Review: The Industries of the Future

The Industries of the Future by Alec J. Ross My rating: 2 of 5 stars 

Rating this a two because even though I liked this book I don’t know that I’d recommend it for the following reasons –

1) It’s five years old now, and the technology review the author provides in The Industries of the Future is somewhat dated. It would be amazing if it weren’t, given how rapidly technology is changing.

2) The author worked under Hillary Clinton at the State Department as a Senior Advisor for Innovation, so he’s been well placed to observe and comment on advances in industries and technologies. The flip side of that though is that, at least in this book, he’s provided a rose-colored view of the future through the lens of the US foreign policy establishment.

3) There’s a few things I see as misses – for example, there’s some fantastic work going on right now in rocketry / space industry, including advances in mini-satellites, that is nowhere to be found in this book. Also, and perhaps this is a sign of the age of the book – the term “artificial intelligence” doesn’t appear once in the book even though he spends quite a bit of time on “big data” and the associated analytics, i.e. Artificial Intelligence. AI is also a big part of advances in robotics, but again, in his discussion of robots he focuses on the potential for robots in human form, and doesn’t discuss AI at all.  

4)His intro says that he wants to write the book that will show young people entering the job market where the opportunities will be in the next 20 years, and I think he only partially achieved that. (His discussion of cybersecurity as a rapidly growing profession is right on).

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