English 4.0

Jedes Jahr Ende Januar treffen sich Persönlichkeiten aus Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur und Gesellschaft in Davos. Auf dem Weltwirtschaftsforum erörtern sie Themen, die die Menschen weltweit bewegen, nicht selten mit dem Ziel, revolutionäre Veränderungen her

The Davos revolution

Klaus Schwab doesn’t look like a revolutionary. He certainly doesn’t look like Che Guevara, who was a major figure in the Cuban revolution of the 1950s and whose face became an icon of revolution in popular culture. Schwab looks more like a man who was born in Ravensburg in 1938 than the Guerrillero Heroico in Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che. But the 80-year-old is a revolutionary in his own way.

In 1971, he founded the World Economic Forum. The annual meeting at the end of January in Davos brings together 2,500 business leaders, politicians, economists, celebrities and media for four days to discuss the most important problems facing the world. The yearly talkfest in the eastern Alps of Switzerland has created a new class of people known as “Davos Man” and “Davos Woman”. They speak English in all its global varieties and see themselves as totally international. They don’t feel the need for any specific national identity and regard national borders as pointless.

In fact, Davos Man and Davos Woman believe national government is a thing of the past, something that’s unnecessary as we move into a future of global cooperation. One can laugh at these people, and many do, or one can consider them to be the forerunners of a revolution that’s taking place today. In 2016, Klaus Schwab wrote a book titled The Fourth Industrial Revolution. In the introduction, he said: “We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another. In its scale, scope and complexity, what I consider to be the Fourth Industrial Revolution is unlike anything humankind has experienced before.” Now, Schwab is back with another book, Shaping the Future of

“Klaus Schwab is a revolutionary in his own way”

the Fourth Industrial Revolution, co-written with Nicholas Davis, an Australian lawyer. Davis is very much a Davos Man. He lives in Geneva and, among other things, he’s described as “a strategy professional and scenario expert”.

“The good news is that the evolution of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is entirely within our power, and we are still at its very earliest stages,” write Schwab and Davis. This optimistic statement is very different to the warnings of the trendy historian Yuval Noah Harari, who fears a future in which computers will know us better than we know ourselves. Will we still be able to make our own choices? Or will we be politically powerless and economically helpless?

Harari is pessimistic, where Schwab and Davis are hopeful. In their words: “Individuals are, ultimately, the people who will live in the future that technologies help to create.”

Along with artificial intelligence, blockchain, additive manufacturing, robotics, geoengineering and neurotechnology, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is filled with words like “externalities”, “inflection points” and “developtory sandboxes”. The last in this list are the places where new ideas are tested, by the way.

This column was created in 2016 to look at some of the ideas emerging from the Industry 4.0 concept, which is at the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And as part of the Business Spotlight mission to make language easier to use, from now on, I’ll be looking here at key words and phrases that we need when talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“Individuals will live in the future that technologies help to create”