What’s at Stake in a Fourth Industrial Revolution?
A Publication of Essays: Toward a Framework for Critique
In June 2018, a group of academics, journalists, curators, technologists, and research managers gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for a two-day workshop. This workshop was hosted by the Museum’s Software History Center, and was supported by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). The workshop’s topic was a question: “What’s at stake in a Fourth Industrial Revolution?” The group’s task was to write, and then to discuss, a series of analytical essays that would show the range of ways in which the question could be answered. In sum, the essays would begin to provide a framework for critique and engagement. This publication is a selection of these essays.
The broad vision of the workshop’s organizers, the editors of this publication, was to reveal unexamined assumptions, to find gaps and oversights in conventional wisdom, and to help to set a critical agenda for researching and acting on the issues and concerns raised by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
A Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Across the globe, public and private sector actors argue that we are entering a period of rapid technological and social change profound enough to be called a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4th IR). They see an accelerating development of currently emerging and converging technologies — artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and numerous other information-dependent technologies — as certain to fundamentally transform the way humans live and work. In this view, the 4th IR holds both the promises of economic growth and public goods and the perils of great social dangers, including mass unemployment and increasing inequality.
It matters whether or not the proponents of a 4th IR are correct or not, because such a discontinuity implies a limited window for investments and policies to shape the changes, to intentionally push the revolution toward promise and away from peril. In South Korea, Germany, China, and the United States, self-designated experts insist that the successful navigation of the 4th IR is essential to national competitiveness. The World Economic Forum (WEF), which positions itself as the voice of enlightened corporate engagement, has been in the vanguard of advancing the concept of the 4th IR, placing it at the center of its recent annual meetings in Davos, opening a large Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco, and planning for additional such centers in a variety of countries. The WEF’s central message has been that governments, corporations, and NGOs all need to rethink their policies and practices in anticipation of the 4th IR.
Is a new industrial revolution indeed upon us? What are the alternative futures that might be possible as a consequence? What interests are served by this way of thinking? Put simply: What is at stake in a 4th Industrial Revolution?
The Recent History of a Pending Revolution
An important origin of today’s talk of a 4th IR is a 2011 industrial trade fair in Hanover, Germany. At it, suppliers of industrial goods and services for advanced manufacturing promoted the concept of “Industrie 4.0.” They contended that fast-changing information and computer technologies — including the collection and interpretation of “Big Data,” artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, smart materials, and the “Internet of Things” — would be integrated into “intelligent manufacturing.” Their premise was that this intelligent manufacturing offered significant competitive advantage for the nation state, and enhanced profits at the level of the firm. Quickly, discussions of Industrie 4.0 spread far beyond Germany.
In 2015, Klaus Schwab, an economist and the founder of the WEF, advanced the related concept of the 4th IR. Through its many channels, WEF commentators positioned the 4th IR as encompassing the intelligent manufacturing of Industrie 4.0, as well as a long list of additional “emerging technologies” that would also be important far beyond manufacturing.
In 2016, the WEF made “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution” the theme of its annual meeting in Davos, giving the 4th IR enormous visibility on the international stage. As WEF publications framed it, a first Industrial Revolution took place starting in the 1780s, in which technologies powered by water and steam afforded mechanical production. A second Industrial Revolution followed in the 1870s, as electricity-based technologies enabled mass production with a division of labor. A third Industrial Revolution took hold in 1969, in which electronics and computing technologies were used for widespread automation and information processing. In the WEF’s formulation, the 4th IR is happening now, centered on technologies powered by the “cyber-physical systems” of intelligent manufacturing and other emerging technologies. In the WEF’s formulation — and in broader discussions — the 4th IR is inevitable, and the best that societies can hope to do is to guide and adapt to it.
A Global, Consequential Discussion
Discourse about the 4th IR has been consequential in several national contexts: Public and private actors have used the 4th IR to justify new national industrial policies. In Germany, where the idea of Industrie 4.0 first developed, its 2012 federal “High Technology Strategy 2020 Action Plan” allocated €200 million in research support. These funds, passed through established government agencies and public-private partnerships, supported research aimed at assisting companies to integrate new computing and information technologies for advanced manufacturing.
In China, the federal Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) based its 2015 “Made in China 2025” policy explicitly on the German example and the concept of intelligent manufacturing, and on extensive consultation with the Chinese Academy of Engineering. In its policy, the Chinese government aims to spend some $1.5 billion by 2025 on direct investments, and another $30 billion in government-backed bank loan programs to advance intelligent manufacturing across Chinese industries, and to invest in key research. For example, China recently announced plans for a $2 billion artificial intelligence technology park near Beijing.
Other countries are formulating national economic and industrial policy in anticipation of the 4th IR. In South Korea’s 2017 presidential election, discussion of the 4th IR figured prominently in debates about defending the nation’s status as a successful export-oriented manufacturing economy. In the United States, the National Academies convened discussions about the 4th IR with government, academic, and industrial representatives in preparation for articulating a national plan.
What’s at Stake?
The notion of a 4th IR, and the technological developments associated with it, continue to figure prominently in global discourses. No day passes without the appearance of an article or opinion piece on machine learning, the politics of algorithms, the power of social media, the effect of autonomous vehicles, the increasing automation of work, the volatility of cryptocurrency, and so on. Less common, though much needed and increasing, is thoughtful consideration, informed by research and expertise, about the socioeconomic impacts of these technologies. Relatively little is said about who finances these developments, who makes choices among them, and who ultimately benefits. There is a good deal at stake today in this 4th IR, whether or not it actually exists or will. Now is the critical time to start analyzing the 4th IR.
While the WEF presents the 4th IR as poised to deliver a “supply-side miracle” so profound as to redefine what it means to be human, they also acknowledge grave risk. Most pronounced is the fear that a 4th IR will increase global inequality through disruption of labor markets at all levels by intelligent automation. Echoing the economist Thomas Piketty, the WEF warns that the 4th IR could exacerbate the gap between the return on labor and the return on capital. Further, some emerging technologies are seen to be inherently dangerous. For example, this danger could reside in the use of artificial intelligence for military applications, such as self-guided, self-firing drones.
As yet, no broad analytical framework has been advanced for grappling with this economic, political, and cultural development. What political and economic interests are being ignored by describing the present and the envisioned near-future as a 4th IR? What are the limitations of this framing? Can the discourse of the 4th IR and associated policy-based actions be interpreted as moves by corporations, to control technological development in service of the status quo? Where are the voices of labor and wage-earners? What about the professions being industrialized? In what ways do the existing discourses of the 4th IR overlook the climate crisis and mass extinction? The experiences of migrants, women, racial minorities, sexual minorities, and the disabled?
David C. Brock
Margaret Graham
W. Patrick McCray
Lee Vinsel
February 2019
