The trajectory of business creation from the perspective of a software developer
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Its Effect on the Creation of New Businesses
An analysis of the history, present, and future of creating enterprises through the lens of the four industrial revolutions
Voyaging out on new business ventures is easier today than any other day in history. The past, present, and future of the synthesis of enterprise can be tracked through the study of the four industrial revolutions.
A brief history
The First Industrial Revolution — Mechanization
This was characterized by the creation of the steam engine in the late 18th Century England. This first impacted the textile industry, providing the first form of large-scale automation. Steam power also revolutionized transportation through the creation of steamboats and trains. This allowed entrepreneurs to create new businesses greater scales due to increases in production technology and transportation of goods. The creation of the steam engine also laid the groundwork for further inventions surrounding energy production.
The Second Industrial Revolution — Electricity
The Second Industrial Revolution was a result of innovation around the electrical grid and electrical components (e.g. lightbulbs) in the late 19th Century America. This led to what is known as the Gilded Age in America, as electricity provided a way for business owners to scale up their operations without the upfront costs of procuring resources such as coal and steam engines. This time period transformed America from a collection of farming communities into the urban and technological powerhouse that it would come to be known as going forward. This era was one of the first of truly massive businesses, such as the Carnegie steel mills. However, the average worker still had no way of creating their own businesses, and labor unions had to be created in order to keep business owners from taking total advantage of their workers.
The Third Industrial Revolution — The Internet
This industrial revolution took place starting in the 1960s and coming to a head in the 1990s through the early 2000s. The most notable changes that occurred during this period are the invention of the internet and the subsequent creation of Information Communication Technologies, or ICTs. These ICTs allowed for rapid and affordable communication over incredibly long distances with services such as email, instant messaging services, and telecommunication systems.
The creation of these ICTs lead to the increased globalization of businesses, and the internet drove up the scale at which businesses could be started. Many startups were created and failed during this time period (Dot-com crash), but others have persisted — Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon to name a few. While this revolution started in the 1960s, innovations correlating with the core concepts of this time period are still going strong today, often aided by inventions from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The present state
The Third Industrial Revolution — Continued
The introduction of cloud computing is arguable a natural extension to the Third Industrial Revolution. The large-scale availability of cloud computing resources provided by large enterprises such as AWS, Microsoft and Google, as well as services oriented towards smaller businesses such as DigitalOcean and Heroku provide a means for startups to create websites and applications without actually needing to take on the overhead of hardware ownership and administration. Small business owners can even easily create their own marketing sites using services such as Squarespace. The capabilities and availability of these services are continuing to expand daily.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution — Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing in a new realm of automation the scale of which humanity hasn’t seen before. Machine learning and AI research has been ongoing since the 1950s but hasn’t been immediately applicable until recent years. This is in part due to the improvements in hardware and software that have made big data possible. This big data can be utilized to train machine learning models in a manner that actually renders said models effective.
AI has been used in virtually every field now, such as the medical field with analysis of imaging results, transportation with automated driving, high-risk trading with quantitative analysis within hedge funds, and manufacturing with robotics. There are many services and libraries available for developers and companies to implement machine learning and AI in a variety of ways for no cost besides labor, such as computer vision (OpenCV), natural language processing (NLTK), and neural networking (TensorFlow).
The Future
AI and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning will continue to be a central concept in the future of business creation and startups, as humanity has only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible with these concepts. AI will also continue to improve as other disruptive technologies affect and are affected by it.
Quantum Computing
While quantum computing has been solely academic for years, 2019 provided two massive milestones for quantum computing. First, Google demonstrated quantum supremacy for the first time in history:
Secondly, Amazon began a preview for quantum computing as a service — Amazon Braket. This opens the gates for developers and other businesses to leverage the exciting power of quantum computing without having to take on the millions of dollars in engineering and maintenance for the hardware.
Quantum computing allows organizations to perform simulations that more accurately resemble the real world. This will massively affect the healthcare and bioinformatics industry and pose incredible shifts to cybersecurity among other domains. While the topics in quantum computing are too advanced to discuss within the scope of this article, the science behind quantum computing is incredibly fascinating and worth exploring further.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
VR and AR have continued to grow, especially in the gaming world (which isn’t to be overlooked, as the video game industry is now larger than both the movie and music industries combined). Another area where VR and AR have begun to shine is in manufacturing. Ford is now utilizing augmented reality with the Microsoft HoloLens to design cars. This allows for designers, engineers, and even mechanics to practice using a virtual representation of a car or component without having to risk wasting money on real-world materials.
Conclusion
Overall, it’s a positively thrilling time to start a business. There are more resources available at low or no cost than ever before, and individual developers can even create their own global business by leveraging web-scale technologies and learning resources. The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the growing availability of AI and machine learning tools and libraries also allow smaller businesses to compete with tech and corporate giants, as it’s now possible to create a scalable business with just a laptop and an internet connection.
