Trends in America’s Advanced Industries

Excerpt from the Brookings Institution — August 2016

Although this Brookings research focuses on industries (rather than professions and occupations) and only large markets are included, the conclusion is clear: digital services comprised over half of the advanced industries jobs created in 2013-15. From the report:

The advanced sector can be characterized as the nation’s prime site for technology development, application, and hybridization. Multiple developments in this supersector reveal this nexus:

• The physical and digital worlds are converging in these industries as the“digitization of everything” pervades all of its fields, transforming nearly all enterprises with software, “big data,” and connectivity to the internet

• The related Internet of Things (IoT)—the convergence of industrial machines, sensors, data, and the internet—is unleashing new ways to optimize the functionality, efficiency, and reliability of physical systems

• Advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are making it possible to automate more and more worker tasks, opening the possibility of both productivity gains and labor market disruption

• Applied physics, materials science, and chemistry are interacting to develop advanced materials with radically useful attributes, including incredible strength, conductivity or the ability to “remember” previous states

• Next-generation genomics is bringing low-cost genetic analysis and “editing” to bear to improve medical diagnostics, accelerate drug discovery, and develop drought- and pest-resistant crops…

• Read the research
• Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash