Incredibly imminent

An English app will be free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half a year. The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from $18,000 to $400 within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies have started 3D printing of shoes. Spare airplane parts are already 3D printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amounts of spare parts such stations used to have in the past. At the end of this year, new smartphones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoe at home. In China, they already 3D printed a complete six-storey office building. By 2027, 10 per cent of everything that’s being produced will be 3D printed.

Electric cars will become mainstream by 2020. Cities will be less noisy because all cars will run on electricity, which will become incredibly cheap and clean: solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can only now see the impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil fuel used. The price for solar will drop so much that all coal companies will be out of business by 2025. With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination now only needs 2kWh per cubic metre. We don’t have scarce water in most places; we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if everyone can have as much clean water as he/she wants, for nearly no cost.

Is this all science fiction in the offing? No. Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. According to a paper presented by Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum at the Davos summit earlier this year, in the future, technological innovation will also lead to a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. He expects transportation and communication costs to drop, logistics and global supply chains to become more effective, and the cost of trade to diminish, all of which “will open new markets and drive economic growth”.

Professor Schwab is convinced that the world is at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another, which he explores in his new book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution: “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before … A Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. There are three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace.”

Technology is becoming embedded within societies and even in human bodies. Genome editing, new forms of machine intelligence and breakthrough approaches to governance that rely on cryptographic methods such as block-chain are some of the examples of technology becoming increasingly embedded in our lives.

Schwab says that irrespective of the net outcome of the revolution, he is convinced “that in the future, talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production”, giving rise to a job market “increasingly segregated into low-skill/low-pay and high-skill/high-pay segments, which in turn will lead to an increase in social tensions”. South Asia, including Pakistan, with a very large low-skilled or unskilled youth population is likely to face major challenges. So, let us be warned. And let us do something about it before it is too late. The opportunities we are currently facing are probably the greatest humankind has ever faced. New technological capabilities such as big data and the internet of things are transforming our daily lives in ways that could not have been imagined just a decade ago.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 18^th, 2016.

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