Every night for the next several weeks on cspan2 booktv will be in prime time. Tonight booktv highlights non Fiction Books on the future. We will hear from author alec ross on the industries of the future and dhen a conversation with the authors of the book the smartest places on earth later a take on the future of food science. That will be followed by booktvs after wards with steve case on the future of entrepreneurship. You will have a front row seat to every minute of the Republican National convention and Democratic National convention. Watch live stream without commentary or commercials. Use the video clipping tool to create your own clips of moments and share them on social media. And read twitter feeds from delegates and reporters in clooend and philadelphia. Our special Convention Pages have everything you need to get the most of cspans gavel to gavel coverage. Go to cspan. Org Republicannational Convention and cspan. Org democraticnational convention. Our special page and all of cspan. Org a Public Service of your cable satellite provider. Check it out on the web at cspan. Org. Cspan makes it easy to keep up the latest convention developments with the cspan radio app. Available for me on the Apple App Store or google play. Get audio coverage of every minute of the conventions, as well as Schedule Information about important speeches and events. Get cspan on the go with the cspan radio app. Host good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming out on this beautiful surveillance transparency act. It is great to see all of you here. I am lissa and we welcome all of you as does our fabulous staff here. Before we get started i just want to mention a few housekeeping matters. If you have a cellphone on or device that might make an unwelcomed sound and you could silence that we would appreciate that. If you have a question please come to the microphone. We are video taping this and we have cspan here. It is helpful if people can hear the questions during the q a. And lastly, you do not need to fold up your chairs. Usually we ask you to but we have more events today. Leave them and alec will do a signing at the end. He will speak for a bit, do the q a and then the signing. Here is his book. It is terrific. We have plenty of copies. It is at the front if you have not had a chance to pick it up yet. For those missing our coffee shop and know it is under renovation, we have installed a temporary coffee cart operating during the day. If you are feeling desperately in need of a caffeine fix at any point during it day or after the event please feel free to go downstairs and by coffee, tea and they have pastries as well. For me, this is a personal pleasure to be able to introduce not only a terrific author for a terrific book, but a friend and formal colleague of mine, alec ross, to politics and prose. We workled together at the state department under secretary Hillary Clinton. The first time i met him i realized this guy was a force of nature. His title at state was Senior Advisor for innovation which tells you how much the world of diplomacy has changed. His job was to invasion Ways Technology could be used on behalf of Foreign Policy and help shape Democratic Values and cultures around the world. It was really, really exciting from my Vantage Point and i am completely prehistoric when it comes to my understanding of this but it was exciting to watch his work unfold. Little things i remember, and these are probably so tiny you will be embarrassed i am mentioning them. But the secretary went to the democratic republic of congo to visit with various people and also with women existing in the worst part of the world for gender based silence. Was there a way to arm woman with cell phones so they could report the crimes, take pictures and the crease justice being done through that technology . Could poor women in Subsaharan Africa use phones to get weather reports and adjust with that information and technology. Could a couple guys with laptops and access to social media up end the dominance of fark in columbia and on and on. Alec thinks more broadly than these examples. He helped craft the secretarys open internet agenda and he has been advising Business Leader now. He is a distinguished fellow at John Hopkins University as well. More to the point, he put all of this experiences and ideas on paper in a book. I dont know if you are as illschooled as i am on this futuristic stuff but we know robotics, genetics, and cybersecurity and uber, and air b and b and isis even are changing the way we work and govern and protect ourselves but what are the ramifications of these industries now and into the future . And i think this is important to stress and part of the work at state but i know very important to him personally in this field is how do we harness the forces for political, social and civic good. These are the questions he poses and answers in his wonderful new book called the industries of the future. I have to say having watched alec in action i am delighted all of this energy and creativity and ideas will reach well beyond the seventh floor of the state department. It is an important book to understand our world now and how it is unfolding. Please join me in welcoming alec ross to politics prose. Guest this is my first reading. The book came out on tuesday. I am so pleased to be able to do it here. This is absolutely the place i wanted to do the first one. Let niasia ellis me say, i hope you all buy the industries of the future but whether you do or dont buy something here. Bookstores like politics prose are very and important. One thing i understand and studied is digitization and picasey said it bes when he said every act of creation begins with an act of destruction. Unfortunately it is difficult for independent bookstores to make it in this day. Buy the industries of the future but buy another book, too. How i actually want to get started is i want to read a bit from the introduction just to cue things up, then talk a little bit about why i wrote the book, read another little section, and then get into some q a. And we served together as diplomats at the state department both of us working for Hillary Clinton but i am not a diplomat any more so feel free to ask undiplomatic questions. It is 3 a. M. And i am mopping up whiskey smelling puke after a country concert in West Virginia. It is the summer of 1991 after my first year of freshman college. Most of my friends are doing fancy internships at law firms, congressional offices and investment banks, i am one of six guys on the janitoral crew at the charleston civic center. Working the midnight shift is worse than jet lag. You have to decide if you want your work to be the beginning of your day or the end of your day. I would wake up at 10 p. M. , eat breakfast, work from midnight to 8 a. M. , and then go to bed around 3 p. M. The other five guys on the crew were a tough bunch. They were good guys but beaten down. One carried a pint bottle of vodka in his back pocket that was done by lunch at 3 a. M. A scraggly red head who was sort of near by age. The others were in their 40s and 50s at what should have been the peak of their wage earning potential. The way Country Music concerts work in West Virginia was people drink too much and our job was to clean up the result. We used florescent blue chemicals that would sizzle when poured on the floor. The last wave of innovation produced winners and losers. The investors, entrepreneurs and high skilled labors that gathered around the fast moving markets were for the winners. Another were the one billion who moved from poverty to the middle class because their low cost labor was an advantage. The losers were people who lived in high cost labor markets like the United States and europe whose skills could not keep up with the pace of technological change in globalizing markets. The guys i mopped with on the midnight shifts were the losers because the job they could have gotten in a coal mine had been replaced by a machine and whatever job they could have gotten in a factory from the 1940s to the 1980s moved to mexico or india. For these men, being a midnight janitor was not just a summer job it was to me, it was one of the only jobs left. Growing up i thought life in West Virginia was representative of life everywhere. You were doing your best to manage the slow dissent. But what where was witnesses only made sense as i traveled the world and saw other regions rising as West Virginia was falling. So my point of departure in writing this book is from the perspective of a Public School kid from wes virginia who worked as a midnight janitor or on a beer truck. There is not an ounce of blue blood in this body. Since my time working as a janitor, since my time working on a beer truck, i have been very fortunate. It is that kind of opportunity that did over the course of the 20something years allow me to work for the secretary of state, it allows me to do things now like work at john hopkins and advise government and Business Leaders around the world. But i have tried to not forget the experience of growing up in a Community Like the one that i did in West Virginia which floundered in the last stage of globalization. After i left government, i asked myself a question i said if the last 20 years were shaped in significant measure by digit digitalization and rise of the internet and large scale globalization what next . What is going to shape the next 20 years . So the book, the industries of the future, is the product of a couple years of research about what is next. There are a couple thesis that emerge from it that i want to briefly explain before i read another section and tell another story. It is a net optimistic book. Most people who write about the future or who write about technological or scientific driven change tend to be utopian books where we are all going to grow up healthy and wise or they are distopian and written from the fetal position. I think this book is a little different dystopian. I consider myself a realistic idealis. Idealist. I try to describe the world in real terms. Briefly, subjects i write about in the book is number one, the rise of artificial intelligence, Machine Learning and robotics. I believe the robots like c cartoons are going to be the realities of the 2020. The belief space that took things that were very complex for robots like grasping which might seem straight forward but it is difficult to model mathematically. Breakthroughs in mathematics and modeling belief space combined with cloud robotics, the idea a device doesnt have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and software but it can be a lowcost light weight device means that automation and robotics specifically are going to be able to doing things that are manually and routine to cognitive and nonroutine. When you think about automation, the peoples whose jobs were displaced in the last wave of globalization, like the men i worked with on the midnight shift mopping up in the charleston civic center, the next level impacts what i call lowlevel white coller workers. I think about my father who worked hard for 45 years as a country lawyer in West Virginia and most of what he has done is real estate closing. Preparing nineinch tall stacks of paper that you sign for half an hour, 40 times. It requires cognition but there is also a lot of repetition in it. So the jobs that have been displaced over the last 20 years have been largely rooted in displacing work that involved peoples shoulders and next is the work my father did for 40 plus year. White collar but rooted in repetative work. The worlds last 12 millitrilli industry was created out of computer code and next is genetic code. We are 15 years past the mapping of the human genome and finally at the point where i believe we are three years away from permize personalized medicine in a way that is not recognizable from the past. You may have noticed president obama made this one of his signature initiatives for his 8th year in office. By way of explanation, i want to read another passage from the book and tell the story briefly of lucas wartman. Lucas wartman is the kind of guy you invite to a dinner party to impress your guests. He mixes advice about which murals to see in mexico city with ecounts of the latest dwepts in Cancer Research now taking place inside the worldpist most advanced life science labs. Raised 45 minutes outside of chicago, we speaks with midwestern talk. He is quite and ernest and blue eyes and short brown hair. His Facebook Page is filled with photos of him and his doing. He is a lowkey guy. While wearing his White Lab Coat the 38yearold doesnt tout his remarkable life story. But he works on the cut edge of genome technology. He studies leukemia in mice and creates genome models of the disease. He has battled acute leukemia and survived three times. It is a cruel coincidence his favorite class in medical school was where he looked at leukemia slides under the microscope. He loves his work. I think i would be a leukemia doctor even without personal experience. You can diagnose a patients cancer just by looking at the blood smear or bone marrow under a microscope. There is something satisfying by being able to diagnose cancer by directly looking at it rather than just by taking care of patients. He has been at Washington University most of his career. Washington University Also saved his life against all odds. In children, all is treatable. But it is often fatal in adults. Survival rates for first relapse are slim. And data for double relapses dont even exist. So when wartman developed all for a third time in 2011 when he was 33 no known treatment could save him. His colleagues at Washington University g eshenoic institute the odds were not good. They decided to sequence the dna and rna from wartmans cancer tells and sequence dna from his skin sample so they could compare the dna between the healthy cells and leukemia cells. All cancer begin with damaged dna that is damaged through time or inherited makeup or environmental factors like cigarette smoke. As a result, it mutates. With cancer the mutated dna and rna which Work Together to make proteins are malfunctioning and failing to control the growth of unhealthy cells creating a tumor or failing in their role as the bodys repair engine and allowing cells to become cancerous. To treat wartman, scientist want to know if the malfunction is from the dna providing bad programming or the rnas role in cretcreating protein isnt working. Sequences his healthy genes and cancer genes was a way of pinpointing where the breakdown occurred. The Washington University team ran the sample through the universitys 26 sequences machine and super computer. Sequences machines can be as small as a desktop computer or as big as a jumbo copy machine from the 1980s. The lab put them all to work and ran day in and day out. Zeroing in on the invisible contours of one mans genetic makeup. After several weeks, Washington University sequence machine found the culprit. One of his normal genes was producing large quanties of flt 3. A protein that was spurring the cancers growth. Genome sequencing can be a fexing endeavor. It is often the case the medical community doesnt have a drug or treatment that are capable of targeting the problem once discovered especially if the mutation is rare. The pharmaceutical compa compan just released a treatment. Because of the sequences, wartman was going to be the first to use it for ala. Within two weeks of taking the drug, he was in remission and soon after in good enough shape to receive a bone Marrow Transplant to insure the cancer wouldnt come back in a mutated form. Four years later no cancer. He has side effects from the treat, eye problems and mouth infections, but it is a small price to pay for being alive. His recovery is remarkable but he is not out of the woods. His outcome is guardered guarded. That he has lived as long as he has he owes to intensive genetic sequences. Quote i dont have any doubt about that. Sequences saved my life. His treatment is just the beginning of the potential of genomics. His story will some day be ordinary some day soon. In the book, you know, as i described the promise and peril that comes economically so too do i try to draw out the advances taking place in the world scientifically. Thinks that are happening for example with the commercialization of genomics which i believe will have three or four years of Life Expectancy to todays Primary School children in the United States. To here i try to examine the unintended consequences or the downside of the commercialization of genomics. For example, with this knowledge that we can acquire the choices available to us for example with genetic selection. We will soon know during pregnancy, between four and eight weeks of pregnancy, instead of knowing it is going to be a boy or girl, very soon on a mass scale we will know, oh it is going to be a boy, he is probably going to be between 57 and 59, he is going to have a 12 chance of getting parkinsons, a 9 chance of being an alcoholic, he is going to have this affinity and that affinity and with that information it is going to be interesting to see the kinds of human decisions we make in the face of this scientific information. And so this is an ambitious book. Instead of a 400 page book about data or robotics i tried to take these and more topics and pull them all together in one place that is accessible. It is storydriven but does have data and Research Behind it. And again i think it is a net optimistic work. With that, what i would welcome is some questions on any topic related to this, or my service at the state department. All i would ask is that if you could for the Television Cameras ask your question from the microphone in the front. Yes, maam . Thank you very much for writing this book. Could you tell us a little bit about the how you got to go to 41 countries . The reason that i think that is interesting is because japan and south korea and any of these countries are doing advance research in the future industries. So i would like to know how did you get that opportunity and what did you discover in some of these more advanced countries . Thank you for asking that. The 41 countries i traveled to were just while at the state department. Apparently i have traveled close to a 100 of the 196 countries on planet earth. My assistant did me a disservice and totaled up the travel and apparently it is the equivalent of two round trips to the moon with a side trip to new zealand. What i saw was remarkable place to place. You specifically mentioned japan and south korea. I write in particular a lot about those in robotics. Japan, for example, in the same way in which it reinvented electronics and cars in the past, so too, do i write here about how they are reimaging robotics. In the western culture we have deeply engrained bias about bringing things to life that ought not to be. From the waxed wings to frankenstein. But eastern cultures are not burden with that mythology. In japan, where 80 of the population practice a belief that all objects have souls, so what is interesting is there are inventions in robotics there and innovations taking place there that we would that would have more of a head wind in the United States. One of the examples i write about are caregiving robots. In japan, they have the oldest citiz citizens on a per capita bases and are growing older. Because of the relatively strong number of japanese and restricted immigration practices there are not enough young japanese people to take care of the grandparents as they age and become feeble. One of the stories i tell is about toyota and honda creating robots that do things like lift up aging parents, play the violin, get food. It is really remarkable. On the opposite end of the spectrum, stair stais what i n subsaharan, african. As you will read in the industries of the future i take a wildly optimistic view of most of Subsaharan Africa from a pure standpoint. It has benefited from the Internet Connections and what we see happening in africa is communities that were historically isolated economically are now connecting to Global Markets in ways that were not possible before. There is a lot of content about africa. And second, do you actually talk about the possibility of some of these technologies being organized in the future . Thank you for the questions. The answer is yes. So, one of the things that is going to create pushback for my friends in Silicon Valley if they do insist on talking about some of the ethical questions that have to be asked and answered because of the development of these technologies. I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley and theres a libertarian egos that says the upward march of technology and science ought not to be scrutinized by anything other than other scientists and technologists, and i think that is a view of things. In every chapter its neither is utopian nor dystopian. What are the upside and downside, so the way that genomics will worry of life as we get a personalized medicine as we are able to find cancers at stage one instead of three and four because we are able to get genetic information. So i say what i babies arent brought to term because they dont match the ideal so its important to have eyes open as we study these. The weaponization there is a chapter called the weaponization of code thats about cybersecurity, and i think the weaponization of the code is the most Significant Development since the fissile material. The difference being creating for Nuclear Weapons provides the scarcest scientific talent and elements whereas creating now where there is a lower barrier to entry. Im from chile working with the world bank and i want to start a short personal note to say thank you for writing this book and being such a great storyteller. Having that passion of your roots and storytelling, im enjoying the book. You mentioned an example and i wanted to know if you have any remarks for the future. In the last stage of globalization we were making sweeping statements. Europe is going to do this and that south america is going to do this. In the next stage we are going to see a lot more fragmentation. South america is going to go up, down or sideways. We are going to see Different Countries doing well and Different Countries stagnate and do poorly. If chile is one of those that i am optimistic so is the Pacific States and south america, chile and south america are positioned for the next ten years and its because theyve thrown out a lot of the market is on thats thrown off of brazil and other states and they havent tried to create a hybrid capitalist model. They really pivoted their Education System to portions of their Education System towards the industry in the future, so very optimistic about chile. I wa i was wondering in your book if you made any mention of the technology and where thats going. I do make brief mention and focus a little bit more on grounds both the positive and negative. The negative. I will see the Aerospace Technology, Aerospace Technology is going to change in the next ten years than exchanged that last 40 to 50 years. Theyve chosen to make this the next great year. Its the best known example of that, but theres other Companies Like the labs and others that are thinking completely outside of the box about the Aerospace Technology. And theres another one called hyperlink thats out there right now talking about the technology and how you can transport people and goods in a way that sounds straight out of science fiction. I do think commercialization, having an idea and taking that and turning it into a product in aerospace takes longer than any other field but by the time you are in the workforce, it will be positive. I was wondering what you see about the future of work this was the creator of the currency but i think it is an equalizing force and is critical. There is no more important question being asked right now because we see the nature of work changing as it goes from being an employer based to projectbased. We see these different libra patterns among the millennialist than we do among the people in my generation. I am 44yearsold and they are working with different work patterns than the way my generation has. So theres a section called codification of money, markets and trust. My theory is that as we increasingly develop marketplaces for labor its going to dramatically change the future of the work. We have seen the sharing economy because nobody is sharing anything. Dont forget your credit card. We see i think the possibility of using apps to distribute labor and goods in ways that were not previously possible. So that which has been done for extra bedrooms with ayer b b is going to be done with new forms of labor, and i think its going to have really significant impacts as is the case i write about for good and ill and the unintended consequences. The balance of the reward and curtains he is one of the variables. Yes sir. Happy to be here. I started following you on twitter when i found out you were going to be here. Currently i have an International ConsultingCompany Based here. Hightech companies and big business for the fourth industry revolution do you think thats going to increase even more, and i say that meaning do you think you mentioned Subsaharan Africa for example. We all have cell phones now. Do you think companies are going to shift these highly skilled and highpaying jobs from traditional eastern or western countries like the u. S. Or europe and spend less money to train these people that still may live in a village to do the same job in the same productivity from even greater value and i mean less money then somebody here clack im glad you asked that question because i can give an optimistic answer about it. This is a good thing. One of the stories i tell in the book is about a Company Called andella that goes into places of Subsaharan Africa where theres a will to places like legos nigeria into places with lots of population benefited in recent years from connectivity into the thesis is that if you identified the top 1 of talent in these places and you rigorously trained them than they can be good enough to work for like google but because the connectivity, they dont have to leave legos or nairobi so what they have done is build a marketplace out of that where they are taking these spectacularly brilliant young nigerians and kenyans and putting them through the toughest kind of Technology Training and they then create essentially a marketplace where they can go work for google, and they can do so from legos or nairobi. What that means is the capital is flowing from Silicon Valley to Subsaharan Africa and youre able to build Human Capital in these countries thats going to be lasting and the founders of the future companies so this is a case i am wildly optimistic. Is there anybody else doing that right now . At the beginning of a larger trend that you will read about in the book. Ive only got six or seven more minutes at the microphone so im going to answer your questions quickly. I had to think whats going to change our world is business structure. We own the data and creativity a hybrid of cooperatives that use capitalist dynamics, incentive rewards, investments, entrepreneurship, capital to build the cooperative model. I tried to launch it in boston between mit and harvard and got nowhere until i went to the midwest and the coops are a big pain in the midwest. At the reception was exactly 100 different and what i want to get from you is an idea of what you found. Youve been around the world and a lot of countries where they are vitally important. I want to get an idea of the evaluation of the acceptance and possibility of that model in those countries. The thesis is the land was the material of the agricultural age. It was of the Industrial Age and he is theva is the raw materiale information age. He who controls the land have the political power and the economic power. He who owned the factories and controlled access during the Industrial Age to the political and economic power. He or she controlled the data and the information and have the political and economic power so it can be viable anywhere. What youre able to do is build Business Models where you are able to control the data and build models. With Silicon Valley has done for us is organized. We can do that alternatively or by ourselves using the capitalist strengths. Thats right. The thesis is instead of having to be domicile in the Silicon Valley platform it will be increasingly commoditized. Two more questions. My question is a political question. You worked for Hillary Clinton. Whats your impression . [laughter] i hope she is in a hotel room with cspan on and listening. Given what ive studied about the industries of the future its pretty clear that we need a competent intelligent person who understands and is passionate about the wellbeing of the parts working in the middle class who are going to be streamed by the development of these industries, and i think that shes perfectly suited to do it not just because she cares about the working middle class i think marco rubio cares but as a practical matter youve got to be able to come up with policies that become law that position people to succeed in the industries of the future and