According to some experts, were at the beginning of a fourth Industrial revolution,
and it's one that'll make those that came before it look like mere
dress rehearsals for the main event. But what is it and why should you care?
Sometimes, it seems that human history has been one big, continuous,
technological roller coaster ride. First we discovered fire, and then agriculture.
Then came the wheel, and then cities, and manufacturing and trading, followed by
steam power, electricity, mass production, synthetic chemicals, computers, the internet,
gene editing block chain, self driving cars, artificial intelligence.
Scientists are now even talking about growing people in laboratories, and one
day, possibly downloading our brains into computers. This is one mind-blowingly
crazy technological rollercoaster ride were on,
and it's getting faster and weirder by the day. If you're into tech of course,
this is an incredibly exhilarating ride. But it's also a scary one; especially
when you think about what might go wrong. Over the past 300 years, one wave after
another of technological revolutions have impacted our lives. It started with
the first Industrial Revolution, when we discovered how to fully harness the
power of steam. Then, as we entered the 20th century, we worked out how to
mass-produce products using electricity. This led to a second industrial
revolution, that lasted all the way up to the 1970s when we discovered digital
computers. And then we found ourselves in yet another revolution. But now we're
going through a fourth Industrial Revolution; and it's one that's so
radical, it makes the previous three look like child's play.
What makes this fourth Industrial Revolution so different is that we're
well on the way to developing the ability to design and engineer the world
around us using the very atoms and molecules it's made of. If you think of
atoms and how they're arranged in materials is the "digital code" of the
real world, we're learning how to hack this code; and in the process to change
our reality. You can see this in areas like gene editing and synthetic biology,
where we are quite literally learning how to hack biology by reprogramming DNA.
But we're also learning to hack stuff that isn't alive, by using atoms and
molecules in new ways. Using nanotechnology and other forms of
advanced manufacturing for instance, we're creating designer materials that
can be used in everything from our clothes and our computers, to robots,
spacecraft, even the food we eat. But this isn't the half of it. What makes this
fourth Industrial Revolution so mind-boggling is the way that we're
vastly enhancing this mastery of living and non-living stuff with an incredibly
powerful "secret sauce". And this secret sauce is cyberspace. in the third
Industrial Revolution we discovered digital computing, and we created a
virtual world of bits and bytes. And we're now quite literally using this to
add a fifth dimension to the world we live in. Of course we're all familiar
with the three physical dimensions: up-down, left-right, and front-back. And
we're used to thinking of time as a fourth dimension. But cyberspace allows
us to work outside of these more conventional dimensions, and dip in and
out of them at will. In other words, cyberspace provides us with a back door
to re-engineering and redesigning our reality. It's a bit like the science
fiction idea of hyperspace in that it gives us ways to achieve things in the
real world that would be impossible if we couldn't sometimes step outside of it.
This is really mind-blowing stuff. But it's also a little disquieting, because
we're in completely uncharted territory, and we have remarkably little idea of
what go wrong. Of course, we have some hints. We know
for instance that we're now at a point where, if a technology gets out of
hand, we can't simply turn the clock back. There is no easy reset button when
you're hacking reality. And we realize that, if we're not careful, a lot of
people could get hurt in this fourth Industrial Revolution, by losing their
jobs for instance, or their rights, or even their lives. Even more worryingly
perhaps, we're beginning to develop artificial intelligences that live in
cyberspace, and that we don't fully understand or control. What's even more
concerning is that, just as we can use cyberspace to hack reality, so can they.
This could get weird fast if we're not careful, and this is why everyone should
care about the fourth Industrial Revolution and where it's taking us;
because unless we learn how to develop and use our new technological
capabilities responsibly, this could end up being one roller coaster ride of a
revolution that, for some people, leaves the rails with catastrophic consequences.
The good news is though that there are people working on this. For instance in
the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University,
we're training the next generation of experts and leaders with the skills they
need to navigate us safely through this revolution. And organizations like the
World Economic Forum and others are working on new ways to ensure we can
meet the emerging challenges, while keeping the tremendous benefits that
this revolution offers. Because without a doubt, with the right understanding,
people, and skills, this fourth Industrial and technological revolution could
radically improve our lives. But to do this, it's going to take an equally
radical revolution in how we develop and handle the technologies it involves
responsibly, and beneficially.