The 5th Industrial Revolution
The beginning of the 5th Industrial Revolution
I am reminded of a quote from Charles H. Duell, the Commissioner of the US patent office in 1899, “everything that can be invented has been invented.” (Duell, 2019) Think about this for a moment. Believe it or not, this is an exact quote attributed to the Head of the Patent office in 1899, if he were among us now, after this statement what do you think he would think of the times we live in and how consequential it is to continue innovating?
Current Situation
Globally, people are being asked to shelter in place, to limit their movements, to become virtual, in all facets of their lives. People are being asked to become technologists, in a sense, daycares, schools, offices, medical facilities, factories, theaters, banks, stores, etc. All of these staples of society are being asked to close or “drastically” curtail operations. We have only seen the type of shifts in our everyday experiences in the time of war, something that impacts every human on a global scale. What is different this time? Technology is driving and fueling this ability to change our lives in a way no one could have been prepared for, in such a dramatic way. Technology is making it easier and more sustainable. However, the layers of technology we are using today will feel much like a VHS tape ten years from now.
Remote working has become the new working model (likely the way we work will change from this time going forward). Think in the US alone, over 100 Million people are working from home; over 1 billion globally. These remote workers are now using the basics of fundamental modes of connectivity, security, AI/ML, and experiential experiences.
I pose a question, are we entering the 5th Industrial Revolution?
No one on the planet can escape the moment we live in today; no one could foresee the challenge of our time. However, significant innovations come out of necessity, and we are starting to see this happen today. For those who find themselves with more time than usual, they are asking themselves what do I do with this time? How do I keep the brain cells clicking? Innovators are thinking and acting differently! Innovators are solving today’s problems with tomorrow’s technologies. Yes, they are addressing the next thing by enhancing the current thing. Innovators are also thinking about the next big thing, not just making the current thing better.
To understand the Industrial Revolutions over the past 200 years, I am going to use Klaus Schwab the Founder and Executive Chairman, of the World Economic Forum to outline the drivers of the Industrial Revolution from the inception to current state:
“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, digital, and biological spheres.” (Schwab, 2016)
It took roughly 100 years to move between each of these substantial revolutions; however, there is no time limit between “substantial and significant” advances that move us from Revolution to Revolution. The timing and advancements between the 4th and where we are today is roughly 50 years. Consider where we started the 4th, something that is evident is the speed of innovation/technology will shorten these revolutions. We see this leap-frog effect where we forego common advances to significant advances in shorter amounts of time. These advancements are mainly due to the technological advancements that are making the ability to consume, create, and deliver breakthroughs in a fraction of the time between the previous enabling revolutions.
The more prevailing consensus is that the 4th Revolution is powered by infrastructure, security, scalability, IoT, and globally independent architectures. What will likely be the drivers of this 5th Industrial Revolution? Will they be further enabling capabilities? My theory is that the 5th will consume these enabling. The differentiation will be moving from the independent nature of technology to the fully aggregated, and to an autonomous platform that will make the 5th Industrial Revolution a reality.
My proposition is we are entering this 5th Revolution. I call this the Autonomous 5th Industrial Revolution. I believe we have now crossed the chasm from enabling capabilities to adopting capabilities.
We are living at the beginning of this “Autonomous Revolution.” This Revolution takes manufacturing and distribution of goods and services beyond the factory, delivery systems, and services to a world beyond augmentation and enablement to consumption and autonomy. Do not think solely of the Autonomous Driving vehicle as to the sole premise of the Autonomous Revolution. Autonomous cars are still part of the enabling capabilities of an Autonomous Revolution. The Autonomous Revolution extends to a global service brokered integrated autonomous platform. This platform becomes the global marketplace, not just the independent market; this marketplace is fueled by technology that anyone and entity can plug into and become an Amazon-like broker. Driven by technology, imagine machines not only producing and delivering solutions and services, but ultimately “ideating” driving the innovation; by utilizing all the data that has been amassed over the past 50 years and facilitating this data through one of the enabling technologies. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies are mostly driving these enabling technologies and making the autonomous Revolution possible. Imagine that day when technology becomes a body; it has a heartbeat, a breath, a thought, more importantly, a “moment.”
Technology having a moment, how could this happen? The idea that technology can take a moment, a moment to pierce through the present and create the future without human intervention. Is this possible? Today’s thinking is that technology needs human intervention, and any ideation is the manifestation of the originator of the program or platform. However, the idea of machines ideating and using data to create a new solution, not advancing an existing solution, is where the Autonomous Revolution becomes a reality.
The Autonomous Revolution will be driven by an “Autonomous Platform.” This platform provides a central and consolidated service broker that everything and everyone connects to and consumes all other services and offerings. This broker is analogous to the neuro system, that enables this connection. What is different between this and the Internet? The current construct of the Internet is the highway that allows rules of the road, the ability to share, crowdsource, ideate, enable commerce, distribute, and create connections. The Internet is mostly consuming all of the 4th revolutions allowing capabilities of IoT, AI, ML, Security, and Experience.
This Autonomous Revolution will be enabled by a “Universal Autonomous Platform (UAP),” which will provide the brokered service that is being built and will continue to mature. The UAP will consume enough information that will know me; it will understand my attributes, who I am, my past experiences, my likes and dislikes, my family, friends, and colleagues. Likely we are thinking Facebook; however, the UAP will intersect this collection and broker it across the UAP, and the power of this federated attribution will open up more opportunities. The platform has crossed all of these attributes of me and my “Humo-System (yes, I created a new word, human dynamic ecosphere), all of my connections tangible and intangible and connects these into a single set of metadata. Searchable, scalable, and aggregated and at any point can be correlated into creating my digital twin, more than just the physical, but the attributes that cannot be captured in a picture, more of a 3D digital view of my existence. With all of this aggregated data being shared on an autonomous platform, my needs are then brokered across a shared system, much like the Amazon marketplace. Imagine a centralized independent platform that interconnects everything from commerce to human interactions and predicts the next thing to take action on and facilitates reasonable or unreasonable outcomes.
I posed this question because conventional wisdom is saying we are in the middle of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Still, the ecosystem is telling me we are entering the 5th Revolution at a rapid speed. I believe that enabling capabilities are driving the 4th Revolution, and we are far exceeding our wildest dreams from the ’80s until now.
Still, the Autonomous Revolution will be our greatest Revolution that changes who we are as a person, and people will look at things far differently than we do today? Better yet, we will have human to human interaction or technology interactions far above the peer to peer interactions we use in social media. So I pose the question, are we entering, or have we began this Autonomous Revolution? How do you prove we have not, or are we not approaching this in real-time?
Before you answer, remember time is not the arbitrator of revolutionary shifts; it is only a measure, not the definition.
+
