There was a Fourth Industrial Revolution? Where was I?
Apparently, while we were all dealing with the Great Recession, crippling student debt, annexations and election interferences the Fourth Industrial revolution happened. Also, as we were in a humdrum of under-employment and hustling to get by, Industry 4.0 (an alternative label for the industrial revolution or you can use the even douch-ier 4IR) became a buzzword, with Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and even CNBC writing about it.
Is it Really A Thing?
The problem I have with this label is that most industrial revolutions are defined by a significant shift in labor distribution. This is usually characterized by economic effects, but also societal blow back. The first industrial revolution had the Luddites which destroyed textile machines to stave off their inevitable replacement by those same machines.
This was back when factory owners could shoot protesters without any major legal ramifications, likely because only well-educated elites had voting rights. Oh, and breaking machines as a form of protest was punishable by death — because if the government does anything it protects daddy-big-bucks/pounds. Ah, the good ole days! Wait….that sounds eerily contemporary.
According to this Forbes article, 12 million homes (thus at least 12 million people were forced out of their homes) were foreclosed on during the 2008 housing crisis. The defaulted loans were valued at $2 trillion. The total bill to the taxpayer that the government committed to for bailing out the banks (according to another Forbes article) during this same exact period was $16.8 trillion — with $4.8 trillion paid out by 2015. Soooo to sum up people lost their homes for bad loans and banks that issued the bad loans got money. Noice.
[gingerly steps off soapbox]
To be completely forth-right with my ignorance, I wasn’t aware that there where other industrial revolutions but apparently:
· The first gave us steam power and manufactured textiles. The uptick in the use of coal was so significant during this period that we are still seeing its effects today — close to 200 years later.
· The second happen right before the Great War (ironically there was nothing great about that war except its death-toll) it gave us the telephone, the internal combustion engine and the light bulb.
· The digital revolution started in the 1980s when people thought computers could do anything — even though back then they had trouble displaying more than two colors. And those two colors had to be black and green.
· Our current fourth revolution — which we will continuing diving deeper into.
There is a Shift
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by the Internet of Things — i.e. the integration of the internet into everything from digital assistants, TVs, refrigerators and even sex toys. Yes, sex toys… my question is if it’s hacked, is that considered cheating? Oh, and I forgot to mention for pure comedic affect — ‘smart’ rectal thermometers.
But that’s just one side of the 4th Industrial Revolution — data is another big part of it. In ideal circumstances this data is used in conjunction with machine learning to refine the use of a device, process or industry.
In non-ideal circumstances it is used against people or sold off as a commodity to optimize targeting for companies’ products or other less than savory entities.
And here comes the societal blow-back: this interconnectedness of everything has come at the cost of privacy and to a certain extent security. We have seen digital assistants that record everyday conversations, social media behemoths that sold off users’ information to marketers and nuclear facilities that were made inoperable via hacking. In the last example we have even seen the movie trope “this is such a powerful weapon it would be catastrophic if it fell into the wrong hands”. With the difference that the ‘powerful weapon’ is a sophisticated, self-replicating piece of software.
Like Stuxnet that was a U.S./Israel joint project (allegedly — everyone denies any and all involvement. Spies amarite?). This software’s ‘mission’ was to disable physical centrifuges in Iran used to create enriched uranium. Unfortunately, the virus found a way out and actually infected computers outside the nuclear facility. Luckily not a lot of people have nuclear enrichment centrifuges for personal use.
Let’s pull it back into less terrifying territory: the internet of things (and machine learning, I’m adding that even though its usually mentioned) has undeniably redefined the way we interact with the physical world. The IoT (internet of things) was undeniably instrumental to the ascension of the ‘gig economy’ and all the ills and benefits that go along with it.
I guess that’s your societal blow back and shift in labor distribution.
It Needs More To Be a Revolution
I guess this is a product of our times. We are much quicker to jump aboard the hype-train and make hyperbolic declarations even if it’s just stopped at the station. When the IoT starts reversing environmental degradation and machine learning optimizes transport to the point of curtailing the huge energy demands of the logistics industry — then I would readily call it a revolution.
Although the contribution of IoT is undeniably significant — it has serious flaws both in terms of ethics and ultimately application. It’s currently equal parts gimmick (see ‘Hey Alexa play Africa by Toto’) and actual beneficial tech. We have seen it used more as a tool for extracting data from users, then being beneficial to users’ daily lives. Yeah, it’s cool I can watch YouTube on my fridge, but it would be nicer if it could give me statistics about my food consumption habits, to help minimize food waste.
“Please put the guacamole down. Data shows you have a jar of guacamole in your fridge which is over a year old. Alternatively, buy nacho cheese dip — we have seen you eat it with a spoon when you were out of tortilla chips…We see everything Dave.”
For anyone out there that didn’t get that reference — it’s from Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey 2001, in which (spoilers ahead) a rogue A.I. turns against the human it was previously assisting to complete a mission it was programmed accomplish.
Let’s think about what the first industrial revolution brought to the table — cheaper clothes, oh and a little thing called workers’ right reform. Reform is a bit too liberal a term as there were practically no workers’ rights before especially for children. Yes, child labor was a completely legal thing at the beginning of the first industrial revolution. It also allowed social mobility — a term that means moving from a lower socioeconomic class to a higher one.
This revolution has made us more efficient but paradoxically instead of working fewer hours we work more. Within this century (for the US) the GDP produced per hours worked (A.K.A. productivity) has increased 7-fold, yet the average hours worked only drop two measly hours. So, we haven’t seen any profound reforms in regard to labor.
Technology and internet access have been gotten significantly cheaper, many more devices and industries are interconnected which has had substantial economic effects — as mentioned previously the rise of the ‘gig economy’ and remote workers, but has it actually had revolutionary economic and societal effects?
Nope, not yet at least.
