The electrified industrial age as enabler of the digital age
Very often in university courses, in business and in the media the narrative regarding the emergence of the digital economy describes a transition from the industrial to the information age. In that narrative the digital revolution is part of the advent of the information age and it brings about such radical change that invalidates almost all of the principles of the old industrial economy. The story goes that old forms die and new ones emerge, that everything changes, that age-old constraints disappear and that we’re only at the dawn of a bright new day. As tempting as this representation of the major transformations of our world may be, it is in fact an oversimplification and, to be honest, completely wrong.
It is inaccurate in more ways than it’s useful to describe here, but there are two aspects that are worth discussing:
- scientific progress of the XIXth and XXth century that bridges the gap between energy and matter
- the paradigm of how innovation takes root and affects human activity
Bridging the gap between energy and matter
Scientific progress that’s been taking place for the past two centuries takes many forms, improving our understanding of the universe, helping improve living conditions for mankind on planet Earth and giving us access to space. At its core a lot of that progress is about bridging the gap between energy and matter, in particular those discoveries that are relevant in understanding digital innovation and the transformation of human activities.
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A set of crucial discoveries were made in science, technology, engineering, maths and even culture and mindset. They were the seeds that made the information or digital age truly transformative. Thus between the industrial revolution and the digital revolution, there was the scientific revolution around matter and energy that gave rise to the electrified industrial age, while providing an understanding of physics that created the promise of virtually infinite energy and powerful electromagnetic machines.
That is what opened the door for new ways of seeing the world and human activity, one that is based on representing everything as information. One in which information can be processed as electromagnetic signals as long series of binary digits, ones and zeroes. If we look at this evolution from an industrial viewpoint we will see how critical a transformation it has been for the shopfloor to be distributed around electrified machines that were no longer dependent on a central unit for producing the steam. That’s quite analogous to our modern-day discussions about centralised and distributed computing. As we will see in a future episode, there are about eight underlying principles at work that make business and the economy more turbulent and faster to change than ever before in human history. One of them is precisely distribution or distributed infrastructure, from energy to computing and financial systems; another is ubiquitous computing, sensors, actuators, motors and robots that bridge the gap between the logical-digital sphere and the material world. So in essence, at a very conceptual level, it bridges the gap between energy and matter.
The paradigm of innovation
The other aspect worth discussing in the erroneous narrative of a transition from a purely industrial to a purely digital age, is the very way in which innovation takes place that is not quite as clearcut as that narrative presents it to be. It does not work in the way its most enthusiastic proponents usually describe, that is the complete replacement of the old by the new. What is at work is in fact a process of amalgamation in which the old and the new mix, sometimes in ways that eradicate the old forms, e.g. when automotive vehicles made horse carriages obsolete, and sometimes in ways that create hybrids, some of which are fertile can further evolve while others end up failing. Fertile hybridisation can be found in the media business where radio did not replace newspapers, TV did not replace radio and digital technologies became catalysts for convergence in such a way that one is not surprised to find a television or radio studio in the premises of a daily for example.
