February 28, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
Klaus Schwab wrote two books prior to the Covid Pandemic and the formation of his Great Reset initiative. All of the excerpts in this segment are from those two books minus one paragraph from Schwab’s The Great Narrative (2022) and the last paragraph titled “Ending Conclusion.”
In my judgement, Schwab does an excellent job of explaining his concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There is little controversy or criticism of his views on the associated technologies. The criticism surrounding “The Great Reset,” is who should be making the decisions on their application; how valid concerns will be addressed; and corollary initiatives surrounding the technologies, particularly in financing, climate change, and governance policies.
Utilizing a democratic process is one such means. A second process is to charge a group of technical, corporate, and governmental elites to do so. The tension between these two processes in addressing worldwide governance, digital surveillance, climate change, global economics, and income inequality as well as ethics and human considerations in the application of emerging technologies is at the heart of this series.
In that regard pay particular attention to the “Geoengineering” and “Concerns for the Future” excerpts both of which are towards the end of the text and PDF portions of the segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
P.S. As I read about the “Internet of Things” and what the future might hold as a result, it was very sobering to think that I only started using the Internet about 25 years ago and today I couldn’t live without it. In this fast-changing world of ours the next 25 years portends to be even more dramatic.
Dear Friends and Family,
Klaus Schwab wrote two books prior to the Covid Pandemic and the formation of his Great Reset initiative. All of the excerpts in this segment are from those two books minus one paragraph from Schwab’s The Great Narrative (2022) and the last paragraph titled “Ending Conclusion.”
In my judgement, Schwab does an excellent job of explaining his concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There is little controversy or criticism of his views on the associated technologies. The criticism surrounding “The Great Reset,” is who should be making the decisions on their application; how valid concerns will be addressed; and corollary initiatives surrounding the technologies, particularly in financing, climate change, and governance policies.
Utilizing a democratic process is one such means. A second process is to charge a group of technical, corporate, and governmental elites to do so. The tension between these two processes in addressing worldwide governance, digital surveillance, climate change, global economics, and income inequality as well as ethics and human considerations in the application of emerging technologies is at the heart of this series.
In that regard pay particular attention to the “Geoengineering” and “Concerns for the Future” excerpts both of which are towards the end of the text and PDF portions of the segment.
Happy Learning,
Harley
P.S. As I read about the “Internet of Things” and what the future might hold as a result, it was very sobering to think that I only started using the Internet about 25 years ago and today I couldn’t live without it. In this fast-changing world of ours the next 25 years portends to be even more dramatic.
THE GREAT RESET: IS DEMOCRACY (worldwide) IN DANGER?
THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – EXCERPTS: SEGMENT 2
INTRODUCTION: The first industrial revolution spanned from about 1760 to around 1840. Triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine, it ushered in mechanical production. The second industrial revolution, which started in the late 19th century and went into the early 20th century, made mass production possible, fostered by the advent of electricity and the assembly line. The third industrial revolution began in the 1960s. It is called the computer/digital revolution because it was catalyzed by the development of semiconductors, mainframe computing (1960s), personal computing (1970s and ‘80s) and the internet (1990s).
We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity, what I consider to be the fourth industrial revolution is unlike anything humankind has experienced before. Think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The changes are historic in terms of their size, speed and scope.
We do not yet know how the transformations driven by this industrial revolution will unfold, their complexity and interconnectedness across sectors imply that all stakeholders of global society – governments, business, academia, and civil society – have a responsibility to work together to better understand the emerging trends. The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril. My concern is that decision makers are too often caught in traditional, linear (and nondisruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future.
The more we think about how to harness the technology revolution, the more we will examine ourselves and the underlying social models that these technologies embody and enable, and the more we will have an opportunity to shape the revolution in a manner that improves the state of the world. The fundamental and global nature of this revolution means it will affect and be influenced by all countries, economies, sectors and people. It is, therefore, critical that we invest attention and energy in multistakeholder cooperation across academic, social, political, national, and industry boundaries.
Source: The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016)
MEGATREND DRIVERS: To identify the megatrends and convey the broad landscape of technological drivers of the 4th industrial revolution I have organized the list into three clusters: physical, digital and biological.
Physical manifestations:
Digital Manifestations: Today, there are billions of devices around the world such as smartphones, tablets and computers that are connected to the internet. Their numbers are expected to increase dramatically over the next few years, with estimates ranging from several billion to more than a trillion. This will radically alter the way in which we manage supply chains by enabling us to monitor and optimize assets and activities to a very granular level. Also the digital revolution is creating radically new approaches that revolutionize the way in which individuals and institutions engage and collaborate. For example, the blockchain is a secure protocol where a network of computers collectively verifies a transaction before it can be recorded and approved.
Biological: Innovations in the biological realm – and genetics in particular – are nothing less than breathtaking. 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 variations generate particular traits and diseases.
It is in the biological domain where I see the greatest challenges for the development of both social norms and appropriate regulation. We are confronted with new questions around what it means to be human, what data and information about our bodies and health can or should be shared with others, and what rights and responsibilities we have when it comes to changing the very genetic code of future generations.
KEY THEMES ON HOW TECHNOLOGIES WILL AFFECT THE WORLD: The 4th industrial revolution is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, for renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interactions across the physical, digital and biological domains that makes the 4th industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions.
Source: The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016).
Extending Digital Technologies: The Internet of Things: In the next decade, more than 80 billion connected devices around the world will be in constant communication with people and with each other. This vast web of interaction, analysis and output will remold the way objects are produced, anticipate our needs and provide new perspectives of the world. Supermarkets, for example, will no longer have check-out facilities, and fast-food restaurants will have less than half the staff they had 10 years before. As business models take advantage of internet of things (IoT) to optimize their operations and create a “pull economy,” the world around us will continuously anticipate our needs by analyzing our patterns of behavior.
Areas where such value may accrue include: Factories (e.g., predictive maintenance), Cities (e.g., public safety and health and traffic control), Human (e.g., monitoring and managing illness), Retail (e.g., self-checkout, layout optimization, smart customer-relations management), Outside (e.g., logistics routing, autonomous vehicles, navigation, Work sites (e.g. operations management and equipment maintenance), Vehicles (e.g., condition-based maintenance), Homes (e.g., energy management, safety and security, chore automation), and Offices (e.g., augmented reality for training).
The critical concern for IoT involves the social impact on employment and skills as it combines with AI and robotics and reduces the need for routine or manual labor. The major risks from IoT systems, however, are generally thought to be cybersecurity-related hazards, due to unsecured devices, the lack of standards and cross-border data concerns.
Source: Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2018)
Reforming the Physical World: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Robotic potential has increased in the last decade as AI has begun to power new physical systems. Humans and machines, working together, will likely begin to take over and reduce the number of roles traditionally needed for educated or skilled persons, such as doctors, lawyers, pilots and truck drivers. This is creating concern about the role of human expertise and to what extent human intelligence and judgement will be needed for many tasks that could be given over to automated systems.
3D Printing: 3D printing is impacting almost every industry, from food to health to aerospace, with bespoke products and services. Additive manufacturing technologies enable economically feasible low-volume production, fast prototyping, and the decentralization and distribution of manufacturing. The growth trajectory for the technologies is set to swiftly rise in the next decade.
Drones: Drone technology is well beyond the developmental stages. Drones are in use by the military and are commercially available to the public. In addition, they represent a convergence of aerospace, new materials science, robotics and automation technologies. They can carry surveillance cameras, as well as medication, both of which provide aid in search-and-rescue operations. They can also carry bombs.
By 2040, cloud robotics and AI could enable swarms of drones that work in tandem. They could communicate and learn from each other, as well as map new terrain, much like autonomous transportation vehicles. Indeed, a world full of drones offers a world full of possibilities. Should drones become autonomous weapons with the help of image-recognition algorithms that enable them to make decisions to engage targets without human input, the ethical debate will become even more complicated.
Altering the Human Being: The lines between technologies and beings are becoming blurred, and not just by the ability to create lifelike robots or synthetic organisms. Instead, it is about the ability of new technologies to literally become part of us. These include biotechnologies, neuro-technologies and brain science, and virtual and augmented reality devices. Perhaps more than any other set of technologies in the 4th Industrial Revolution, these will challenge us ethically. These technologies will operate within our own biology and change how we interface with the world. They are capable of crossing the boundaries of body and mind, enhancing our physical abilities, and even having a lasting impact on life itself.
Biotechnologies: Emerging biotechnology agendas promise to improve and augment human lifespans and to enhance physical and mental health. Optimists depict a more sustainable world, free from the disease what we battle today. Pessimists warn of a dystopian future of designer babies and unequal access to the fruits of biotechnology.
Biotechnologies are set to have an impact on society through their application in precision medicine, agriculture and biomaterial production. The latter would affect the creation of bioproducts for industries such as healthcare and food but would also affect all the industries for which microbes are being engineered to produce chemicals and custom materials.
Neuro-technologies: The category “neuro-technologies” describes a wide set of approaches that provide powerful insights into the workings of the human brain, allowing us to extract information, expand our senses, alter behaviors and interact with the world.
Neuro-technologies help us to better understand the brain and how it works, and also to influence consciousness, mood and behavior. Improving these capabilities could ameliorate diseases and injuries affecting the brain and improve brain functionality. The line between repair and enhancement may be controversial and will require thinking about the impact of how the technologies are used. Brain and computer interaction doesn’t need to break the skin. Objects can be worn that help diagnose disorders and augment behaviors. The opportunity for personalized learning, candidate screening, improving productivity or countering depression will make neuro-technologies attractive to industry players.
Virtual and Augmented Realities: Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) are revolutionizing how we experience, understand and interact with the world around us while opening up the opportunity to experience an infinite number of worlds bounded only by imagination. The result could be more community, collaboration and empathy, and they promise faster ways to work together, develop skills and test ideas. Yet, technology could also be used to manipulate our perspectives of the world and influence our behavior. Uncritical use could also tempt us to escape from the real world, or at least from parts we do not wish to engage with, rather than seeking to change it for the better.
Integrating the Environment: The 4th Industrial Revolution will be dependent on technologies that enable infrastructure development, perform global systems maintenance and open up new pathways for the future. Energy capture, storage and transmission capabilities, especially those based on sustainable materials and practices, stand ready to reduce fossil-fuel dependence and provide low-cost, distributed power for people and their technologies. Geoengineering, though still highly speculative, is forcing us to consider what goes into managing a climate and what way we can best confront the global challenge of rising atmospheric temperatures. Space technologies surround us, monitor the planet and its ecosystems, and provide a frontier for science, exploration and technological innovation. Each of these connects us and the planet and the wider universe beyond, and each requires an understanding that the environment – land, air and space – is a shared multistakeholder responsibility. The potential of these technologies to have such a dramatic impact will require collaborative efforts and important decisions to be made about our collective future.
Space Technologies: Human societies have benefited tremendously from space technologies. Satellites provide services used every day for synchronizing global financial networks, monitoring the Earth’s climate, sustainably managing natural resources and providing education and critical services to remote communities, as well as early warnings of natural disasters. Yet the space sector, like many others, is on the cusp of a massive change driven by technological development.
Geoengineering: Geoengineering is the idea that humans can deliberately and successfully control the behavior of the Earth’s highly complex biosphere. Though currently theoretical for the most part, climate geoengineering techniques are proposed reactive measures that are needed to mitigate the greenhouse gases emitted into the biosphere. Many scientists, however, see technologies that purport to intervene in this space as immature and insecure at best and existentially threatening at worst, with consequences that are both unforeseen and unmanageable. Nevertheless, the fact that technological interventions are being proposed to offset challenges ranging from air pollution and droughts to global warming suggests more needs to be devoted to this topic. Technology may be able to intervene in these systems, but without limited understanding of the ramifications, actions of this type may well cause irreparable damage to our world.
Government issues arising out of proposed geoengineering techniques range from questions of control and decision-making to ensuring the effective participation of affected societies. Within the current global governance architecture, only the UN General Assembly seems to possess the legitimacy to mandate the development of a governance framework by a suitable professional international authority.
Source: Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016).
SOME CONCERNS FOR THE FUTURE:
Governance: I am convinced that the 4th industrial revolution will be every bit as powerful, impactful and historically important as the previous three. However, I have two primary concerns about factors that may limit the potential of the 4th industrial revolution to be effectively realized.
First, I feel that the required levels of leadership and understanding of the changes underway across all sectors are low when contrasted with the need to rethink our economic, social and political systems to respond to the 4th industrial revolution.
Second, the world lacks a consistent, positive and common narrative that outlines the opportunities and challenges of the 4th industrial revolution, a narrative that is essential if we are to empower a diverse set of individuals and communities and avoid a popular backlash against the fundamental changes underway.
Source: The 4th Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016)
Dealing successfully with the speed and scale of impact from 4th Industrial Revolution technologies will require new, more agile models of governance which include private sector and social stakeholders as well as governments and traditional regulatory institutions. The goal is to develop more future-compatible, adaptable and multistakeholder-led forms of governance, including new norms, standards and practices.
Ethics: Data, algorithms, their sciences, technologies, uses, and applications provide huge opportunities to improve private and public life, as well as our environments. Unfortunately, such opportunities are also coupled with significant ethical challenges. Three elements are particularly relevant: the extensive use of big data; the growing reliance on algorithms to perform tasks, shape choices and make decisions; and the gradual reduction of human involvement or even oversight over many automatic processes. Together, they pose pressing issues of fairness, responsibility, equality and respect of human rights, among others. Striking a robust and fair balance will not be an easy or simple task.
Data ethics is the branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data, algorithms and corresponding practices. Data ethics needs to be developed from the start as macro-ethics, that is, as an overall “geometry” of the ethical space that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the diverse set of ethical implications brought about by the information revolution within a consistent, holistic, inclusive and multistakeholder framework.
Artificial Intelligence Application: The impact of AI and robotics depends on how we adopt them. The way that AI and robotics systems are applied by organizations to real-life problems is the primary driver of their impact. This means that, as AI and robotic systems become more powerful and capable, the decision-making processes for boards and managers in determining where and when to use them also rise in importance.
Ethical concerns about AI and robotics are a particularly high priority for many people and organizations, as AI is capable of having an impact everywhere from the labor market, to vehicle navigation to decisions about creditworthiness. These ethical concerns are often related to transparency issues, consent and forms of bias embedded in the algorithms that power the AI. AI and robotics will require collaborative governance as issues involving conflict resolution, ethical standards, data regulation and policy formation become priorities on the global scale.
Virtual and Augmented Realities: VR raises privacy concerns. VR devices can learn much about how their users respond to different stimuli by tracking their eye movements and head positions and even monitoring their emotional state. Such information could be used to influence behaviors or even to incriminate and embarrass. VR could become a social challenge: it could increase isolation by putting the users in fully enclosed worlds where they interact with digital avatars instead of physical human beings. The excessive use of VR could distance people from their loved ones and erode community structures.
Source: Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2018)
ENDING CONCLUSION:
As Schwab explained in a WEF video, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution will impact our lives completely. It will not only change how we communicate, how we produce, how we consume. It will change, actually, our own identity.” Source: The Great Reset by Marc Morano (2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION – EXCERPTS: SEGMENT 2
INTRODUCTION: The first industrial revolution spanned from about 1760 to around 1840. Triggered by the construction of railroads and the invention of the steam engine, it ushered in mechanical production. The second industrial revolution, which started in the late 19th century and went into the early 20th century, made mass production possible, fostered by the advent of electricity and the assembly line. The third industrial revolution began in the 1960s. It is called the computer/digital revolution because it was catalyzed by the development of semiconductors, mainframe computing (1960s), personal computing (1970s and ‘80s) and the internet (1990s).
We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity, what I consider to be the fourth industrial revolution is unlike anything humankind has experienced before. Think about the staggering confluence of emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing to name a few. Many of these innovations are in their infancy, but they are already reaching an inflection point in their development as they build on and amplify each other in a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The changes are historic in terms of their size, speed and scope.
We do not yet know how the transformations driven by this industrial revolution will unfold, their complexity and interconnectedness across sectors imply that all stakeholders of global society – governments, business, academia, and civil society – have a responsibility to work together to better understand the emerging trends. The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril. My concern is that decision makers are too often caught in traditional, linear (and nondisruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future.
The more we think about how to harness the technology revolution, the more we will examine ourselves and the underlying social models that these technologies embody and enable, and the more we will have an opportunity to shape the revolution in a manner that improves the state of the world. The fundamental and global nature of this revolution means it will affect and be influenced by all countries, economies, sectors and people. It is, therefore, critical that we invest attention and energy in multistakeholder cooperation across academic, social, political, national, and industry boundaries.
Source: The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016)
MEGATREND DRIVERS: To identify the megatrends and convey the broad landscape of technological drivers of the 4th industrial revolution I have organized the list into three clusters: physical, digital and biological.
Physical manifestations:
- Autonomous vehicles: The driverless car dominates the news but there are now many other autonomous vehicles including trucks, drones, aircrafts and boats.
- 3D Printing: 3D printing consists of creating a physical object by printing layer upon layer from a digital 3D drawing or model. 3D printing starts with loose material and builds an object into a three-dimensional shape using a digital template. Unlike mass-produced manufactured goods, 3D printed products can be easily customized.
- Advanced robotics: Rapid progress in robotics will soon make collaboration between humans and machines an everyday reality.
- New Materials: Like many innovations of the 4th industrial revolution, it is hard to know where developments in new materials will lead. Take advanced nanomaterials such as graphene, which is about 200 times stronger than steel, a million-times thinner than a human hair, and an efficient conductor of heat and electricity.
Digital Manifestations: Today, there are billions of devices around the world such as smartphones, tablets and computers that are connected to the internet. Their numbers are expected to increase dramatically over the next few years, with estimates ranging from several billion to more than a trillion. This will radically alter the way in which we manage supply chains by enabling us to monitor and optimize assets and activities to a very granular level. Also the digital revolution is creating radically new approaches that revolutionize the way in which individuals and institutions engage and collaborate. For example, the blockchain is a secure protocol where a network of computers collectively verifies a transaction before it can be recorded and approved.
Biological: Innovations in the biological realm – and genetics in particular – are nothing less than breathtaking. 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 variations generate particular traits and diseases.
It is in the biological domain where I see the greatest challenges for the development of both social norms and appropriate regulation. We are confronted with new questions around what it means to be human, what data and information about our bodies and health can or should be shared with others, and what rights and responsibilities we have when it comes to changing the very genetic code of future generations.
KEY THEMES ON HOW TECHNOLOGIES WILL AFFECT THE WORLD: The 4th industrial revolution is not only about smart and connected machines and systems. Its scope is much wider. Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, for renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interactions across the physical, digital and biological domains that makes the 4th industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions.
Source: The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016).
Extending Digital Technologies: The Internet of Things: In the next decade, more than 80 billion connected devices around the world will be in constant communication with people and with each other. This vast web of interaction, analysis and output will remold the way objects are produced, anticipate our needs and provide new perspectives of the world. Supermarkets, for example, will no longer have check-out facilities, and fast-food restaurants will have less than half the staff they had 10 years before. As business models take advantage of internet of things (IoT) to optimize their operations and create a “pull economy,” the world around us will continuously anticipate our needs by analyzing our patterns of behavior.
Areas where such value may accrue include: Factories (e.g., predictive maintenance), Cities (e.g., public safety and health and traffic control), Human (e.g., monitoring and managing illness), Retail (e.g., self-checkout, layout optimization, smart customer-relations management), Outside (e.g., logistics routing, autonomous vehicles, navigation, Work sites (e.g. operations management and equipment maintenance), Vehicles (e.g., condition-based maintenance), Homes (e.g., energy management, safety and security, chore automation), and Offices (e.g., augmented reality for training).
The critical concern for IoT involves the social impact on employment and skills as it combines with AI and robotics and reduces the need for routine or manual labor. The major risks from IoT systems, however, are generally thought to be cybersecurity-related hazards, due to unsecured devices, the lack of standards and cross-border data concerns.
Source: Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2018)
Reforming the Physical World: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Robotic potential has increased in the last decade as AI has begun to power new physical systems. Humans and machines, working together, will likely begin to take over and reduce the number of roles traditionally needed for educated or skilled persons, such as doctors, lawyers, pilots and truck drivers. This is creating concern about the role of human expertise and to what extent human intelligence and judgement will be needed for many tasks that could be given over to automated systems.
3D Printing: 3D printing is impacting almost every industry, from food to health to aerospace, with bespoke products and services. Additive manufacturing technologies enable economically feasible low-volume production, fast prototyping, and the decentralization and distribution of manufacturing. The growth trajectory for the technologies is set to swiftly rise in the next decade.
Drones: Drone technology is well beyond the developmental stages. Drones are in use by the military and are commercially available to the public. In addition, they represent a convergence of aerospace, new materials science, robotics and automation technologies. They can carry surveillance cameras, as well as medication, both of which provide aid in search-and-rescue operations. They can also carry bombs.
By 2040, cloud robotics and AI could enable swarms of drones that work in tandem. They could communicate and learn from each other, as well as map new terrain, much like autonomous transportation vehicles. Indeed, a world full of drones offers a world full of possibilities. Should drones become autonomous weapons with the help of image-recognition algorithms that enable them to make decisions to engage targets without human input, the ethical debate will become even more complicated.
Altering the Human Being: The lines between technologies and beings are becoming blurred, and not just by the ability to create lifelike robots or synthetic organisms. Instead, it is about the ability of new technologies to literally become part of us. These include biotechnologies, neuro-technologies and brain science, and virtual and augmented reality devices. Perhaps more than any other set of technologies in the 4th Industrial Revolution, these will challenge us ethically. These technologies will operate within our own biology and change how we interface with the world. They are capable of crossing the boundaries of body and mind, enhancing our physical abilities, and even having a lasting impact on life itself.
Biotechnologies: Emerging biotechnology agendas promise to improve and augment human lifespans and to enhance physical and mental health. Optimists depict a more sustainable world, free from the disease what we battle today. Pessimists warn of a dystopian future of designer babies and unequal access to the fruits of biotechnology.
Biotechnologies are set to have an impact on society through their application in precision medicine, agriculture and biomaterial production. The latter would affect the creation of bioproducts for industries such as healthcare and food but would also affect all the industries for which microbes are being engineered to produce chemicals and custom materials.
Neuro-technologies: The category “neuro-technologies” describes a wide set of approaches that provide powerful insights into the workings of the human brain, allowing us to extract information, expand our senses, alter behaviors and interact with the world.
Neuro-technologies help us to better understand the brain and how it works, and also to influence consciousness, mood and behavior. Improving these capabilities could ameliorate diseases and injuries affecting the brain and improve brain functionality. The line between repair and enhancement may be controversial and will require thinking about the impact of how the technologies are used. Brain and computer interaction doesn’t need to break the skin. Objects can be worn that help diagnose disorders and augment behaviors. The opportunity for personalized learning, candidate screening, improving productivity or countering depression will make neuro-technologies attractive to industry players.
Virtual and Augmented Realities: Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) are revolutionizing how we experience, understand and interact with the world around us while opening up the opportunity to experience an infinite number of worlds bounded only by imagination. The result could be more community, collaboration and empathy, and they promise faster ways to work together, develop skills and test ideas. Yet, technology could also be used to manipulate our perspectives of the world and influence our behavior. Uncritical use could also tempt us to escape from the real world, or at least from parts we do not wish to engage with, rather than seeking to change it for the better.
Integrating the Environment: The 4th Industrial Revolution will be dependent on technologies that enable infrastructure development, perform global systems maintenance and open up new pathways for the future. Energy capture, storage and transmission capabilities, especially those based on sustainable materials and practices, stand ready to reduce fossil-fuel dependence and provide low-cost, distributed power for people and their technologies. Geoengineering, though still highly speculative, is forcing us to consider what goes into managing a climate and what way we can best confront the global challenge of rising atmospheric temperatures. Space technologies surround us, monitor the planet and its ecosystems, and provide a frontier for science, exploration and technological innovation. Each of these connects us and the planet and the wider universe beyond, and each requires an understanding that the environment – land, air and space – is a shared multistakeholder responsibility. The potential of these technologies to have such a dramatic impact will require collaborative efforts and important decisions to be made about our collective future.
Space Technologies: Human societies have benefited tremendously from space technologies. Satellites provide services used every day for synchronizing global financial networks, monitoring the Earth’s climate, sustainably managing natural resources and providing education and critical services to remote communities, as well as early warnings of natural disasters. Yet the space sector, like many others, is on the cusp of a massive change driven by technological development.
Geoengineering: Geoengineering is the idea that humans can deliberately and successfully control the behavior of the Earth’s highly complex biosphere. Though currently theoretical for the most part, climate geoengineering techniques are proposed reactive measures that are needed to mitigate the greenhouse gases emitted into the biosphere. Many scientists, however, see technologies that purport to intervene in this space as immature and insecure at best and existentially threatening at worst, with consequences that are both unforeseen and unmanageable. Nevertheless, the fact that technological interventions are being proposed to offset challenges ranging from air pollution and droughts to global warming suggests more needs to be devoted to this topic. Technology may be able to intervene in these systems, but without limited understanding of the ramifications, actions of this type may well cause irreparable damage to our world.
Government issues arising out of proposed geoengineering techniques range from questions of control and decision-making to ensuring the effective participation of affected societies. Within the current global governance architecture, only the UN General Assembly seems to possess the legitimacy to mandate the development of a governance framework by a suitable professional international authority.
Source: Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016).
SOME CONCERNS FOR THE FUTURE:
Governance: I am convinced that the 4th industrial revolution will be every bit as powerful, impactful and historically important as the previous three. However, I have two primary concerns about factors that may limit the potential of the 4th industrial revolution to be effectively realized.
First, I feel that the required levels of leadership and understanding of the changes underway across all sectors are low when contrasted with the need to rethink our economic, social and political systems to respond to the 4th industrial revolution.
Second, the world lacks a consistent, positive and common narrative that outlines the opportunities and challenges of the 4th industrial revolution, a narrative that is essential if we are to empower a diverse set of individuals and communities and avoid a popular backlash against the fundamental changes underway.
Source: The 4th Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2016)
Dealing successfully with the speed and scale of impact from 4th Industrial Revolution technologies will require new, more agile models of governance which include private sector and social stakeholders as well as governments and traditional regulatory institutions. The goal is to develop more future-compatible, adaptable and multistakeholder-led forms of governance, including new norms, standards and practices.
Ethics: Data, algorithms, their sciences, technologies, uses, and applications provide huge opportunities to improve private and public life, as well as our environments. Unfortunately, such opportunities are also coupled with significant ethical challenges. Three elements are particularly relevant: the extensive use of big data; the growing reliance on algorithms to perform tasks, shape choices and make decisions; and the gradual reduction of human involvement or even oversight over many automatic processes. Together, they pose pressing issues of fairness, responsibility, equality and respect of human rights, among others. Striking a robust and fair balance will not be an easy or simple task.
Data ethics is the branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data, algorithms and corresponding practices. Data ethics needs to be developed from the start as macro-ethics, that is, as an overall “geometry” of the ethical space that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the diverse set of ethical implications brought about by the information revolution within a consistent, holistic, inclusive and multistakeholder framework.
Artificial Intelligence Application: The impact of AI and robotics depends on how we adopt them. The way that AI and robotics systems are applied by organizations to real-life problems is the primary driver of their impact. This means that, as AI and robotic systems become more powerful and capable, the decision-making processes for boards and managers in determining where and when to use them also rise in importance.
Ethical concerns about AI and robotics are a particularly high priority for many people and organizations, as AI is capable of having an impact everywhere from the labor market, to vehicle navigation to decisions about creditworthiness. These ethical concerns are often related to transparency issues, consent and forms of bias embedded in the algorithms that power the AI. AI and robotics will require collaborative governance as issues involving conflict resolution, ethical standards, data regulation and policy formation become priorities on the global scale.
Virtual and Augmented Realities: VR raises privacy concerns. VR devices can learn much about how their users respond to different stimuli by tracking their eye movements and head positions and even monitoring their emotional state. Such information could be used to influence behaviors or even to incriminate and embarrass. VR could become a social challenge: it could increase isolation by putting the users in fully enclosed worlds where they interact with digital avatars instead of physical human beings. The excessive use of VR could distance people from their loved ones and erode community structures.
Source: Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (2018)
ENDING CONCLUSION:
As Schwab explained in a WEF video, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution will impact our lives completely. It will not only change how we communicate, how we produce, how we consume. It will change, actually, our own identity.” Source: The Great Reset by Marc Morano (2022).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| democracy_2l_4th_industrial_revolution_--_segment_2.pdf |