The fourth industrial revolution is upon us
The fourth industrial revolution is upon us
By Jim Hoagland November 22 at 6:58 PM
MARRAKESH, Morocco
Driverless cars and trucks rule the road, while robots
“man” the factories. Super-smartphones hail Uber helicopters or even planes to
fly their owners across mushrooming urban areas. Machines use algorithms to
teach themselves cognitive tasks that once required human intelligence, wiping
out millions of managerial, as well as industrial, jobs.
These are visions of a world remade — for the most part,
in the next five to 10 years — by technological advances that form a fourth
industrial revolution. You catch glimpses of the same visions today not only in
Silicon Valley but also in Paris think tanks, Chinese electric-car factories or
even here at the edge of the Sahara.
Technological disruption in the 21st century is
different. Societies had years to adapt to change driven by the steam engine,
electricity and the computer. Today, change is instant and ubiquitous. It
arrives digitally across the globe all at once.
Governments at all levels on all continents are suddenly
waking up to how social media and other forms of algorithms and artificial
intelligence have raced beyond their control or even awareness. (See the Trump
campaign and Russia, 2016, for one example.)
This realization that American lives are on the cusp of
technological disruptions even more sweeping than those of the past decade was
driven home to me by being part of a research project on technology and
governance at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University this year.
“Autonomous” (i.e., driverless) cars, the cloud, and swarming drones that
deliver goods to your doorstep or transform naval and ground war-fighting
strategy are well-known concepts. But the reality that they are breathing down
my — and your — neck came as something of a surprise.
So did the startling visions of change outlined in the
cozy confines of Silicon Valley that were also on the agenda here on Africa’s
Atlantic shoulder when France’s Institute of International Relations held its
annual World Policy Conference this month.
The usual suspects — global balance-of-power politics,
the European Union’s woes, President Trump’s foreign-policy brutishness, Brexit
— shared pride of place with the Internet of Cars (the on-wheels version of the
Internet of Things) and the vulnerability of the 5,000 military and civilian
satellites now in orbit.
These were not abstract subjects for the conference’s
host country. Morocco this month became the first African nation to launch a
spy satellite into space. And the kingdom is a key player in U.N.-sponsored
efforts to organize a global containment strategy for climate change.
China’s policies toward Taiwan and India were not dwelled
upon here. Instead it was noted that China produces more electric-powered
automobiles than the rest of the world combined in a determined campaign to
reduce pollution. “China is becoming a global laboratory as well as a global
factory,” said one speaker, pointing to Beijing’s surging development of
artificial intelligence in all civilian and military forms.
The world’s major powers offer sharp contrasts in
harnessing technological change to their national interests and histories. The
result is a new bipolar world based on technology rather than nuclear arsenals.
Today’s superpowers are the United States and China.
The U.S. government has kept out of the way and let
market forces develop giant technology companies with global reach. China has
chosen to compete head to head, keeping Facebook, Google and others out of its
markets while capturing U.S. intellectual property for its national firms.
Europe lets U.S. technology companies in and regulates them rather than
competing. Russia has weaponized information technology, adding social media to
its arsenal of troops, missiles and tanks.
Diplomats and strategists have begun to patrol this
expanding intersection of technology and international affairs, hoping to find
ways to adapt the Cold War rules of deterrence and arms-control agreements to
threats from cyberspace. Some experts shudder at the thought of artificial intelligence
being incorporated into national command-and-control systems, further reducing
the time humans have to respond to hostile missiles or laser beams.
There were also calls for governments to begin to grapple
with urgent earth-bound problems created by the disruptive impact of technology
on domestic labor markets and increasingly fragile political systems.
The jobs that artificial intelligence and automation
create while destroying outmoded ones often require constant retraining and
multiple career and location changes. U.S. employers report that 6.1 million
jobs currently sit vacant largely because applicants lack either the skills or
mobility needed.
And there was clear recognition from Palo Alto, Calif.,
to Marrakesh that the communication revolution embodied in social media has
hollowed out the political parties in democracies, enabling demagogues to whip
up mobs by remote control.
The world turns, as always. But now it turns on a dime,
or rather a computer chip.
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