{"id":1740,"date":"2016-12-05T15:59:21","date_gmt":"2016-12-05T14:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/heikoxplore.com\/?p=1740"},"modified":"2018-03-29T15:39:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T13:39:02","slug":"change-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heikoxplore.com\/en\/change-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Change ahead, no matter how many industrial revolutions you count."},"content":{"rendered":"

Change ahead, no matter how many industrial revolutions you count. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"10104252_l\"This week we have the pleasure for the second time of featuring a piece by Jaap Suermondt (his first post is dated 2nd October 2016, About gold rushers, harvesters, and contrarians<\/strong>) who writes for us from the Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

Here is it, fully translated.<\/p>\n

Have a good read.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Change ahead, no matter how many industrial revolutions you count.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jaap Suermondt, PhD<\/p>\n

Sunnyvale, California<\/p>\n

So when I grew up (back in the stone age when talking to a computer or making video calls was Star Trek sci-fi), we were taught only about \u201cThe\u201d Industrial Revolution \u2013 that massively disruptive change from agrarian to industrial urban society. It sounded like a dark time \u2013smoke-belching factories, child labor, Dickensian crowded cities full of misery, disease, and crime, and enormous social, economic, cultural, and political upheaval, culminating in wars and actual (bloody) revolutions, but ultimately, modern society with laptops, cheap flights to the Canary Islands, clean water, antibiotics, and a television or two in every home.<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems that with a little revisionist history during my lifetime, we have spawned another three or four industrial revolutions. Governments, economic fora, and various technologists and futurists have been one-upping one another on numbering schemes for these industrial revolutions; they are succeeding one another faster than French republics. I am not sure who gets credit or blame for this (the government of Germany with Industrie 4.0? The World Economic Forum?). When you read about it now, the advent of electricity was apparently a second industrial revolution. And then the advent of electronics, information technology, and automation was the third. And the fourth, depending on how you count, is going on now \u2013 and it seems to be about actually using that stuff in the real world (call it cyber-physical systems, or IOT, or whatever). Klaus Schwab, founder and chair of the World Economic Forum, wrote extensively about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with a mix of optimism and concern (\u201cThere has never been a time of greater promise, or one of greater potential peril\u201d). But wait, before you have time to digest that fourth one, different people are already claiming the 5th<\/sup> – Robotics? AI? Mass obsolescence of humans? Whatever it is, predictions range from utopian levels of free time and wealth for all, to a Terminator-like rise of the machines. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Accelerating numbering schemes seem to be a sign of technological adolescence. Remember Web 2.0 or Web 3.0? You are dating yourself. Ask a kid (or even the average young tech employee riding the big white bus with wifi and darkened windows up or down Highway 101) what it means \u2013 you will get a puzzled look. And nobody calls it \u201cthe web\u201d anymore anyway, let alone worrying about its short-lived version numbering scheme. So perhaps this epistemological numbering craze on industrial revolutions will fade from memory too.<\/em><\/p>\n

But one thing is clear: Everyone alive today, regardless of their age, has been surrounded at every moment of their lives by recent, technical, transformational miracles with enormous social, cultural, and economic consequences \u2013 and this has been going on non-stop since the late 18th<\/sup> century. And while subdividing it into phases or calling each phase a separate revolution may not be all that useful, recognizing what it means may be. And Mr. Schwab points out some very real mega-trends and their potential implications on business, government, and people.<\/em><\/p>\n

As technologists, whether in corporate, consultative, entrepreneurial, financial, or client positions, we are all party to the effects of this ongoing revolutionary process on business. A few examples:<\/em><\/p>\n