The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change

by Al Gore

  ROBOSOURCING

  This pattern of progressive improvement in the effectiveness and utility of machine intelligence is under way in thousands of industries and it is the cumulative impact that is driving the global change in the nature and purpose of work in the world. Look, for example, at the coal industry in the United States. In the last quarter century, production has increased by 133 percent, even as jobs have decreased by 33 percent.

  To take another example, jobs in the U.S. copper mining industry have declined precipitously in the last half century even as output increased significantly over much of that period. As is often the case when new technology replaces jobs, the pattern was not an even and steady decline, but a decline that lurched downward from one plateau to the next as new innovations became available and were implemented. In one six-year period—from 1980 to 1986—the number of hours of labor required to produce a ton of copper fell by 50 percent. In that same decade, one of the largest companies, Kennecott, increased labor productivity in one of its largest mines by 400 percent.

  Looking more closely at this industry as an illustrative example of the broad trend, the new technologies that replaced jobs included much larger trucks and shovels, much broader use of computers for micromanaging the schedule of the trucks and the operation of the mills, much more efficient crushers connected to better conveyer belts, and the introduction of new chemical and electrochemical processes to automatically separate the pure copper from the ore.

  The copper mining industry in the United States also illustrates changes from robosourcing and outsourcing that impact the third classical factor of production—resources. As technology increased labor productivity and the number of tons of copper produced year by year, the industry eventually reached a tipping point when the available supplies of economically recoverable copper ore began to diminish. New sources of copper were developed in other countries, principally Chile. Sharp increases in the efficiency of production, coupled with increasing consumption rates driven by population growth and increased affluence, are driving many industries toward constraints in the supplies of natural resources essential to their production processes.

  In a process that is further reducing jobs and demand in the industrial world, robosourcing and IT-empowered outsourcing are now also beginning to have a major impact on jobs in the largest category of employment: services. Consider the impact of intelligent programs for legal and document research in law firms. Some studies indicate that with the addition of these programs, a single first-year associate can now perform with greater accuracy the volume of work that used to be done by 500 first-year associates.

  Indeed, many predict that the impact of robosourcing will be even more pronounced in services than in manufacturing. Much has been written about Google’s success in developing self-driving automobiles, which have now traveled 300,000 miles in all driving conditions without an accident. If this technology is soon perfected—as many predict—consider the impact on the 373,000 people employed in the United States alone as taxi drivers and chauffeurs. Already, some Australian mining companies have replaced high-wage truck drivers with driverless trucks.

  Where services are concerned, we are also seeing a third trend, which might be called “self-sourcing”: individual consumers of services, empowered with laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other productivity-enhancing devices, are interacting with intelligent programs to effectively partner with machine intelligence to effectively replace many of the people who used to be employed in service jobs. Many airline travelers routinely make their own reservations, pick their own seats, and print their boarding passes. Many supermarkets and other stores enable shoppers to handle the checkout and payment process on their own. Banks began to provide cash with ATM machines and now offer extensive online banking services. Customers of many businesses now routinely deal with computers on the telephone. National postal services in many countries, including the U.S., are being progressively disintermediated (that is, their “middleman” role is being made obsolete) by email and social media.

  This self-sourcing trend is still in its early stages and will accelerate dramatically as artificial intelligence improves year by year. One obvious problem is that there is no compensation for all the new work done by individuals, even as the compensation formerly paid to those in firms who lost their jobs is also lost to the economy as a whole. The enhanced convenience associated with self-sourcing improves efficiency and saves time, to be sure, but on an aggregate basis, the overall reduction in income for middle-income wage earners is beginning to have a noticeable impact on aggregate demand—particularly in consumer-oriented societies.

  ON A GLOBAL basis, offshoring and robosourcing are together pushing the economy toward a simultaneous weakening of demand and surplus of production. The use of Keynesian stimulus policies—that is, government borrowing to finance temporary increases in aggregate demand—may become less effective over time as the secular, systemic shift to an economy with far fewer jobs relative to production represents a larger cause of declining incomes, and thus declining consumption and demand. In addition, as I’ll detail later, unprecedented demographic shifts include a larger proportion of older, retired people in industrial countries whose incomes are already replaced by programs such as Social Security—thereby limiting the ability of governments to replace income indefinitely to working age people.

  Unless the lost income of the unemployed and underemployed factory workers in industrial countries can somehow be replaced, global demand for the products of the new highly automated factories will continue to decline. The industrial economies, after all, continue to provide the greatest share of global demand and consumption. Higher wages paid to workers in developing and emerging economies are far more likely—in part for cultural reasons—to go into savings instead of consumption. While both labor and capital have been globalized, the bulk of consumption in the world economy remains in wealthy industrial countries. This results in a mismatch between the distribution of income and the central role of consumption in driving global economic growth.

  RETHINKING RESOURCES

  These accelerating changes will therefore require us to reimagine the now central role of consumption in our economy and simultaneously replace the flows of income to workers that presently empower consumption. The current connection between ever rising levels of consumption and the health of the global economy is increasingly unstable in any case.

  The accelerating technology revolution is not only transforming the role of labor and capital as factors of production in the global economy, it is also transforming the role of resources. The new technologies of molecular manipulation have led to revolutionary advances in the materials sciences and brand-new hybrid materials that possess a combination of physical attributes far exceeding those of any materials developed through the much older technologies of metallurgy and ceramics. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin predicted more than sixty years ago, “In becoming planetized, humanity is acquiring new physical powers which will enable it to super-organize matter.”

  The new field of advanced materials science involves the study, manipulation, and fabrication of solid matter with highly sophisticated tools, almost on an atom-by-atom basis. It involves many interdisciplinary fields, including engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology. The new insights being developed into the ways that molecules control and direct basic functions in biology, chemistry, and the interaction of atomic and subatomic processes that form solid matter is speeding up the emergence of what some experts are calling the molecular economy.

  Significantly, the new molecules and materials created need not be evaluated through the traditional, laborious process of trial and error. Advanced supercomputers are now capable of simulating the way these novel creations interact with other molecules and materials, allowing the selection of only the ones that are most promising for experiments in the real world. Indeed, the new field known as computational science has now been recognized as a third basic form of knowl
edge creation—alongside inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning—and combines elements of the first two by simulating an artificial reality that functions as a much more concrete form of hypothesis and allows detailed experimentation to examine the new materials’ properties and analyze how they interact with other molecules and materials.

  The properties of matter at the nanometer scale (between one and 100 nanometers) often differ significantly from the properties of the same atoms and molecules when they are clustered in bulk. These differences have allowed technologists to use nanomaterials on the surfaces of common products in order to eliminate rust, enhance resistance to scratches and dents, and in clothes to enhance resistance to stains, wrinkles, and fire. The single most common application thus far is the use of nanoscale silver to destroy microbes—a use that is particularly important for doctors and hospitals guarding against infections.

  The longer-term significance that attaches to the emergence of an entirely new group of basic materials with superior properties is reflected in the names historians give to the ages of technological achievement in human societies: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. As was true of the historical stages of economic development that began with the long hunter-gatherer period, the first of these periods—the Stone Age—was by far the longest.

  Archaeologists disagree on when and where the reliance on stone tools gave way to the first metallurgical technologies. The first smelting of copper is believed to have taken place in eastern Serbia approximately 7,000 years ago, though objects made of cast copper emerged in numerous locations in the same era.

  The more sophisticated creation of bronze—which is much less brittle and much more useful for many purposes than copper—involves a process in which tin is added to molten copper, a technique that combines high temperatures and some pressurization. Bronze was first created 5,000 years ago in both Greece and China, and more than 1,000 years later in Britain.

  Though the first iron artifacts date back 4,500 years ago in northern Turkey, the Iron Age began between 3,000 and 3,200 years ago with the development of better furnaces that achieved higher temperatures capable of heating iron ore into a malleable state from which it could be made into tools and weapons. Iron, of course, is much harder and stronger than bronze. Steel, an alloy made from iron, and often other elements in smaller quantities, depending upon the properties desired, was not made until the middle of the nineteenth century.

  The new age of materials created at the molecular level is leading to a historic transformation of the manufacturing process. Just as the Industrial Revolution was launched a quarter of a millennium ago by the marriage of coal-powered energy with machines in order to replace many forms of human labor, nanotechnology promises to launch what many are calling a Third Industrial Revolution based on molecular machines that can reassemble structures made from basic elements to create an entirely new category of products, including:

  • Carbon nanotubes invested with the ability to store energy and manifest previously unimaginable properties;

  • Ultrastrong carbon fibers that are already replacing steel in some niche applications; and

  • Ceramic matrix nanocomposites that are expected to have wide applications in industry.

  The emerging Nanotechnology Revolution, which is converging with the multiple revolutions in the life sciences, also has implications in a wide variety of other human endeavors. There are already more than 1,000 nanotechnology products available, most of them classified as incremental improvements in already known processes, mostly in the health and fitness category. The use of nanostructures for the enhancement of computer processing, the storage of memory, the identification of toxics in the environment, the filtration and desalination of water, and other uses are still in development.

  The reactivity of nanomaterials and their thermal, electrical, and optical properties are among the changes that could have significant commercial impact. For example, the development of graphene—a form of graphite only one atom thick—has created excitement about its unusual interaction with electrons, which opens a variety of useful applications.

  Considerable research is under way on potential hazards of nanoparticles. Most experts now minimize the possibility of “self-replicating nanobots,” which gave rise to serious concerns and much debate in the first years of the twenty-first century, but other risks—such as the accumulation of nanoparticles in human beings and the possibility of consequent cell damage—are taken more seriously. According to David Rejeski, director of the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, “We know very little about the health and environmental impacts [of nanomaterials] and virtually nothing about their synergistic impacts.”

  In a sense, nanoscience has been around at least since the work of Louis Pasteur, and certainly since the discovery of the double helix in 1953. The work of Richard Smalley on buckminsterfullerene molecules (“buckyballs”) in 1985 triggered a renewed surge of interest in the application of nanotechnology to the development of new materials. Six years later, the first carbon nanotubes offered the promise of electrical conductivity exceeding that of copper and the possibility of creating fibers with 100 times the strength and one sixth the weight of steel.

  The dividing line between nanotechnology and new materials sciences is partly an arbitrary one. What both have in common is the recent development of new more powerful microscopes, new tools for guiding the manipulation of matter at nanoscales, the development of new more powerful supercomputer programs for modeling and studying new materials at the atomic level, and a continuing stream of new basic research breakthroughs on the specialized properties of nanoscale molecular creations, including quantum properties.

  THE RISE OF 3D PRINTING

  Humankind’s new ability to manipulate atoms and molecules is also leading toward the disruptive revolution in manufacturing known as 3D printing. Also known as additive manufacturing, this new process builds objects from a three-dimensional digital file by laying down an ultrathin layer of whatever material or materials the object is to be made of, and then adds each additional ultrathin layer—one by one—until the object is formed in three-dimensional space. More than one different kind of material can be used. Although this new technology is still early in its development period, the advantages it brings to manufacturing are difficult to overstate. Already, some of the results are startling.

  Since 1908, when Henry Ford first used identical interchangeable parts that were fitted together on a moving assembly line to produce the Model T, manufacturing has been dominated by mass production. The efficiencies, speed, and cost savings in the process revolutionized industry and commerce. But many experts now predict that the rapid development of 3D printing will change manufacturing as profoundly as mass production did more than 100 years ago.

  The process has actually been used for several decades in a technique known as rapid prototyping—a specialized niche in which manufacturers could produce an initial model of what they would later produce en masse in more traditional processes. For example, the designs for new aircraft are often prototyped as 3D models for wind tunnel testing. This niche is itself being disrupted by the new 3D printers; one Colorado firm, LGM, that prototypes buildings for architects, has already made dramatic changes. The company’s founder, Charles Overy, told The New York Times, “We used to take two months to build $100,000 models.” Instead, he now builds $2,000 models and completes them overnight.

  The emerging potential for using 3D printing is illuminating some of the inefficiencies in mass production: the stockpiling of components and parts, the large amount of working capital required for such stockpiling, the profligate waste of materials, and of course the expense of employing large numbers of people. Enthusiasts also contend that 3D printing often requires only 10 percent of the raw material that is used in the mass production process, not to mention a small fraction of the energy costs. It continues and accelerates a longer-term tren
d toward “dematerialization” of manufactured goods—a trend that has already kept the total tonnage of global goods constant over the past half century, even as their value has increased more than threefold.

  In addition, the requirement for standardizing the size and shape of products made in mass production leads to a “one size fits all” approach that is unsatisfactory for many kinds of specialized products. Mass production also requires the centralization of manufacturing facilities and the consequent transportation costs for delivery of parts to the factory and finished products to distant markets. By contrast, 3D printing offers the promise of transmitting the digital information that embodies the design and blueprint for each product to widely dispersed 3D printers located in all relevant markets.

  Neil Hopkinson, senior lecturer in the Additive Manufacturing Research Group at Loughborough University, said, “It could make offshore manufacturing half way round the world far less cost effective than doing it at home, if users can get the part they need printed off just round the corner at a 3D print shop on the high street. Rather than stockpile spare parts and components in locations all over the world, the designs could be costlessly stored in virtual computer warehouses waiting to be printed locally when required.”

  At its current stage of development, 3D printing focuses on relatively small products, but as the technique is steadily improved, specialized 3D printers for larger parts and products will soon be available. One company based in Los Angeles, Contour Crafting, has already built a huge 3D printer that travels on a tractor-trailer to a construction site and prints an entire house in only twenty hours (doors and windows not included)! In addition, while the 3D printers now available have production runs of one item up to, in some cases, 1,000 items, experts predict that within the next few years these machines will be capable of turning out hundreds of thousands of identical parts and products.