Smart city, industry 4.0 & the global challenges...

After read the announcement from ORGALIME (Sep. 14, 2018)...

"This year will see the fifth edition of the Financial Times Future of Manufacturing Summit, bringing together senior business leaders, policy makers and media to discuss the latest industry trends. Set to take place in London on 3-4 October, the two-day summit will focus on the challenges and opportunities surrounding Industry 4.0"

...immediately comes to mind, the diversity, and complexity, of our worldwide set of challenges still to be transformed.

When talking about the "4th industrial revolution", or even about "smart cities", this echoes as very local approaches, what apparently contrasts with our troubled world of disputes on geopolitical and commercial agendas, where the human being, wherever he is, is sometimes (or even frequently...) disregarded in his essential needs.

In addition to this relative absence of true humanism, the environment of the planet, the home of all of us, is also reflecting the "aggressions" imposed on it by our industrial development. This for humanity can have a deadly effect!

When the local concept of "smartcity", for instance, is expanded to the global scope, "smartplanet" we could say, it's possible to wonder what would be the main vector of this transformation.... and so, the idea of a "smart human being" comes to mind too, on a local level, and also on the global one! Humanity itself probably is the great and "true" vector.

This kind of global "smartness", of course, requires qualifications.

It seems to be valuable to reflect, all of us, what qualifications these would be, and how to manifest them in our day to day, for in practice it now seems that local prosperity, where such prosperity already exists, is threatened (migrations, commercial taxations, and so on...) by the absence of the same in scope broader... the "global" one!

I confess sometimes I see myself divided between the sensational of innovations (industry 4.0, autonomous car, trucks, trains, ships, etc); and the inhumane side of all of it, especially as regards the reduction of jobs...

At the same time that it accelerates the movement for the electrification of road transport, this is increasingly associated with the hope that such a thing will be done without any coal or nuclear source of energy! Thus, it seems also opportune, increasingly to visualize how to promote some new technological "rupture" in what concerns the impact of the Otto and Diesel cycles in the environment, in order to reduce such impact to something very much around "zero"... supporting the emergence of hydrogen energy industry, may be! It's not a trivial task, of course!

I am an engineer, that's right, many of us are also, but we are all professionals or entrepreneurs in some technical business niche... but we are something else, or we can be something beyond, as citizens of the world, and brothers, in this human civilization.

Accompanying this moment of "race" (geopolitical & economic) of several countries towards the African lands and people, it occurs to me to ask...

What, in terms of constructive and structuring strategy, would be the "priority revolutions" to bring African countries to the level of... say... at the "European" level, for example:

1. The institutional revolution (values, ethics, leadership, public spirit, etc.)?

2. The agricultural revolution?

3. The educational revolution?

4. The industrial revolution?

5. The revolution in transport?

6. The digital revolution?

7. The various revolutions (above) at the same time?

What then would be the best choice of the "menu" of revolutions for intelligent (strategic) use of the resources that are available?

We can reflect, any of us, that political power, economic power, technical ability, and talent to visualize ventures and innovate, are some components present in our society that in themselves, are neither good nor bad!

The combination of these factors, for a purpose, and the reasons for that purpose, are the components that qualify or disqualify any initiative, in the face of what seems to us to be the best of our discernment.

And this discernment is something different, and distant, from the concept of benefiting few, in sacrifice and prejudice of many.

This seems applicable for Chicago, Rio, London, Lisbon or Luanda ... in fact, I think, this can and should apply to any human cluster.