Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Fourth Industrial Revolution  

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

The world is moving toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which mobile communications, social media and sensors are blurring the boundaries between people, the internet and the physical world.

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, the digital, and the biological.

Previous economic revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different.

It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translates languages for us almost automatically. Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data, from software used to discover new drugs to algorithms used to predict our cultural interests.

Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, 3D printing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.

While the next economic revolution offers a lot of promise, economists like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have pointed out, the revolution could yield greater inequality, especially in its potential to disrupt labor markets. With automation replacing labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines means the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor are diverging rapidly.

Related articles

• Are The Droids Taking Our Jobs? Andrew McAfee Says Yes 
• Racing With The Machines 
• Joseph Stiglitz on the Enigma of Innovation 

Potentially though, the displacement of workers by technology may result in a net increase in safe and rewarding jobs overall.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, may not only change not only what we do but also who we essentially are.

It could affect our very human identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation.

As with so many predictions about the future, the possibilities are only limited by our imagination.

SOURCE  World Economic Forum

By  33rd Square	Embed