Tomorrow's People and New Technology

Changing How We Live Our Lives

Felix Dodds, Carolina Duque Chopitea, Ranger Ruffins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Desarrollo sostenible

As we witness a series of social, political, cultural, and economic changes/disruptions this book examines the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the way emerging technologies are impacting our lives and changing society.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterised by the emergence of new technologies that are blurring the boundaries between the physical, the digital, and the biological worlds. This book allows readers to explore how these technologies will impact peoples' lives by 2030. It helps readers to not only better understand the use and implications of emerging technologies, but also to imagine how their individual life will be shaped by them. The book provides an opportunity to see the great potential but also the threats and challenges presented by the emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, posing questions for the reader to think about what future they want. Emerging technologies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, big data and analytics, cloud computing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, the Internet of Things, fifth-generation wireless technologies (5G), and fully autonomous vehicles, among others, will have a significant impact on every aspect of our lives, as such this book looks at their potential impact in the entire spectrum of daily life, including home life, travel, education and work, health, entertainment and social life.

Providing anindicationof what the world might look like in 2030, this book is essential reading for students, scholars, professionals, and policymakers interested in the nexus between emerging technologies and sustainable development, politics and society, and global governance.

1 A brief history of the industrial revolutions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003045496-1

Introduction

Today, many of us wake up and look at our phones, navigate the Internet for news, turn on the lights in our rooms, take a shower, and have breakfast, perhaps preparing eggs that were produced in faraway farms. Most of us wear clothes and drive cars that have been mass-produced in factories. Beyond ‘country of origin’ labels, we don’t know where these factories are or how our goods got to us.

There are thousands of different occupations around the world, from businesspeople, bankers, financial analysts, data scientists, and engineers to architects, construction workers, project managers, consultants, writers, journalists, community organisers, truck drivers, cashiers, receptionists, farmers – you name it, and someone somewhere likely makes a living out of it.

New and emerging careers evolve as the pace of change increases. Even the nature of how essential jobs deliver their goods and services is changing. We are also seeing jobs disappear as new changes take root. Over the preceding three industrial revolutions we have created technologies and occupations to satisfy ever-changing human needs. Job loss and job gain have tended to balance, but it is not clear that will still be the case for this Fourth Industrial Revolution.

A history of human innovation

The history of the industrial revolutions has been one of human ingenuity expressed through creativity, innovation, courage, hard work, intellect, and passion. It is the history of love for progress, but it is also a history of greed, inequality, violence, and unfairness. Depending on where you live in the world, you may be experiencing multiple industrial revolutions at the same time, even though in developed countries the various revolutions have tended to build on each other. A sustenance farmer in Senegal may be still taking food to market with a donkey and cart but may have electricity in his or her village from solar panels or own a mobile phone.

Imagine prior to the First Industrial Revolution you live in a world with no Internet, no electricity, no running water, no toilet, and no waste disposal systems. No cooking stove or ovens, no strawberries in the winter, little or no access to education, and certainly no modern medicine or antibiotics. You still travel by horse or foot. Your family and friends, like 80 per cent of the world population, are engaged in farming. The remainder of the population carefully crafts goods by hand. Your standard of living is not much better than thousands of years ago. All the advancements we enjoy today have their roots in the First Industrial Revolution and the subsequent industrial revolutions that have truly shaped the world we live in.

Of course, not everyone has benefitted equally from the developments brought by these revolutions. Neither every person nor every country in the world reaps the benefits of the industrial revolutions equally, yet everyone has been impacted by them.

In his book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi coins the term ‘social dislocation’ to explain the process in which previous social tendencies were undermined, and society moved from a premodern economy mostly based on redistribution and reciprocity to a market economy driven by industrialisation and increasing state influence (Polanyi, 1944). He explains that the expansion of capitalism fundamentally changed humans’ economic relations as land, labour, and money became commodities subordinated to the laws of the market, resulting in significant social dislocations. Polanyi claims that social dislocations often created spontaneous movements to protect the foundations of societies.

This idea of ‘social dislocations’ that Polanyi applies to the emergence of market capitalism and the movement from the commons to private ownership echoes the social dislocations that have taken place throughout industrial revolutions and the subsequent social movements that have emerged to protect society from abrupt change.

The history of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and their respective evolutions, are different, yet highly interconnected. The industrial revolutions have not only been characterised by their developments and technological advancements but also by the social upheavals, unrest, and anxiety that they created.

The term ‘Industrial Revolution’ was popularised by English writer Arnold Toynbee in the late 1880s. Toynbee’s lectures on the Industrial Revolution, published in 1884, were the first and most influential attempts to historicise the transition to a machine-based economy, particularly in Britain (Wilso, 2014). This term was later used to describe not one but four distinct periods of industrial revolution throughout history.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), describes an industrial revolution as the emergence of:

New technologies and novel ways of perceiving the world [that] trigger a profound change in social and economic structures.

(Schwab, 2017A)

Simply put, industrial revolutions are the intersection of change between emerging technologies and the way humans live and perceive life.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a revolution is a sudden, radical, or complete change, often in society and the social structure, frequently accompanied by violence. And industrialisation is the process by which an economy is transformed from a primarily agricultural focus to one based on the manufacturing of goods. Individual manual labour is often replaced by mechanised mass production, and craftsmen are replaced by assembly lines. Characteristics of industrialisation include economic growth, a more efficient division of labour, and the use of technological innovation to solve problems as opposed to dependency on conditions outside human control (Investopedia).

It is hard to overstate the significance of the First Industrial Revolution – starting around 1760 to 1820. Up until that point, civilisation had made almost no economic progress for most of its existence, and suddenly there was a spike in social and economic progress. For most of human history, the economic growth rate was about 0.1 per cent per year, which allowed for a gradual increase in population but no growth in per capita living standards (Silver, 2012).

The Industrial Revolution was marked by increased production brought by machines and characterised by new energy sources, particularly steam power and the rise of coal and creation of factories.

The Second Industrial Revolution – the Technological Revolution – was the age of mass production; it was a phase of rapid standardisation and industrialisation characterised by the mass introduction of electrical power, among others.

The Third Industrial Revolution was the move from analogue and mechanical devices to digital ones bringing with it semiconductors, mainframe computing, personal computers, and the Internet – this was the Digital Revolution.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the one we are currently living in, is a period that is changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. It is driven by technological advances and built upon the previous revolutions. This period is characterised by the blurring boundaries between the physical, digital, and biological worlds and it is increasing the pace of change to an extent not previously seen.

All these revolutions brought major societal transformations with significant implications for the average person. During these periods, particularly in what is now known as the developed world, people went from mostly working the land to working in factories, from the countryside to cities, from production to mass production, from paper to personal computers, and from personal computers to smartphones and personalised assistants in our digital devices, all in the last three hundred years.

Economic development has grown exponentially: More changes to human society and the environment around us have taken place in the last three centuries than in the previous 15,000 years of human history.

This chapter digs deeper into each of these revolutions. It discusses topics like how they emerged, what drove them, and who was impacted the most. The goal of this chapter is to give the reader some historical context of human economic and technological development, and the tools to better understand the significance of these revolutions.

This chapter will focus particularly on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the changes and technologies emerging from this period. It will seek to answer what technologies are currently emerging and why are they worth talking about.

The revolution of revolutions: The First Industrial Revolution and the steam engine

The latter half of the 18th century saw the emergence of the First Industrial Revolution; the age of steam and factories that changed the course of humanity forever. The First Industrial Revolution refers to a transition to a new manufacturing process that began in Britain and spread to the rest of the world. This period transformed mostly rural, agrarian societies into industrialised, urban ones, and goods began to be produced in large quantities by machines in factories.

Scholars continue to debate why the Industrial Revolution sparked in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world. But broadly speaking, Europe and particularly Britain had the political, social, and economic conditions that allowed for the birth of this revolution. Some of the factors that may have contributed to the revolution are the culture of science and invention of Europe at the time that fostered the creation of revolutionary technologies. In Britain this was accompanied by freer political institutions that encouraged innovation and protect property rights, creating incentives for investors, resulting in Britain becoming the cradle of the revolution.

The First Industrial Revolution resulted in increased production brought about using machines and characterised by new energy sources, particularly coal and steam.

Before the revolution, world industries were generally small-scale and relatively unsophisticated. For example, most textile production was centred on small workshops and involved thousands of individual manufacturers (White, 2009).

The textile industry in Britain was at the forefront of this revolution, adapting innovations like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the power loom to make weaving more efficient. Producing cloth became much faster and required less human labour. Tasks that were previously done by hand by hundreds of individual and independent weavers were brought together in a single cotton mill, and as a result, factories were born. The rise in demand for goods, particularly textiles, combined with increased production capacity to create the perfect ingredients for kickstarting a revolution.

The steam engine was a revolutionary source of energy in this period. In the 1770s, it powered the machines used to pump water out of mine shafts (History, n.d.). Improvements to the steam engine allowed miners to dig deeper and extract more coal, making it a cheap and plentiful energy source.

The steam engine spread across most of Britain like the flu, shaping industries like flour, paper, and cotton mills, not to mention ironwork, distilleries, and construction (think canal building). Many industries became heavily reliant on this source of energy. Demand for coal increased significantly because it was used to run the factories that produced manufactured goods. Coal also powered transportation via railroads and steamships. It is still used today to produce electricity and steel. Pollution from industrial-scale coal and natural gas are standing legacies of the Industrial Revolution.

To date, we still struggle with these energy sources, because their burning emits greenhouse gases that get trapped in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change and putting the future of humanity at risk.

The first person to show scientific evidence of climate change was amateur American scientist Eunice Foote. Her experiments in the mid-1800s warned of the Earth’s greenhouse effect:

An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature … must have necessarily resulted.

(Foote, 1856)

At the same time, life in the countryside was also changing. Inventions, like the iron ploughs drawn by horses, began to displace wooden ploughs, thus making some farmers redundant. As a result, an oversupply of cheap agricultural labour led to unemployment, hence driving many to the cities in search of work, where they supplied employees for the large-scale labour-intensive factories then on the rise (White, 2009).

Even though this migration increased the population of cities, rural areas also began to change as cities started expanding and the rise of large factories turned smaller towns into m...