How the fourth industrial revolution will change the world
Automation and artificial intelligence will shape social and economic development for the next generation.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum in Davos chose “Mastering the Fourth
Industrial Revolution” as its theme. It was one of the first public uses of a term that has quickly entered the mainstream.
As a catch-all description of a wave of disruptive new technologies, some already in the wild and others in the pipeline, it brings together a diverse collection of products and services with the potential to change not just industry but wider society.
They include 5G networks, Wi-Fi 6, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and machine learning, renewable power, 3D printing, blockchain finance, robotics, nanotechnology, quantum computing and biotechnology.
These technologies are already reshaping the labour market and our lives. To give just a few examples:
In classrooms, children are learning from online software. Human teachers step in to help them with the parts they struggle to understand, once those have been identified by the app.
In warehouses, robots can locate, pick and transport items without any human intervention.
Rather than employing a journalist to write a story about changing share prices, financial websites use algorithms that display neat graphs automatically and without errors.
Police and private companies in the UK are using AI to look for the faces of criminals in crowds. A court ruled in September that doing so is not a breach of human rights.
Legal firms now sit new clients in front of software which asks them a series of questions and drafts documents appropriately. In some cases, doctors can be replaced with a diagnostic algorithm and a nurse.
Are the robots coming for our jobs?
The fourth industrial revolution (or 4IR) is already creating ethical and legal problems, the greatest of which may be the fear that robots are coming for our jobs. A 2017 report by global management consultants McKinsey said that as many as 800 million workers worldwide could be “displaced” by changing technologies between 2017 and 2030.
Already, according to Professor Andrew Scott of the London Business School, “thousands of jobs in financial services have gone as transactions have moved online.” Soon, he predicts, “people in marketing may find the tasks they perform being taken over by AI [and] new technologies could lay waste to a host of back-office jobs such as processing information for accounts or handling legal documents.” It sounds like bad news, but it’s not the whole story.
What we can learn from spreadsheets
For the BBC’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, economist Tim Harford examined the rise of VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet program, which was released in 1979 and quickly replaced paper-based spreadsheets that clerks had needed to manually recalculate. It was a breakthrough for firms with complicated accounts – but would it be a disaster for accounting clerks? Yes and no. According to NPR’s Planet Money podcast, in the US alone 400,000 fewer accounting clerks are employed today than in 1980, just after VisiCalc came out – but there are now 600,000 more jobs for actual accountants than there were back then. The accountancy jobs that vanished after VisiCalc were routine, repetitive and mechanical. Handing them over to a computer allowed humans to spend more time on analysis – and creative responses to what the spreadsheets revealed.
What can we do to prepare?
While 4IR is a challenge rather than a threat, it poses potential problems. Harford suggests that lower-skilled jobs may become simplistic and souldestroying, while Professor Scott thinks that people in the middle of the skill spectrum, or those who can’t retrain, may struggle to find work.
Yet, far from resisting it, economists and politicians say Britain must embrace 4IR, to minimise the risks and ensure the new technologies benefit society as a whole. As digital minister in 2017, Matt Hancock told a group of MPs investigating 4IR: “Our goal must be to automate work, but humanise jobs. Allow machines to do the dangerous, boring and repetitive, and ensure we humans have the capacity to do the creative, empathetic and interactive.”
Riding the revolution
The new technologies driving the fourth industrial revolution are already creating challenges as well as opportunities – and both are likely to multiply as the pace of change accelerates.
The potential pitfalls are ethical and social as much as technical, with the biggest perceived threat being increased unemployment. But there is every reason to be optimistic as we seek to take advantage of this latest wave of change.
One thing is certain: there is no way to turn back the clock. However we choose to engage with it, technology will reshape our world again.