Thursday, March 1, 2018

Should Davos delegates live in fear of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’?

6:55 AM    
The World Economic Forum Meeting at

Davos, Switzerland this year is all about navigating a path through the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Preceding industrial revolutions were centred on machinery, electrified mass production, and computers. The fourth is premised on emerging breakthrough technologies based on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, brain research, robots, the internet of things, and much else.
Beneath the branding and the hype, major technological changes are happening that will have enormous implications for the organization of business, the pattern of work, daily life, and the future of capitalism. The rapid pace of change is set to continue, and the world will be very different in 30 years from now.
The publicity for the Davos meeting portends a world of joblessness, low productivity and inequality. But are these inevitable, and haven’t we heard such warnings before? It would be a mistake for delegates to assume that technological changes lead automatically to one set of possible socio-economic outcomes.