The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Is the society ready enough to embrace the fourth industrial revolution?
Which are the technologies that are at the core of it?
Published in 2017 the first edition of the book “The fourth industrial revolution” by Klaus Schwab is a collection of themes that comprise, technological tendencies and several kinds of impacts.
I read this book in the last couple of months and now in 2022, I have an overview that the author didn’t have when he started this book. Not saying that I’m more expert than he is on the matter, but simply because I saw what happened in the last 5 years apart.
So, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is without of doubt a disruptive one and is indeed an Industrial Revolution. The author back in 2017 was still “fighting” and trying to prove with this text that we were in the imminence of it. The digital technologies acceleration is present in the services and the industry had to seek new manners to use the computational power to develop new businesses or to re-adapt existing ones.
New companies are launched nowadays under the embodiment of Start-up in the fields of digital technologies more than ever, this is due to the fact that initial investments tend to zero in this kind of business and help their creation. Several established companies are also adopting cultural changes to simulate the same agile mindset and also investing in them as venture capitalists, because “who knows if the technology will help us further ahead?”. So which were the technological tendencies and how they are helping humanity?
The fourth Industrial Revolution and Biotechnology!
Three years into the publishing of the book we had a global pandemic and several months of economical stall due to imposed confinement, but apart from this one of the technological tendencies described by the author presented humanity with a solution in record time. You shall remember in March 2020 we started to get some fuss around the global locations affected by a strange disease that could lead to respiratory failure and sudden death. Was the start of a long period of confinement due to COVID-19.
Then by the end of the year, a vaccine was ready for production and to be administered all around the world. In less than one year we developed a vaccine and all due to the advancements in the fields of biotechnology. The solution was found within the mRNA, a technique used to read the DNA.
Why is this so amazing?
This is an outstanding result because we needed 10 years and 2,7 M$ to decode for the first time the human DNA. Due to the computational power and the earlier research on that topic we were now able to find a way to stop this vírus into deathly aftermath.
The fourth Industrial Revolution and Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing)
Somehow 3D printing or Additive manufacturing is among us since the ’90s and technologies were not evolving so much in the last 20 years, but for some reason nowadays it got into the spotlight. Why? The technology is now cheaper than ever and allowed any person to have his own printer at home allowing people to create and make their ideas into phisycal objects. Also, the developments appeared to be on materials and with the use of 3D printing with biotechnology we now can print bio-compatible materials. In the near future materials will become cheaper, and stronger and 3D printing will increase in speed becoming more sustainable than current subtractive production processes. This enables also the intersection with the on-demand market that we use more often these days.
The fourth Industrial Revolution and Autonomous Vehicles & Advanced Robotics
Computational power is central to all the technological tendencies comprised by the fourth but autonomous driving and Advanced robotics are some of the areas where we are spending a lot of human efforts and money resources.
Autonomous driving implementation is intended, to improve road safety, increase energy efficiency and will disrupt the automotive industry where we do not need to own a vehicle since we can use them on demand. The raise of this technology will impact several job markets such as professional drivers that will disappear in the advent of it.
Advanced robotics will have a similar impact where repetitive activities performed by persons are systematically substituted by robots leading to more job losses further ahead.
With this said, some questions remain to be answered.
How can we adapt our society in the direction of a new economical mindset of on-demand markets?
Can we quickly “recycle” knowledge of the working force as they lose their jobs?
Are our education systems well fitted to train our new needs?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution still’s quite updated and is a good reading for new graduates who want to be aware of which direction the technologies are heading and their impacts, it’s also a good reading for well-established professionals to forecast new job markets and what they should be focused on.
The book is also an alert for the disruption ahead either for job markets the changes needed in education systems and government levels that impact our known society. Our society is laid heavily on how to use knowledge instead of how to create knowledge. With the intersection of digitalization with physical and biological technologies, there is a new world to be known and that requires new creative mindsets while we leave the repetitive work and implementation of knowledge to the machines.
