Recommended Watch: Beyond Technology: The Fourth Industrial Revolution in the Developing World
(youtube.com)
On May 21, the CSIS Project on Prosperity and Development will be releasing an essay anthology on the fourth industrial revolution. The authors include Romina Bandura, Christina Campbell-Zausner, William Carter, MacKenzie Hammond, Sonia Jorge, Casper Klynge, Aaron Milner, Maiko Nakagaki, Peter Raymond, Nilmini Rubin, Daniel Runde, and Steven Zausner.
There are not going to be driverless Ubers in Lagos anytime soon. Robots are not going to steal millions of jobs from American miners or factory workers. Nor will our genes be spliced with technological enhancements to defeat diseases and to supercharge our neurons. Not yet, at least.
But we are beginning to see symptoms of the globally disruptive phenomenon known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)*. Rapid periods of past technological industrialization have created tectonic shifts in societies throughout human history. Diverse technologies have grown and scaled to knock off behemoths and traditions to become the next giants themselves.
Some of these technologies that will define next-generation human enterprise, connectivity, and lifestyles already are here, but they haven’t been scaled to everyday utilization. For example, the vertical lift technology for flying cars has been around for years, but the regulatory environment, legal considerations, and other issues currently outweigh the benefit to innovate. Just because society has these technologies does not mean they will roll out. There are growing speed bumps to technology around privacy, competition, and equitable access. Technologies’ dramatic impact on everyday life could take a long time, but just like previous revolutions, if we do not plan for these evolutions now, we won’t benefit from them in the future.
This event is made possible through generous support of the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington D.C.
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Subscribe to our channel: http://cs.is/2dCfTve
CSIS is the world's #1 defense and national security think tank. Visit http://www.csis.org to find more of our work as we bring bipartisan solutions to the world's greatest challenges.
There are not going to be driverless Ubers in Lagos anytime soon. Robots are not going to steal millions of jobs from American miners or factory workers. Nor will our genes be spliced with technological enhancements to defeat diseases and to supercharge our neurons. Not yet, at least.
But we are beginning to see symptoms of the globally disruptive phenomenon known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)*. Rapid periods of past technological industrialization have created tectonic shifts in societies throughout human history. Diverse technologies have grown and scaled to knock off behemoths and traditions to become the next giants themselves.
Some of these technologies that will define next-generation human enterprise, connectivity, and lifestyles already are here, but they haven’t been scaled to everyday utilization. For example, the vertical lift technology for flying cars has been around for years, but the regulatory environment, legal considerations, and other issues currently outweigh the benefit to innovate. Just because society has these technologies does not mean they will roll out. There are growing speed bumps to technology around privacy, competition, and equitable access. Technologies’ dramatic impact on everyday life could take a long time, but just like previous revolutions, if we do not plan for these evolutions now, we won’t benefit from them in the future.
This event is made possible through generous support of the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington D.C.
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Subscribe to our channel: http://cs.is/2dCfTve
CSIS is the world's #1 defense and national security think tank. Visit http://www.csis.org to find more of our work as we bring bipartisan solutions to the world's greatest challenges.
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Francisco Gimeno - BC Analyst We are living in interesting times. We have the ability, as humans, to understand we are living into a new paradigm shift. We call it the 4th IR. More importantly we understand this new paradigm will have a deep and dramatic global impact, and we can foresee what this may mean in the long term, some thinking utopias, and other dystopias.But we all agree: disruption is coming. For developing societies in Africa and other territories this is not just the opportunity to climb to the level other societies live (a wrong thinking anyway) but the opportunity to immediately leap to the new economy and society which is coming. In fact we believe the real battleground for the 4th IR won't be the developed societies, but those places where the change will be widely disruptive and transformational. At the end, it also depends on how we prepare for it.