Industry 4.0

“Industry 4.0," or what some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is the wave of cyber and digital automation that is changing the landscape of work. Systems such as cloud technology and artificial intelligence are already having a profound effect on manufacturing and the debate over economic and ethical implications is intensifying.

Join us for a panel discussion with Roy Bahat, John Tamny, James H. Wilson, and Andy Kessler on the impact of tech in manufacturing. With a diverse set of backgrounds ranging from think tanks to venture capitalists, these experts will provide a unique perspective on how Industry 4.0 is shaping itself.

About the Panel

Roy Bahat

Roy Bahat is the head of Bloomberg Beta, a venture fund backed by Bloomberg L.P. that invests in companies that make business work better.

Bloomberg Beta has an unusual model for a corporate-backed venture fund. It invests for financial return and strives to work in the same new ways as startups who define the future of work -- transparent (with its full operating manual open sourced at https://bloombergbeta.com) and driven by data (with a program to statistically predict who will start companies in the future).

Roy has spent time making startups, as a corporate executive, in government, media, and academia -- and is one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business.

He was the founding chairman of OUYA, a Kickstarter-backed game console company acquired by Razer. For five years, he ran News Corporation’s IGN Entertainment, where he hired software engineers without looking at their resumes, and was in the office of News Corp.’s chairman. Before that, Roy was in government in the office of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and was a short-lived consultant at McKinsey & Co.

Today, he is on the faculty at U.C. Berkeley where he teaches about media at the Haas School of Business. He serves on the boards of CodeNow, a nonprofit that teaches technology skills to underprivileged students, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom.

Roy graduated from Harvard College, where he ran the student public service nonprofit. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Autumn McDonald

Autumn McDonald is the director of New America CA. She has nearly two decades of experience working with foundations, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and associations on strategy, advocacy, and civic innovation. Her work has focused on coalition building and innovative problem-solving in service of social justice. She currently works to highlight local public problem solvers and creative solutions that are making the region more livable, resilient, and equitable. McDonald and the New America CA hub work closely with New America's Initiative on Work, Workers, and Technology. Thus, her focus also includes the future of work—how AI and automation are changing what skills are in demand and how workers lives are changed as a result. New America CA is a convening and connecting civic enterprise, focused on activating individuals and communities to play critical roles in designing and implementing solutions.

Before joining New America, McDonald served as a senior advisor to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee through the FUSE Corps executive fellowship. During her tenure, she led the women's economic empowerment agenda, shaping policies, programs, and public-private initiatives to improve economic and social opportunities for women and families throughout the Bay Area. Prior to that, McDonald worked with FSG, a social impact-focused consulting firm, where she led a range of strategy projects. Throughout her career, McDonald has led work related to economic mobility, education, distressed communities, and place-based initiatives.

McDonald serves on the boards of Equal Rights Advocates, Peer Health Exchange, and GO Public Schools. She has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, a master’s in education policy and management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a master’s in the learning sciences from the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy. She, her husband, and their three children live in Oakland.

John Tamny

John Tammy is a Political Economy editor at Forbes, editor of RealClearMarkets.com, a Senior Fellow in Economics at Reason Foundation, plus a senior economic advisor to Toreador Research & Trading. He is a weekly guest on Forbes on Fox, and the author of “Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank”. In addition, he has written about economic affairs in books he authored titled “Popular Economics: What LeBron James, the Rolling Stones and Downton Abbey Can Teach You About Economics”. His most recent book, ” The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job” was released in May. Tamny frequently writes about the securities markets, along with tax, trade and monetary policy issues that impact those markets for a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Financial Times, National Review and London’s Daily Telegraph.

H. James Wilson

H. James Wilson is Managing Director of Information Technology and Business Research at Accenture Research. He is co-author of Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a management guide to Artificial Intelligence, to be published by Harvard Business Review Press in early 2018.

Andy Kessler

Andy Kessler is the author of Inside View, a column he writes for The Wall Street Journal on technology and markets and where they intersect with culture. He is the author of several books including Wall Street Meat and Eat People. Kessler has worked for about 20 years as a research analyst, investment banker, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. Kessler worked for AT&T Bell Labs as a chip designer and programmer. He later joined Paine Webber in New York as an analyst of the electronics and semiconductor industry. Kessler formerly worked for Morgan Stanley as a semiconductor analyst before moving to San Francisco in 1993. There he worked for Unterberg Harris as an investor, until starting Velocity Capital with Fred Kittler. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Wired, Forbes, The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, The American Spectator, and Thestreet.com.