The Fourth Industrial Revolution Phase 1
Systematic Change: The technology and digitalization will revolutionize everything, making the overused and often ill-used adage "this time is different "apt. Simple put, major technological innovations are on the brink of fuelling momentous change throughout the world-inevitably so.
Drivers: Megatrends: All new developments and technologies have one key feature in common: they leverage the pervasive power of digitalization and information technology. All of the innovation described in this chapter are made possible and are enhanced through digital power.
Physical: There are four main physical manifestations of the technological megatrends, which are the easiest to see because of their tangible nature:
Digital: One of the main bridges between the physical and digital applications enabled by the fourth Industrial revolution is the internet of things (IOT)- sometimes called "internet of all things". In its simplest form, it can be described as a relationship between things (products, services, places, etc.) and people that is made possible by connected technologies and various platforms.
Biological: Innovations in the biological realm- and genetics in particular-are nothing less than breath-taking. In recent years, considerable progress has been achieved in reducing the cost and increasing the ease of genetic sequencing and, lately, in activating or editing gees. It took more than 10 years, at a cost of $2.7 billion, to complete the Human Genome Project. Today, a genome can be sequenced in a few hours and for less than a thousand dollars. With advances in computing power, scientists no longer go by trial and error; rather, they test the way in which specific genetic variation genetic participation traits and diseases.
The Dynamics of Discoveries: Innovation is a complex, social process, and not one we should take for granted. Therefore, even though this section has highlighted a wide array of technological advances with the power to change the world, it is important that we pay attention to how we can ensure such advances continue to be made and directed toward the best possible outcomes.
Academics institutions are often regarded as one of the foremost places to pursue forward-thinking ideas. New evidence, however, indicates that the career incentives and funding conditions in universities today favour incremental, conversation research over bold and innovation programs.
Tipping Points: When these megatrends are discussed in general terms, they seem rather abstract. They are, however, giving rise to very practical applications and developments.
Impact: The scale and breadth of the unfolding technological revolution will usher in economic, social and cultural changes of such phenomenal proportions that they are almost impossible to envisage. Nevertheless, this chapter describes and analyses the potential impact of the fourth industrial revolution on the economy, business, governments and countries, society and individuals.
Economy: The fourth industrial revolution will have a monumental impact on the global economy, so vast and multifaceted that it makes it hard to disentangle one particular effect from the next. Indeed, all the big marco variable one can think inflation and so on-will be affected. I have decided to focus only on the two most critical dimensions: growth (in large part through the lens of its long-term determinant, productivity) and employment.
Growth: The impact that the fourth industrial revolution will have on economic growth is a issue that divides economists. On one side, the techno-pessimists argue that the critical contributions of the digital revolution have already been made and that their impact on productivity is almost over. In the opposite camp, techno-optimists claim that technology and innovation are at an inflection point and will soon unleash a surge in productivity and higher economic growth.
Aging: The world population is forecast to expand from 7.2 billion today to 8 billion by 2030 and 9 billion by 2050. This should lead to an increase in aggregate demand. But there is another powerful demographic trend: aging. The conventional wisdom is that aging primarily affects rich countries in the West. This is not the case, however. Birth-rates are falling below replacement levels in many regions of the world-not only in Europe, where the decline began, but also in most of South America and the Caribbean, much of Asia including China and Southern India, and even some countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Lebanon, Morocco and Iran.
Productivity: Over the past decade, productivity around the world (whether measured as labour productivity or total-factor productivity [TFP]) has remained sluggish, despite the exponential growth in technological progress and investment in innovation. This most recent incarnation of the productivity paradox-the perceived failure of technological innovation to result in higher levels of productivity-is one of today's great economic enigmas that predates the onset of the Great Recession, and for which there is no satisfactory explanation.
Employment: Despite the potential positive impact of technology on economic growth, it is nonetheless essential to address its possible negative impact, at least in the short term, on the labour market. Fear about the impact of technology on jobs are not new. In 1931, the economist John Maynard Keynes famously warned about widespread technological unemployment "due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." This proved to be wrong, but what if this time it were true? Over the past few years, the debate has been reignited by evidence of computers substituting for a numbers of jobs, most notably bookkeepers, cashiers and telephone operators.
Labour Substitution: Many different categories of work, particularly those that involve mechanically repetitive and precise manual labour, have already been automated. Many other will follow, as computer power continues to grow exponentially. Sooner than most anticipate, the work of professions as different as lawyers, financial analysts, doctors, journalists, accountants, insurance underwriter or librarians may be partly or completely automated.
Impact on Skills: In the foreseeable future, low-risks jobs in terms of automation will be those that require social and creative skills; in particular, decision making under uncertainty and the development of novel ideas.
Impact on developing economies: It is important to reflect upon what this might mean for developing countries. Past phases of the industrial revolution have not yet reached many of the industrial revolution have not yet reached many of the world's citizens, who still do not have access to electricity, clean water, sanitation and many types of capital equipment taken for granted in advanced economics. Despite this, the fourth industrial revolution will inevitably impact developing economies.
Nature of Work: The emergency of a world where the dominant work paradigm is a series of transactions between a worker and a company more than an enduring relationship was described by Daniel Pink 15 years ago in his book Free Agent Nation. This trend has been greatly accelerated by technological innovation.
The Importance of Purpose: We must also keep in mind that it is not only about talent and skills. Technology enables greater efficiency, which most people want. Yet they also wish to feel that they are not merely part of a process but of something bigger than themselves. Karl Marx expressed his concern that the process of specialization would reduce the sense of purpose that we all seek from work, while Buckminster Fuller cautioned that the risks of over-specialization tend "to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles".
Business: Beyond the changes in growth patterns, labour markets and the future of work that will naturally influence all organisations, there is evidence that the technologies that underpin the fourth industrial revolution are having a major impact on how businesses are led, organized and resourced. One particular symptom of this phenomenon is the historical reduction in the average life span of a corporation listed on the S&P 500 has dropped from around 60 to approximately 18. Another is the shift in the time it takes new entrants to dominate markets and hit significant revenue milestones. Facebook took six years to reach revenue of $1 billion a year, and Google just five years. There is no doubt that emerging technologies, almost always powered and enabled by digital capabilities, are increasing the speed and scale of change for businesses.
Sources of Disruption: Multiple sources of disruption trigger different forms of business impact. On the supply side, many industries are seeing the introduced of new technologies that create entirely new ways of serving existing needs and significantly disrupt existing value chains. Example abound. New storage and grid technologies in energy will accelerate the shift toward more decentralised sources. The widespread adoption of 3D printing will make distributed manufacturing and spare-part maintenance easier and cheaper. Real-time information and intelligence will provide unique insights on customers and asset performance that will amplify other technological trends.
Four Major Impacts: The fourth industrial revolution has four main effects on business across industries:
Customer Expectations: Customers, whether as individuals (B2C) or businesses (B2B), are increasingly at the centre of the digital economy, which is all about how they are served. Customer expectation are being redefined into experiences. The Apple experience, for example, is not just about how we use the product but also about packaging, the brand, the shopping and the customer service. Apple is thus redefining expectation to include product experience.
Data-Enhanced Products: New technologies are transforming how organisations perceive and manage their assets, as products and services are enhanced with digital capabilities that increase their value. Tesla, for example, shows how over-the-air software updates and connectivity can be used to enhance a product (a car) after purchase, rather than let it depreciate over time.
Collaborative Innovation: A world of customer experiences, data-based services and asset performance through analytics required new forms of collaboration, particularly given the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place. This is true for incumbents and established businesses but also for young, dynamics firms. The former often lack specific skills and have lower sensitivity to evolving customer needs, while the latter are capital poor and lack the rich data generated by mature operations.
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New Operating Models: All these different impacts require companies to rethink their operating models. Accordingly, strategic planning is being challenged by the need for companies to operate faster and with greater agility.
Combining the Digital, Physical and Biological Worlds: Companies able to combine multiple dimensions- digital, physical and biological- often succeed in disrupting an entire industry and their related systems of production, distribution and consumption.
National and Global: The disruptive changes brought by the fourth industrial revolution are redefining how public institutions and organisations operate. In particular, they compel governments-at the regional, national and local levels-to adapt by reinventing themselves and by finding new ways of collaboration with their citizens and the private sector. They also affect how countries and governments relate to each other.
Governments: When assessing the impact of the fourth industrial revolution on governments, the use of digital technologies to govern better is top-of-mind. More intense and innovation use of web technologies can help public administrations modernize their structures and functions to improve overall performance, from strengthening processes of e-governance to fostering greater transparency, accountability and engagement between the government and its citizens. Governments must also adapt to the fact that power is shifting from state to non-state actors, and from established institutions to loose networks. New technologies and the social groupings and interactions they foster allow virtually anyone to exercise influence in a way that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.
Countries, Regions and Cities: Because digital technology knows no borders, there are many questions that come to mind when considering the geographic impact technology and the impact of geography on technology. What will define the roles that countries, regions and cities play in the fourth industrial revolution? Will Western Europe and the US lead the transformation, as they did in the previous industrial revolution? Which countries will be able to leapfrog? Will there be greater and more effective collaboration for the bettering of society, or will we see increased fragmentation not only within countries but also across countries? In a world where goods and services can be produced almost everywhere, and where much of the demand for low-skilled and low-wage work is overtaken by automation, will those who can afford it congregate in countries with strong institutions and proven quality of life?
Innovation-Enabling Regulation: In trying to answer these questions, one thing is clear and great importance: the countries and regions that succeed is establishing tomorrow's preferred international norms in the main categories and fields of the new digital economy (5G communications, the use of commercial drones, the internet things, digital health, advance manufacturing and so on) will reap considerable economic and financial benefits. In contrast, countries that promote their own norms and rules to give advantages to their domestic producers, while also blocking foreign competitors and reducing royalties that domestic companies pay for foreign technologies, risk becoming isolated from global norms, putting these nations at risk of becoming isolated from global norms, putting these nations at risks of becoming the laggards of the new digital economy.
Regions and cities as hubs of innovation: I am particularly concerned about the effect that automation will have on some countries and regions, particularly those in fast-growing markets and developing countries, where it could abruptly erode the comparative advantage they enjoy in producing labour-intensive goods and services. Such a scenario could devastate the economies of some countries and regions that are currently thriving.
International Security: The fourth industrial revolution will have a profound impact on the nature of state relationships and international security. I devote particular attention to this issue in this section as I feel that of all the important transformation linked to the fourth industrial revolution, security is a topic not sufficiently discussed in the public domain and in sector outside governments and the defence industry.
Connectivity, fragmentation and social unrest: We live in a hyper-connected world, where information, ideas and people are traveling faster than ever before. We also live in a world of rising inequality, a phenomenon that will be exacerbated by the massive changes in the labour market that I described earlier. Widening social exclusion, the challenge of finding reliable sources of meaning in the modern world, and disenchantment with established elites and structures, perceived or real, has motivated extremist movements and enabled them to recruit for a violent struggle against existing systems.
The Changing nature of Conflict: The fourth industrial revolution will affect the scale of conflict as well as its character. The distinctions between war and peace and who is a combatant and non-combatant are becoming uncomfortably blurred. Similarly, the battlefield increasingly both local and global. Organisation such as Da'esh, or ISIS, operate principally in defined areas in the Middle East but they also recruit fighters from more than a hundred countries, largely through social media, while related terrorist attacks can occur anywhere on the planet. Modern conflicts are increasingly hybrid in nature, combining traditional battlefield techniques with element that were previously mostly associated with armed non-state actors. However, with technologies fusing in increasingly unpredictable ways and with state and armed non-state actor. However, with technologies fusing in increasingly hybrid in nature, combining traditional battlefield techniques with elements that were previously mostly associated with armed non-stated actors. However, with technologies fusing in increasingly unpredictable ways and with state and armed non-state actors learning from each other, the potential magnitude of change is not yet widely appreciated.
Cyber Warfare: Cyber warfare presents one of the most serious threats of our time. Cyberspace is becoming as much a theatre of engagement as land, sea and air were in the past. I can safely postulate that, while any future conflict between reasonably advanced actors may or may not play out in the physical world, it will most likely include a cyber-dimension simply because no modern opponent would resist the temptation to disrupt, confuse or destroy their enemy's sensors, communications and decision-making capability.
Autonomous Warfare: Autonomous warfare, including the development of military robots and AI-powered automated weaponry holds out the prosper of "robo-war," which will play a transformative role in future conflict.
New frontiers in global security: As stressed several times in this book, we only have a limited sense of the ultimate potential of new technologies and what lies ahead. This no less the case in the realm of international and domestic security For each innovation we can think of, international and domestic security. For each innovation we can think of, there will be the positive application and a positive dark side. While neurotechnologies such as neuroprosthetics are already employed to solve medical problems, in the future they could be applied to military purposes. Computer systems attached to brain tissue could enable a paralyzed patient to control a robotic arm, or leg. The same technology could be used to direct a bionic pilot or Soldier. Brain devices designed to treat the conditions of Alzheimer's disease could be used to direct a bionic pilot or soldier. Brain devices designed to treat the conditions of Alzheimer's disease designed to treat the conditions erase memories or create new ones, "It's not a question of if non-state actors will use some form of neuroscientific techniques or technologies, but when, and which ones they will use," reckons James Giordano, a neuroethicist at Georgetown University Medical Centre. "The brain is the next battlespace."
Toward a more secure world: In the face of these challenges, how do we persuade people to take the security threats from emerging technologies seriously? Even more important, can we engender cooperation between the public and private sectors on the global scale to mitigate these threats?
Over the second half of the last century, the fear of nuclear warfare gradually gave way to the relative stability of mutually assured destructive (MAD), and a nuclear taboo seems to have emerged.
Society: Scientific advancement, commercialization and the diffusion of innovation are social processes that unfold as people develop and exchange ideas, values, interests and social norms in a variety of contexts, This makes it hard to discern the full societal impact of new technological systems: there are many intertwined components that comprise our societies and many innovations that are in some ways coproduced by them.
Inequality and the middle class: The discussion on economic and business impacts highlighted a number of different structural shifts which have contributed to rising to date, and which may be further exacerbated as the fourth industrial revolution unfold. Robots and algorithms increasingly substitute capital for labour, while investing (or, more precisely, building a business in the digital economy) becomes less capital intensive. Labour markets, meanwhile, are becoming biased toward a limited range of technical skill sets, and granting outsized rewards to a small number of "stars." As all these trends happen, the winners will be those who are able to participate fully in innovation-driven ecosystems by providing new ideas, business models, products and services, rather than those who can offer only low-skilled labour or ordinary capital.
Community: From a broad societal standpoint, one of the greatest (and most observable ) effects of digitization is the emergence of new forms of belonging to a community today is more defined by personal projects and individual values and interests rather than by space (the local community), work and family.
Individuals: The fourth industrial revolution is not only changing what we do but also who we are. The impact it will have on us as individuals is manifold, affecting our identity and its many related facets - our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills. It will influence how we meet people and nurture relationships, the hierarchies upon which we depend, our health, and maybe sooner than we think, it could lead to forms of human augmentation that we think, it could lead to forms of human augmentation that cause us to question the very nature of human existence. Such changes elicit excitement and fear as we move at unprecedented speed.
Identity, Morality and Ethics: The mind-boggling innovation triggered by the fourth industrial revolution, from biotechnology to AI, are redefining what it means to be human. They are pushing the current thresholds of life span, health, cognition and capabilities in ways that were previously the preserve of science fiction. As knowledge and discoveries in these fields progress, our focus and commitment to having ongoing moral and ethical discussions is critical. As human beings and as social animals, we will have to think individually and collectively about how we respond to issues such as life extension, designer babies, memory extraction and many more.
Human Connection: As the ethical questions raised above suggest, the more digital and high-tech the world becomes, the greater the need to still feel the human touch, nurtured by close relationships and social connections. There are growing concerns that, as the fourth industrial revolution deepens our individual and collective relationships with technology, it may negatively affect our social skills and ability to empathize. We see this already happening. A 2010 study by a research team at the University of Michigan found a 40% decline in empathy among college students today (as compared with their counterparts 20 or 30 years ago), with most of this decline coming after 2000.
Managing Public and Private Information: One of the greater individual challenges posed by the internet, and our increasing degree of interconnectedness in general, concern privacy. It is an issue that looms larger and larger because, as the Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel has observed, " We seem to be increasingly willing to trade privacy for convenience with many of the devices that we routinely use." Spurred in part by the revelations of Edward Snowden, the global debate about the meaning of privacy in a world of greater transparency has only just begun, as we see how the internet can be an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization and, at the same time, an enabler of indiscriminate, far-reaching and almost unfathomable mass surveillance.
Deep Shifts: Implantable Technologies, Our Digital Presence, Vision as the New Interface, Wearable Internet, Ubiquitous Computing, A Supercomputer in Your Pocket, Storage for All, The Internet of and for Things, The Connected Home, Smart Cities, Big Data for Decisions, Driverless Cars, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making, AI and White-Collar Jobs, Robotics and Services, Bitcoin and Blockchain, The Sharing Economy, Governments and the Blockchain, 3D Printing and Manufacturing, 3D Printing and Human Health, 3D Printing and Consumer Products, Designer Beings, Neurotechnologies.
The Way Forward: The fourth industrial revolution may be driving disruption, but the challenges it presents are of our own making, It is thus in our power to address them and enact the changes and policies needed to adapt (and flourish) in our emerging new environment.
We can only meaningfully address these challenges if we mobilize the collective wisdom of our minds, hearts and souls. To do so, I believe we must adapt, shape, and harness the potential of disruption by nurturing and applying four different types of intelligence.
President Elect Student training and Research Network (S.T.A.R. @ International Association of Dental research |
3 年Nice commentary . Robotics and 3 D printing are going to change style of living. An eye has to be kept on bridging disparities in society with access to health wealth , wages work and quality of life.