By Todd Jones
•
May 11, 2018
By Todd Jones Georgia House of Representatives, District 25 May 2, 2018 Georgia sits at a crossroads. Stay the current course and bet on the tried and true or jump into unchartered waters. Our economy is growing, job rates are at an all-time high and our children attend the best schools in the state. The challenge is where do we go next. We are on the precipice of the next industrial revolution. Augmented intelligence, 3-D printing and autonomous vehicles will fundamentally change our business and personal pursuits and passions. Individually or combined, these three tectonic technology advancements will forever change the way we live. The examples are endless, but here are a few: Healthcare – an orthopedic surgeon printing an exact replica of the patient’s knee nearly assuring the perfect fit and less recovery time, IBM Watson, via AI, making a diagnosis of a rare bone cancer because it had “consumed” years of medical journals to “learn” what humans can’t and providing mobility to the elderly and home-bound patients via AV, liberating a whole segment of our population. Education – empowering teachers to teach and removing the administrative burden by leveraging AI success coaches to handle the mundane and unlock the educator’s passion to change children’s lives. Providing real-time, 3-D modeling to high school robotics teams and higher education engineering students. As a community and state, it is an imperative that we embrace AI, 3-D and AV. The intersection of these burgeoning technologies and industries like transportation, education, healthcare and of course manufacturing sets up Georgia’s new “north star”. We must rally private enterprise, education and government toward creating a workforce with the right skills, a business ecosystem with limited regulation and cash liquidity and R&D bolstered through deep partnerships between our higher education institutions and businesses of all sizes. We have seen how the Internet can be the great equalizer. Uber versus taxis, Facebook versus traditional publishing and on and on. Imagine a manufacturing process comprised primarily of three phases – dream it, design it and print it. An entrepreneur could have a customized product on the company web site within days, not weeks or months. Each customer getting it in the color they choose along with their monogram. Compare that to today. Today’s manufacturing processes are laborious, inefficient and typically do not create a positive return on investment for quarters and in many cases years. Let’s not pick on manufacturing, this can be said about nearly every industry of today. The core processes existing in the USA are rooted in post-World War II thinking. That mantra drove a massive economic expansion in the 50’s and early 60’s, but like the abacus and corded phones we need to be willing to walk away from what is comfortable. Setting us up for success means a commitment from each of us. We are all stakeholders in this revolution. Note revolution, not evolution. Evolving has been what we have been doing for decades. Today is our chance to grab tomorrow. The question is, do we have the resolve?