Alec Ross
Author of The Industries of the Future. Formerly Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary Clinton
Discussion
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Alec Ross
@alecjross · Author, The Industries of the Future
Hi - I'm Alec Ross, author of the Industries of the Future. If you want to understand what's going to shape our world for the next 10 years, I've got some thoughts and would love to hear yours. I'm delighted to be here-- ask me anything!
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Kingsong Chen
@kingsongchen · Founder at Lace, Marketplace for GovTech
Hi Alec, I am starting to see that cities are making a real effort to innovate. How do you think we can attract more young people to government technology?
@kingsongchen Such a good question. I think the main thing to drive young people to public service vs. the private sector who have technology chops is for government to not frustrate the hell out of young people with their insane, inane procurement process. When somebody with technology skills goes into government and then can't use those skills because they can't use the tools that they want and build what they want, it sends them back to the private sector
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Hey, Alec! One of my favorite questions to ask is what do you think will change in the next 10 years that most others will disagree with?
@rrhoover Here it is --- In ten years, the deaf and mute will be able to speak, and everybody reading this article will be conversant in dozens of foreign languages, eliminating the very concept of a language barrier.
It used to be the case when I traveled abroad that I would take a little pocket dictionary that provided translations for commonly used phrases and words. If I wanted to construct a sentence, I would thumb through the dictionary for five minutes to develop a clunky expression with unconjugated verbs and my best approximation of the correct noun. Today I take out my phone and type the phrase into Google Translate, which returns a translation as fast as my Internet connection can provide it, in any of 90 languages.
When I can’t say something, I’ll hold up the screen and my non-English-speaking counterpart can read what I am failing to say. Of course my pronunciation is bad to the point of incoherence, I can only do a couple of sentences at a time, and I have no idea what others are saying to me in response. It’s basically good enough to ask where the bathroom is and then hope somebody points in the right direction.
Today’s machine translation is leaps and bounds faster and more effective than my old dictionary method, but it still falls short in accuracy, functionality, and delivery. In essence, this is little more than a data and computing problem.
Professional translators argue that local dialects, inflections, and nuance are too complex for computers to ever account for sufficiently. But they are wrong. Today’s translation tools were developed by computing more than a billion translations a day for over 200 million people. With the exponential growth in data, that number will soon signify the number of translations made in an afternoon, then in an hour. Massive amounts of language data will go in and out. As the amount of data that informs translation grows exponentially, the machines will grow exponentially more accurate and be able to parse the smallest detail. Whenever the machine translations get it wrong, users can flag the error—and that data too will be incorporated into future attempts. We just need more data, more computing power, and better software. These will come with the passage of time and will fill in the communication gaps in areas including pronunciation and interpreting a spoken response.
Hash_tag_jeff
@jeffumbro · Book Marketing and PR - get in touch
Thoughts on Bernie Sanders? If you were working on the Clinton campaign, what would you have her do immediately?
@jeffumbro I don't think that most people who are supporting Bernie Sanders know that he's a socialist. I would educate people about what a socialist actually believes while also emphasizing her vision for how she can address the legitimate issues of Sanders supporters such as inequality
Arsalan Khan, M.Sc.
@arsalanakhan · Blogger
Hey Alec, What are the top 3 ways to spur citizen innovation through federal, state, local governments and families?
@arsalanakhan 1. Reform the government IT procurement process 2. Make it easier to hire tech experts and/or enable tech experts to volunteer to do work in partnership with governments and 3. more open data, so that citizens can use government data/resources to build products that make use of that data in a way that government isn't doing on its own
Arsalan Khan, M.Sc.
@arsalanakhan · Blogger
@alecjross Any estimates on how much open data is currently being used by citizens?
Mike Coutermarsh
@mscccc · Code @ Product Hunt
Hi Alec! 😀. I'd love to know, what's the one thing you've done professionally that scared you the most?
Andrew Ettinger
@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)
Noting your knowledge on the "industries of the future", which, do you believe, are the cities of the future? In America, or otherwise.
@andrewmettinger So glad you asked that! Bottom line: I think there will be 10-15 global foci for the innovations of the future, maybe 3 of which are in the USA. There's a chapter about this in my book (http://alecross.com/the-industri...) and an excerpt here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/s...
Cuan-Chai Megghross
@iamcuan · Angel Investor, Brainyloft
@alecjross I live in Philadelphia, however I am from Jamaica -- how can small caribbean countries build, innovate and compete with power houses like the US and China?
@iamcuan I don't think "compete" should be the goal. I think that the goal should be to start a business that builds a product or service that people around the world want and buy. I think that trying to compete with a country with 1.3 billion people (China) and the world's center of innovation (USA) is not the short-term goal. The short-term goal should be the creation of a strong business that scales outside of the region
Alex Carter
@alexcartaz · Operations @ 60dB. Ex-PH Podcasts 😻
What startup are you most fascinated by and why?
@alexcartaz Let me give you two: Mark43 and Andela. Mark43 is re-inventing law enforcement by giving local law enforcement the kinds of tools normally reserved for the likes of MI5 of the FBI. I believe that this will create less police harassment, less targeting based on race, and a better job of identifying real criminals. I introduced the CEO, Scott Crouch to David Petraeus (who knows a thing or two about security analytics) and he was so impressed he invested. I did the same with Eric Schmidt (who knows a lot about data science) and he did the same.
Andela represents the best of how the technology community can fuel the development of Africa with a private sector model. Check them out here http://www.andela.com/