a combatant.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Americans collectively drive approximately 3 trillion miles per year, and more than 30,000 people die in the process. Worldwide, those statistics are enormous; approximately 1.3 million people die every year in car crashes. Google,”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“And most big data programs do a poor job of identifying which correlations are more or less likely to be spurious. The use of big data to draw inferences that should be evaluated and tested is often neglected in favor of using big data to produce real-time transactions—”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code. Big data is, by its nature, soulless and uncreative. It nudges us this way and that for reasons we are not meant to understand. It strips us of our privacy and puts our mistakes, secrets, and scandals on public display. It reinforces stereotypes and historical bias. And it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try to regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world’s 196 sovereign nation-states. Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. It’s our best chance at feeding 9 billion people, and it will help solve the problem of linguistic division that is so old its explanation dates back to the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel. Big data technologies will enable us to discover cancerous cells at 1 percent the size of what can be detected using today’s technologies, saving tens of millions of lives. The best approach to big data might be one put forward by the Obama campaign’s chief technology officer, Michael Slaby, who said, “There’s going to be a constant mix between your qualitative experience and your quantitative experience. And at times, they’re going to be at odds with each other, and at times they’re going to be in line. And I think it’s all about the blend. It’s kind of like you have a mixing board, and you have to turn one up sometimes, and turn down the other. And you never want to be just one or the other, because if it’s just one, then you lose some of the soul.” Slaby has made an impressive career out of developing big data tools, but even he recognizes that these tools work best when governed by human judgment. The choices we make about how we manage data will be as important as the decisions about managing land during the agricultural age and managing industry during the industrial age. We have a short window of time—just a few years, I think—before a set of norms set in that will be nearly impossible to reverse. Let’s hope humans accept the responsibility for making these decisions and don’t leave it to the machines.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Airbnb has succeeded in bringing eBay’s trust-through-algorithms-and-ratings model to lodging and built a business around it.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Our ability to develop successful programs in the region took advantage of the fact that we were fluent in both the technology and the local language and culture.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“When leaders wonder what they can do to position their societies for the industries of the future, they need to open up and resist control-freak tendencies. The 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak; future grown depends on empowering people.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“Brian has gone from being unable to afford the rent to being a billionaire.”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future

“The adoption of new technology finally occurs when ease of use, economic savings, and trust all come together to work toward change. EVERYTHING”
― Alec J. Ross, The Industries of the Future