finish it. david shuster, al jazeera. and that's our broadcast. thanks for watching. i'm john siegenthaler. ali velshi "on target" is next. ♪ on target tonight robots in the workplace, cyber war between nations and designer babies. our digital future and how it will change the way we live. get ready because the future is coming. how many times have you heard that? now you hear a lot about a so-called fourth industrial revolution. that's already upon us, by the way. this revolution was undo the global industrial economy, which has underpinned the advances made by human society for more

than 200 years. replacing the old model will be a global digital economy fueled by advances in information technology, data crunching, automation and robotics as well as advances in genetic and biological sciences. that's a lot, but to really understand the gravity of what i'm talking about, it is useful to go back in history and see how transformative past industrial revolutions have been. in the late 1700s the british pioneered the use of water, superheated into steam by coal to power mechanicized production. that led to factories dotting the countryside producing clothes and textiles. the second industrial revolution in the late 1800s switched to coal power to electrical power to create mass production. the economies of scale involved change the course of human history by destroying cottage industries and luring millions of workers from the fields to the cities and towns.

the third industrial revolution in the final decades of the 20th century took off with the use of electronics and information technology to automate the mass production. that computer revolution created all the devices we can't imagine living without today. the fourth industrial revolution, the one that's now underway, is being fueled by billions of people and things connected by mobile devices with unprecedented processing power. more storage capacity than you could ever imagine, and access to knowledge. the possibilities are multiplied by emerging technologies and artificial intelligence, robotics, digital networks, nanotechnology and biotechnology and great advances in computing power. like all of the revolutions before them, this one will come with winners and losers. the disruption this one will bring will be as life-changing azouni other. joins me now to discuss the opportunities and pit falls of

this fourth industrial revolution is alec ross. he's the grandson of a man that dug coal out of the mines in west virginia. alec was a senior adviser on innovation to the secretary of state whose job was to take a lead diplomatic role on policies around cyber security and internet freedom. he's the author of a must read new book, "the industries of the future." in the book he said this new digital revolution will generate prosperity for millions of people worldwide, but at a cost. he estimates it will eliminate some 5 million jobs around the globe because of the trend toward automation and digital marketplaces. alec ross joins me now. great to see you. i'm so much smarter for reading it book, but it speaks to an issue we talked a lot about on this show. the dirty little secret behind the remarkable advances and great valuations we put on tech companies are the people who

like your grandparents, the people you worked with and grew up in west virginia. le the coal workers that decrease in value to our society. this revolution is going to do this to droves of other people. >> that's exactly right. if you think about the last wave of globalization and labor automation, it really displaced the work of men with strong shoulders working in ports, factories, mills and mines. what's interesting is the technologies that are being developed now are not going to just displace the jobs of men with strong shoulders. it's going to replace work of people with white collars. it's going to not just do manual, routine work, but increasingly cognitive, non-routine work. this is really going to significantly impact the work force, and it's going to force us to make tough choices about how to educate people how to compete in that world. >> you really indicate in the book that we're made of the same

stuff. that people are smart. you believe that talent is everywhere, but opportunity very clearly is not everywhere, and we are seeing this in america. we are seeing this in how inequality, wage inequality, income inequality and the dissatisfaction so many americans feel in this mrit sal cycle. >> i grew up, as you said, amidst rural poverty in west virginia. i was then a teacher in west baltimore, some concentrated urban poverty. then i've been lucky and worked in the white house situation room with these people in these kinds of places. i have news for you, i couldn't have a stronger conviction that the kids that i grew up with in west virginia, kids that i taught in baltimore are made of the same stuff as the people that i worked with in the white house situation room. but there's a big misalignment between the educations being delivered in these very poor

communities and the educations being delivered more often than not in the communities that are producing the people who get to work in the white house. >> you have studied education and technology all around the world. there is no shortage of the ability to fix our unequal education system in the united states. there's no work that has to be done to figure it out. so what is it? is it just political will? is it they're entrenched interests that don't want to see it change? >> it is political will. look, you can't take an incremental approach to making a pivot to the fourth industrial -- to the fourth industrial age. what we also have to do is we have to focus on segments of our education system that the cool kids don't focus on like vocational education, community college. these serve millions and millions of very vulnerable people, and so what we need to do is also focus on things like vocational education and make sure that the skills that are being developed there really map to where the job growth is. >> you talk about west virginia.

when you were there, it was still -- when you were growing up, it was toward the end of the heyday. west virginia, you notably point out, separated from virginia around the civil war era because virginia was southern and rural and west virginia was really the heart of what was going on in the industrial world. it was powering it with its coal. >> that's right. >> you saw the end of coal being as important. the population of west virginia has dropped significantly since when you were a kid. you talk about baltimore. it was where people went to work after an industrial revolution. they went to work in factories and mills and do good, pie-paying labor. that also has been lost. >> that's right. as we move from an industrial economy to an increasingly technology-rich, knowledge-based economy, where we have to look now is where is the data? land was the raw material of the agricultural age. iron was the raw material of the industrial age. data is the raw material of the information age. so in a very high-cost labor

market like the united states, all we can really viably create are knowledge-based industries. so what we have to do, wherever we are, is figure out what are the knowledge products? what are the things that we can do with data to constitute the products and services of the future? >> so fundamentally who is at risk? you've been able to outline jobs or types of people or areas of training where they will flourish because of this new age, and others that will entirely disappear. some of them are not untu intuitive. if somebody is watching this with a high school-aged child, what should she think about? >> don't send them to law school, first of all. i think a lot of the kind of work that is repetitive in nature, the $1,000 an hour highest-paid lawyer that does, you know, her job is fine. the kind of legal work that my father did, creating the foot tall stack of papers that you sign during a house closing,

that will be replaced. >> the number of lawyers who litigate, who are in court who do what we see on tv is a small proportion of the lawyers. >> it's very small. anything like contractual, things that are repetitive in nature will be eliminated. let's focus on what's not. some of the things not eliminated are those things that are actually humanistic. things that involve emotional intelligence and understanding of behavioral psychology, strong communication skills. so i think that the best possible education we can get our kids right now is the necessary scientific and technological literacy, but combine it with these attributes from the humanities and put them together. that's what our kids need. >> let's talk about data. you mentioned that. we live in a society where some embrace everything you can do with data and digital things, and others are a little bit scared of it. there are some really

intimidated, that our privacy will be gone and we'll be unsafe. data is something to be stolen or all about surveillance. how do you navigate that road? >> first, one thing i would say is the industries of the future is neither a utoppian book nor distoppian. i'm not going to say everything is fine and we'll be wealthy and happy and wise and there's nothing to worry about with all the data. by the same token, i don't view this issue from the fetal position. here's what i think. i think that we're going to lose a lot of our privacy. this is like gravity. it's inevitable. today in march of 2016, we live in a world of 16 billion internet-connected devices. four years from now, which is not that long from now, that number goes from 16 billion to 40 billion. so forget about surveillance. this is suviellance. this is billions of devices tracking where we're going and all of that. i'm sorry to say this as a

father of three young children. they will grow up in a world with inherently less privacy than we have, but what will change is norms will change. in a world where everybody has a scandal and in a world where we're constantly -- >> scandal won't be that important. we go back to people running for office. >> that's right. we're leaving fingerprints everywhere that no one will care as well. >> all right. stay with me. i want to have a conversation about robotics and a very interesting conversation about bitcoin. come ing up, i will continue ou conversation about our cyber future with alec ross and we talk about who stands to win and lose as this nevable digital revolution rolls on. this is our american story. this is america tonight.

get ready because the future is coming. the new digital economy is taking over, and it's undoing our global industrial economy in the process. advances in information technology, data crunching, automation and robotics as well as advances in science are changing human society beyond recognition. the possibilities for increasing our prosperity are huge, but sow are the pitfalls, for those whom the revolution leaves behind. i'm back with alec ross, he's a technology futurist and author of a new book called "the industries of the future." i like half of society have an

iphone. we heard about the controversies. they're built by foxcon in china where workers earn very little money and that's why we buy them for what we buy them for. foxcon has more than half a million robots now and will have a million in the next couple of years. they have a million workers. they have a million robots. this is fascinating. one of the cheapest labor cost places in the world is replacing its low-level labor with robots. what are the implications of this for all of us, including china? >> if you think about robots and humans, they have diametrically opposed cost structures. humans have few capital expenditures. >> the up-front cost is on the parents and not the employer. >> we have lots of op ex, operating expenses. we want a salary. robots are the exact opposite. very expensive to buy, but wuf them you can work them 24 hours a day, don't have to get a

salary or get sick or unionized. as the computers grow more affordable, there are new equilibrium points. >> that is happening. it gives us more computing power the athe same cost every couple year. >> the ceo of foxcon announced he doesn't want to hire any more humans, even though they're low-cost chinese laborers dropped from the chinese interior. he said the cheap china labor is too expense. he'll just buy a robot. this will significantly change global labor markets, and we can't just count on made in china meaning that it's going to help -- that there's going to be the continual creation of an upwardly mobile middle class there. >> this is a real problem. in the end you look at china, these are places that have really brought themselves out of extreme poverty. you write in your book that india growing up was the india of remarkable poverty and famine and mother teresa.

now it's a place of increasing prosperity and same thing with china. they moved everyone into the cities to get these jobs to make things and sell them to the entire world. if that goes away, does half the world still remain poor? >> i tell you what, i choose to take a mostly optimistic view of this, because if you do look across hundreds of years of history, whenever we've automated things in industry, in farms we say what are we going to do next? yet, we have always created those fields that produced the jobs of tomorrow. i'm choosing to be optimistic. >> what about the displaced workers? we travel a lot. you have a great analogy about cab drivers, for diplomats or journalists they're the best source. >> that's right. >> an automated car which is coming, the aton nus car, gives you better answers to questions or more accurate answers to questions when you're in a cab in another country, but they may not be as rich and textured and as interesting and you may not be riding with someone riding

through the economic cycle of life moving to a higher level. it does change the fabric of society. >> it does. in the face of this what i will say is as the science grows more powerful, as the technology reaches more and more into our lives, we've got to assert our human values more so than ever before. i'm not in favor of slowing down the science and technology, but what i do think is that now as much as ever it's important for us to assert our human values and say, all right, what are the norms that we want around this? what are the regulations around this? what are the practices and protocols around all of this? we aren't completely overrun by the machines. we are telling the machines what to do. the machines aren't telling us what to do. >> it is interesting. you go through talking about the automation of cars. you talk about the things we have to confront. you write a lot about genetics and genetic code.

you think that's the next billion dollar industry. the remarkable advances. we're also going to live. now not only do we lose some jobs but live a lot longer, so we better find ways to make money. >> the last trillion dollar industry was created out of computer code. the next one will be created out of genetic code. we're finally about 15 years after the mapping the human genome at the point where we can create the personalized medicines to keep us alive three, four, five years longer. as all the changes take place in the labor force, we're going to be living longer, and frankly we're outside of the work force longer. this makes me think we have to do more and more and more to make sure we have a good safety net in place. >> no kids. all right. you talk about bitcoin and block chain technology. we have really struggled on this show to understand the value of this. particularly to our viewers. you talk about conversations you had with lloyd blankfine, the head of the biggest investment

bank in the world and most important one, goldman sachs who year after year dismissed the vie ability of crypto currencies and then changed his mind. >> i think bitcoin is like a search engine from the 1990s. i don't think that bitcoin is going to compete with the dollar euro, yen as a competitor of currency, but there's this thing inside bitcoin called the block chain. it's a computer science breakthrough, which i think is going to be applied and be able to create, first of all, a digital currency at some point that is a competitor to the dollar, the yen and the euro but also is going to allow us to do very, very highly trusted transactions between people where normally you would want or need a human. like buying tickets, settling a legal contract, stock sales,

things like this that have a lot of friction and cost. i think the costs are going to go to near zero as this block chain technology enables it. >> you conclude the book with a chapter, the most important job you will ever have, which is what you have to read the book for. what should i do in this weird, changing economy? your answer, the most important job you have? >> being a parent. being a parent. look, i wrote this book through the eyes of somebody with a 13-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son. guys like you and ali, we're going to read the book and think about where we invest and what our jobs might look like in 10 or 15 years. when i researched this and wrote this i was really thinking about my kids and trying to light a little path for parents so that parents know what kind of interventions they should be making in their kids' lives now so that when they get into this very complicated work force, the kids are ready for tomorrow. >> great answer.

alec, great to meet you. thank you for writing this fantastic book. it's called "the industries of the future." how to avoid becoming economic road kill in the age of smart machines. the view from the executive suite at one of the world's biggest technology companies. >> it's a revolutionary approach. >> we are pushing the boundaries. >> techknow is going to blow your mind. >> our experts go inside the innovations, impacting you. >> this is the first time anybody's done this. >> i really feel my life changing. >> techknow, where technology meets humanity. only on al jazeera america.

i am talking tonight about a so-called fourth industrial revolution happening right now. its power has the potential to reshape the global economy. it involves integrating smart internet-connected machines with human labor and blends the digital, physical and biological worlds. this revolution is happening fast, and the people at the forefront of it stand to win big, but like every revolution, there are those who will be left behind. that was one of the big issues at this world economic forum in davos, switzerland. i was there and talked about the revolution pros and cons with john chambers. he's the former ceo of sysco systems. here's what he told me. >> what's changing and this is what it's all about and probably why i enjoy is this fourth industrial revolution is really a digital era. think back to the '90s where the u.s. launched the information age. president clinton created 22

million jobs. i'm a republican. he was amazing. he created 18% growth in real gdp and raised the average income of every american by 17%. this digital era will do the same thing except five to ten times the impact. the implications are 1% to 3% gdp growth for every country in the world, $19 trillion in economic benefit. it will result in disruption, however. you have to think of it in terms of innovation start-up countries and retooling your work force and be inclusive of the entire country and every citizen. think about health care and education. we go from connecting 1,000 devices when cisco was formed in 1984 to 14 billion today to 500 billion. it's not the connectivity. it's getting the right information at the right time to the right machine to make the right decision whether it's on health care or entertainment. it does require all the staging and be very disruptive.

it will create a much larger middle class in the middle east. countries in the middle east are known as start-up nations, not in the traditional industries but in a new era of applications and health care and education. i'm the optimist of the middle east, but it requires the citizens coming together behind the next revolution. >> fundamentally it's the implementation of academies where people get easy access to the education and training required to introduce them into this world in which they can be in start-ups and developing apps? >> exactly. i think each of the countries need to think about retransforming their education system. france is doing that, which hollande, his president, is berth the future of his country on a digital france. moda india the same thing. so it does require a different education reset and more of a start-up nation mentality. network academies for cisco

train a million students around the world for network academies. they use 92% of them say they use what they learned there every day. if they complete the whole program set, they get five to six offers and it talks about the important of rescaling a region regardless of age, gender, et cetera. >> let's talk about the fourth industrial revolution. it's all the talk at davos because that's the theme this year. one has to understand what we discuss here is the past the computer age into this age that we've talked about for a few times. everything is digitized and connected and the implications that has. one of the difficulties that i feel is that we honor innovation and technology. we honor it in the markets and honor what happens. we sort of ignore the dislocation and the disruption, the jobs that will be lost. we're very excited about

autonomous cars and driverless cars and what do you do with the drivers that make a living off of this. how should we address this? >> when the first internet revolution came through, the u.s. led it and president clinton introduced it to all. that's in terms of the impact it could have. many were concerned about the disruptions of jobs, that it would create a have and have not society in the u.s. that there wouldn't be new job creation or gdp wouldn't grow, and the reverse was true. 22.5 million jobs, 18% growth in gdp, 17% growth in real per capita income for all americans on average. so i'm the optimist there. will there be disruption of jobs and companies? absolutely. 40% of the companies in the middle east or in the u.s. will not exist in ten years. there will be more than that number of new companies created, and it will be -- >> they won't employ in the same way. >> i think they actually may. not in the same way. good point.

they will employ more people than exist today, but the people will be doing different jobs. so if you think about what it means in terms of the future, instead of assembling a car, you might be writing the applications for how a driverless car works. instead of going out if you're an insurance person and look at the damage from the storm, you program a drone and fly the drone and look at the damage and come back. so it does require a reskilling of populations. >> that's john chambers, the executive chairman of sysco systems. that's our show for today. the news continues here on al jazeera america.