Politics and prose. We welcome all of you as does our fabulous staff. Before we get started, i just want to mention a few housekeeping matters. If you do have a cell phone or device that may make in our own welcome, please silence it. We would appreciate that. I also would invite you if you have a question to please come to the microphone right here. We are videotaping this. We also have cspan here. Its really helpful if people can hear the questions. Lastly, you do not need to fold up your chairs at the end. Usually we ask you to, but, but we do have more events today. Please just leave them. Alex will do a signing at the end. I think you have seen his book right here. Its terrific. We have plenty of copies. I hope you will buy it. Its upfront if you havent had a chance to pick it up yet. Lastly, for those who are using our coffee shop and know its under renovation, we have installed a temporary coffee cart downstairs that is operating during the day. If you are feeling desperately in need of a caffeine fix at any point during the day or after this event, please feel free to go downstairs and buy some coffee or tea. They have little pastries as well. Welcome again. I just have to say, for me its really a personal pleasure to introduce not only a terrific author and a terrific book, but a a friend and colleague of mine alex ross. We worked together at the state Department Undersecretary hillary clinton. The first time i met him, i realize this guy was a force of nature. His title at state was Senior Advisor for innovation which in an self tells you how much the world of diplomacy has actually changed. His job was to envision the ways in which technology, the internet, social media and other tools of the digital age could be used on behalf of the u. S. Foreign policy and help shape Democratic Values and cultures around the world. Easy, right . It was really exciting from my Vantage Point and im completely prehistoric when it comes to all of the stuff and my understanding of it. It it was very exciting to watch his work unfold. Little things that i remember, and im sure these are so tiny that he will be embarrassed that i mentioned them, but for but for example, the secretary went to the democratic republic of congo to visit with various people and women who are existing in probably the worst part of the world for genderbased violence. Was there a way to arm women with phones so they could report crimes, take pictures of perpetrators and increase the chances of justice being done through that kind of simple technology. Could poor women in Subsaharan Africa use cell phone apps to get weather and Market Reports and adjust their schedules with that information and technologies . A couple guys with laptops and access to social media up and the dominance of sparking columbia and on and on. Now alex, of course, thinks far more broadly than these little micro examples. He helped craft the internet agenda. In the years since leaving government, he advised government leaders around the world on technology and Innovation Strategies and policy. He is also currently a distinguished visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins university. But more to the point, and i think fortunately for all of us, he, he has put all of his experiences and ideas on paper and in a book. I dont know if you are as ill schooled as i am on all this futuristic stuff, but we all no, regardless of how limited our knowledge is, that robotics and genetics insider security along with disruptive organizations are changing the way we live and live our lives. I know very important to him personally in the field, how do we harness these forces for political, social and civic good . These are the questions he poses and answers in his wonderful new book. Its called the industries of the future. I have to say that having watched alec in action, im delighted that with all of his book, his energy and Creative Ideas will reach a public well beyond the the seventh floor of the state department. I really hope you read it. Its really an important book to understand our world as its unfolding and into the future. We have plenty of copies upfront. Please join me in welcoming alec to politic and prose [applause]. Wow. Thank you so much melissa. This is my first reading. The book came out on tuesday and im so pleased to be able to do it here. This is absolutely the place i wanted to do the first one. I hope you all by the industries of the future, but whether you do or not, buy something while you are here because bookstores like politics and prose are very rare. They are very important. One of the things i do understand and have studied intensively is digitization. Picasso said it best when he said every active creation begins with an active destruction. Unfortunately its difficult for independent bookstores to make it in the year 2016. They they do this and of reading for free. By industries of the future, look and buy another book too. I want to get started today is actually want to read a little bit bit from the introduction, just to cue things up. That i want to talk about why i wrote the book, read another little section, and then get into some q a. In the q a, as melissa reference, we served together as diplomats of the state department. Both of us were working for hillary clinton. Im not a diplomat anymore. So please feel free to ask undiplomatic questions when it comes to that. Let me start with the very beginning of the book. Its three am, and i mopping up whiskey smelling puke after a Country Music concert in virginia. Its the summer of 1991, just after my freshman year of college. While of college. While most of my friends from Northwestern University are all doing fancy internships at law firms, congressional offices in banks in washington, im one of six six guys on the janitorial crews at the civic center that seats 13,000 people. Working the midnight shift is worth then jetlagged. You 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 00 p. M. Eat breakfast, work from midnight until eight am and then go to bed around 3 00 p. M. The other five guys on the crew were a tough bunch. There were good guys but beatendown. One carried up pint bottle of vodka in his back pocket which was done by lunch. That was at 3 00 a. M. He was a scraggly redhead from the valleys that run between West Virginias hills. The others were in their 40s and 50s. At what shouldve been the peak of their wage earning potential. The way Country Music concerts work in West Virginia is people drink way too much. Our job is to clean up the results. The 66 of us canvas the arena with him enormous jugs of chemicals that when poured on the concrete floor just sizzle. The last wave of innovation and globalization produced winners and losers. One group of winners were the investors, entrepreneurs and skilled laborers that congregated around markets and new inventions. A new another class of winners were those who move from poverty into the middle class in developing countries because they are relatively low cost of labor was an advantage once their countries open up and became part of a global economy. The losers were people who lived in high cost labor markets like the United States and europe. The skills could not keep up with the pace of technological change in globalizing markets. The guys i mopped with on the midnight shift were the losers in large part because the job they could have gotten in a coal mine years before had been replaced by machines. Whatever job they couldve gotten in a factory from the 1940s to the 1980s had moved to mexico or india. For these men, being a midnight janitor was not just the summer job it was to me, it was one of the only jobs left. Growing up i thought that life and representative West Virginia was representative of life everywhere. The phenomenon i was witnessing really made sense to me 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 West Virginia who works during the summers as a midnight janitor. Theres an ounce of blue button is body. Since my time working as a janitor and working on a beer truck, ive been very fortunate and so its that kind of opportunity that did, over the course of the 20 some subsequent years allow me to work for the secretary of state. Allows me to do things now like work at Johns Hopkins and advise government and Business Leaders around the world. I have tried to not forget the experience of growing up in a Community Like the one that i didnt West Virginia which floundered in the last stage of globalization. After i left government i asked myself question. I said if the last 20 years were shaped in significant measure by digitization and the rise of the internet and large scale globalization, whats next whats going to shape the next 20 years. So this book, the industries of the future is a product of a couple years of research about whats next. There are a couple items that emerge from it that i want to briefly explain before i read another section and tell another story. Its a net optimistic book. Most people who write about the future or who write about technological or scientific driven change, they tend tend to be either utopian books, were all going to up to be happy healthy wealthy and wise, or their written from the field position. I think this book is a little different in that i consider myself a realistic idealist. Because i think that our lives are neither utopian nor dystopian, i try to describe the world to come in the realistic term. So briefly, some some of the subjects that id write about in this book are number one the rise of artificial intelligence, machine Machine Learning and robotics. I believe the robots in the cartoons and movies from the 70s will be the reality of the 2020. The combination of the mathematical breakthrough in modeling space which took things that were previously very complex like grasping which might seem really straightforward but is actually very difficult to model mathematically, breakthroughs in mathematics in modeling belief space combined with cloud robotics, the idea that a device doesnt have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and software but rather can be a relatively lowcost light cost lightweight device means that automation in robotics can go from doing things that are manual and routine to cognitive and nonroutine. So when you think about automation, the people whose job were displaced in the last wave of globalization like the men like i worked with on the midnight shift, mopping up in the charleston civic center, the next wave is actually going to impact what i would call lowlevel whitecollar workers. I think about my father my father worked very hard for 45 years as a country lawyer in West Virginia where most of what he has done is real estate closings, so preparing 9inch stack of paper that you sign for half an hour 40 times. It requires cognition but theres also a lot of repetition in it. So the jobs that have been displaced over the last 20 years have been rooted in displacing work thats in the strength of somebodys shoulders, the kind of work that will be displaced next is the kind of work that my father did for 40 plus years. Again, whitecollar but very rooted in repetitive work. Another field that i focus on significantly in the book is the commercialization. The worlds last trillion dollar industry was created and the next one will be created out of genetic code. We are now 15 years past the mapping of the human genome. We are finally at the point where we are three years away from personalized medicine in a way that is unrecognizable from the way in which weve gotten medicines and prescriptions in the past. You may have noticed that president obama made this one of his signature initiatives for his eighth year in office. By way of explanation, what i want to do is read another passage from the book and tell the story briefly of lucas portman. Lucas is the kind of guy you invite your dinner party to impress your guests. He discusses what to see them mexico city with accounts of the recent developments in Cancer Research taking place in the science labs. He speaks with midwestern affability. Hes quiet and earnest with a round face, kind blue eyes and short brown hair. His Facebook Page pages filled with photos of him and his dog. He is a lowkey guy. Even while wearing his white lab coat, 38yearold is reluctant to tout his own expertise or share his own life story. His life is remarkable. He works on the cutting edge of technology. From his lab at Washington University, the oncologist and medical researcher studies leukemia in mice creating comprehensive genomic models of the disease. Even more remarkable, he had battled acute leukemia, a ll and survived, three times. It is a cruel coincidence that his favorite class in medical school was hematology where he looked at leukemia slides under the microscope. He loved the work. I think i would be a leukemia doctor even if i had no personal experience with it, he says. You could diagnose a patients cancer just by looking at the blood smear or bone marrow under a microscope. There is something very satisfying about being in this position and diagnosing a cancer by looking at it rather than just by taking care of patients. He has been at Washington University for most of his career. He completed college, medical school and residency at the same university. Washington University Also saved his life against all odds. In children, a ll is treatable. It is often fatal in adults. Survival rates are slim. Data for double relapse dont even exist. So when wortman developed it for a third time in 2011 when he was 33 years old, known known known known treatment could save him. His colleagues knew the odds were against his surviving but they wanted to do something, anything to save their colleague. They decided to do something never done before. Sequence both the deoxy ruben, dna and rna from his cancer cells. Then sequence dna from his skin sample as well so they could compare the dna between his healthy cells and the kenya cells. All cancers begin with damaged dna. The dna becomes damaged through time. Where environmental factors like cigarette smoke and as a result it mutates. With cancer, the mutated dna and rna which Work Together to make protein are malfunctioning. They are failing to control the growth of unhealthy cells creating a tumor. Theyre failing in their role as the bodys repair engine and allowing cells to become cancerous. To treat someone like wortman, scientists want to know whether the protein is malfunctioning because the dna is providing bad genetic programming or if the rnas role in creating the protein is not working. Sequencing his healthy genes was a way of pinpointing where the breakdown had occurred. To do this, the Washington University was able to do this through sequencing machines. They can be as small as a desktop computer or as big as a jumbo xerox copy machines from the 1980s that takes up half the mailroom. So they put all of them to work and they ran day and day out. They zeroed in on the invisible contours of one mans genetic makeup. After several weeks, Washington University sequencing machine found the culprit. It turned out out that one of his normal jeans was producing large quantities of flt three. A protein that was ultimately spurring his cancerous growth. Genome sequencing can be a difficult endeavor. Its often the case that the medical community does not have any drugs or treatments that are capable of targeting the problem, especially if the mutation is rare. In wortmans cases case there was good news. The pharmaceutical giant pfizer had recently released a drug that could inhibit this. It was intended for treating Kidney Cancer but because of sequencing, he would become the first person to use it for a ll. Within 22 weeks of taking the drug, he was in remission. Soon after he was in good enough shape to receive bone Marrow Transplant to ensure the cancer would not come back in a mutated form. Four years later his cancer has not returned. Hes had side effects from his treatment. He has eye problems and gets mouth infections but as he makes clear, its a small price price to pay for being alive. His recovery, by all estimations is remarkable but hes not out of the woods. His doctor characterizes his prognosis as guarded. The eventual outcome is unknown in his condition will remain monitored. That he has lived as long as he had, he said i dont have any doubt about it at all. In my case sequencing saved my life. His story is rare but his treatment is just the beginning of the potential in genomics. His story will someday be ordinary. Someday soon. So in the book as i described the promise and peril that comes , so too do i try to draw out some of the advances that are taking place in the world scientifically, things that are happening with the commercialization that will add three or four years of average Life Expectancy to todays Primary School children here in the United States. So here i try to examine a little bit of the unintended consequences or the downside of the commercialization of genomics. With the knowledge that we are now going to be able to acquire about who and what we are genetically, the choice that will be available to us with genetic selection, we will soon know during pregnancy, between 44 and eight weeks of pregnancy, instead of just knowing its a boy or girl, very soon on a mass scale, we will know its going to be a boy. He will probably be between 5foot seven and 5foot nine. He will have a 12 chance of getting parkinsons pretty w