An overview of the 4th industrial revolution
In this article, I will write about the keyword Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is a term first used at the World Economic Forum in 2016. The theme of that year’s conference was “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution”. (This is a different keyword from “Industry 4.0”, which has been used in Germany since 2011.)
What is the Industrial Revolution in the first place?
Originally, the Industrial Revolution was a term used by the economist Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui and later established as an academic term when it was used by Arnold J. Toynbee in his writings. Initially, it referred to the first industrial revolution, but it has come to be used as a concept in the developmental stage theory of industry and society, in contrast to the development of democracy, such as the so-called civil revolution.
The First Industrial Revolution was a dramatic advance in industrialization and urbanization driven by the invention of the steam engine, which occurred in Britain in the 1760s and prevailed throughout Europe and North America in the early 1800s.
The Second Industrial Revolution began in the late 1800s and lasted until around the time of World War I. Characterized by the birth of the mass production line, new industries such as steel, oil, and electricity emerged and electrical products were popularized such as internal combustion engines, light bulbs, and telephones.
The Third Industrial Revolution, sometimes called the Digital Revolution, is a social evolution that began in the late 1980s with the rise of the semiconductor industry and has evolved from machines to computers and then to the Internet, which is still in progress today.
And then there’s the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In the book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and president of the World Economic Forum, explained that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is fundamentally different from the three previous industrial revolutions, which were primarily characterized by technological developments, and described it as a technological revolution that would eliminate the boundaries between Physical, Digital and Biological.
The wording is similar to Industry 4.0, which I mentioned at the beginning. However, while this is a project promoted by the German government to digitize and computerize the manufacturing industry, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by the size of the concept, or disruptiveness, of transcending the realm of biological, or even bioscience.
For example. When you think of applications that can be designed in the cloud, built with a 3D printer, use customized wearable medical devices to sense vital data, and then re-share that data over a network to ensure that you always get the best treatment (, there exist similar services already, though), you can see them as one of spearheads in this industrial revolution, where physical, digital, and biological boundaries are easily straddled, circulated, and services will continue to be with us.
The fourth industrial revolution will bring an unprecedented degree of penetration and connectivity of converged technologies into people’s daily lives, and the widespread adoption of 5G will be a major step toward that goal.
Food traceability, retail and financial services will blend together across boundaries to connect us, and Professor Schwab argues that this revolution has great potential to keep billions of people connected to the web, radically improve business and organisational efficiency, and help regenerate the natural environment through better resource management. The speed of that transformation will sometimes go far beyond our imagination. It once took 75 years for a telephone to reach 100 million people. In contrast, it took less than two years for 100 million people to use Instagram in the modern era; Tiktok took less than a year and Pokémon Go took just one month amazingly. Will we be able to ride out the coming disruptive wave of innovation? Will only some specific companies and people be able to ride the wave, while others will be swept away by it?
Besides speed, it will also pose an ethical challenge. The modern era has escalated the issue of privacy to an unprecedented level; 50 years ago, when you talked about privacy, you might be thinking about the problems of the living environment plagued by the noise of industrialization. Now it has morphed into a problem where individuals are unable to protect their own sensitive information due to advanced digitalization. And this notion of privacy could be further evolved by the new industrial revolution. It is a question of how to protect the dignity of life itself, including ourselves. The old masterpiece Ghost in the Shell depicted people straddling physical, digital, and biological boundaries, but it also asked what brings about one’s identity when the boundaries between biological and mechanical, mental and digital, are blurred. How should we reap the benefits and protect our dignity from new threats in the post-fourth industrial revolution world? It’s good to be prepared for that right now, on the eve of what’s going to happen.
