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Have Data—Will Travel

Author and innovation guru, Alec Ross says that technology is shaping the industries of the future.

“Ninety percent of the world’s data has been produced in the last two years. In fact, if you take the sum of all the information produced by human kind—from paintings on cave walls—to the year 2003, the sum of that data we now produce every two days.” 

Ross has led technology policy for U.S. presidential campaigns, and served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to the U.S. Secretary of State. In this podcast, he talks about his new book that looks at the technological forces he believes will shape the next 20 years. Ross says businesses that capitalize on all this new data will be leading the pack.

“Land was the raw material of the agricultural age, iron was the raw material of the industrial age, and data is the raw material of the information age.”

While the agricultural and industrial ages unfurled over long periods of time, Ross says that for many, the changes brought on by digitization are happening at too fast a pace.

“And this is the trick, because human beings are more difficult to upgrade than software.”

Listen to the podcast:

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