Shifts in employment and skills may also increase gender inequality. Unemployment due to automation has in the past concentrated in sectors that mostly employ men, such as manufacturing and construction.
But the ability to use artificial intelligence and other technologies to automate tasks in service industries puts many more job categories at risk in the future. These include jobs that are the source of livelihood for many young female workers and lower-middle-class women around the world, including call centre, retail and administrative roles.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution may affect inequality across economies as well as within them. In particular, the increasing flexibility of capital in the form of robots and other advanced manufacturing systems may erode the comparative advantage currently enjoyed by many emerging and developing countries, which are focused on labour-intensive goods and services. This mix of factors creates the conditions for violent extremism and other security threats enabled by power shifting to non-state actors.
Furthermore, the strategic space for conflict is changing. The rapid spread of digital infrastructure thanks to the Third Industrial Revolution means that during the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cyberspace is now as strategic a theatre of engagement as land, sea and air. The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution also offer expanded capabilities for waging war which are increasingly accessible to both state and non-state actors, such as drones, autonomous weapons, nanomaterials, biological and biochemical weapons, wearable devices and distributed energy sources.
On the frontier of emerging military technologies are those that interact directly with the human brain to augment or even control soldiers. Even these are not limited to government military programmes. Such security fears are further augmented by the fact that a proliferation of dual-use technologies available to a wider range of actors makes it much harder to put into place international agreements and norms to support the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
The security challenge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be one of coordinating large numbers of potentially lethal private and public sector actors in multiple strategic and cultural contexts. A difficult task indeed.
In addition to concerns around rising inequality and threatened security, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will also affect us as individuals and members of communities. Already, digital media is increasingly becoming the primary driver of our individual and collective framing of society and community, connecting people to individuals and groups in new ways, fostering friendships and creating new interest groups. Furthermore, such connections transcend many traditional boundaries of interaction.
Unfortunately, expanded connectivity does not necessarily lead to expanded or more diverse worldviews. Indeed, across all industries, there is clear evidence that the technologies that underpin the Fourth Industrial Revolution are having a major impact on businesses. On the supply side, many industries are seeing the introduction of new technologies that create entirely new ways of serving existing needs and significantly disrupt existing industry value chains. Disruption is also flowing from agile, innovative competitors who, thanks to access to global digital platforms for research, development, marketing, sales, and distribution, can oust well-established incumbents faster than ever by improving the quality, speed, or price at which value is delivered.
Major shifts on the demand side are also occurring, as growing transparency, consumer engagement, and new patterns of consumer behavior increasingly built upon access to mobile networks and data force companies to adapt the way they design, market, and deliver products and services.
These technology platforms, rendered easy to use by the smartphone, convene people, assets, and data—thus creating entirely new ways of consuming goods and services in the process. In addition, they lower the barriers for businesses and individuals to create wealth, altering the personal and professional environments of workers. These new platform businesses are rapidly multiplying into many new services, ranging from laundry to shopping, from chores to parking, from massages to travel.
On the whole, there are four main effects that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has on business—on customer expectations, on product enhancement, on collaborative innovation, and on organizational forms.
Whether consumers or businesses, customers are increasingly at the epicenter of the economy, which is all about improving how customers are served.
Physical products and services, moreover, can now be enhanced with digital capabilities that increase their value. New technologies make assets more durable and resilient, while data and analytics are transforming how they are maintained.
A world of customer experiences, data-based services, and asset performance through analytics, meanwhile, requires new forms of collaboration, particularly given the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place. And the emergence of global platforms and other new business models, finally, means that talent, culture, and organizational forms will have to be rethought. Overall, the inexorable shift from simple digitization the Third Industrial Revolution to innovation based on combinations of technologies the Fourth Industrial Revolution is forcing companies to reexamine the way they do business.
The bottom line, however, is the same: business leaders and senior executives need to understand their changing environment, challenge the assumptions of their operating teams, and relentlessly and continuously innovate. As the physical, digital, and biological worlds continue to converge, new technologies and platforms will increasingly enable citizens to engage with governments, voice their opinions, coordinate their efforts, and even circumvent the supervision of public authorities.
Simultaneously, governments will gain new technological powers to increase their control over populations, based on pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure. On the whole, however, governments will increasingly face pressure to change their current approach to public engagement and policymaking, as their central role of conducting policy diminishes owing to new sources of competition and the redistribution and decentralization of power that new technologies make possible.
Ultimately, the ability of government systems and public authorities to adapt will determine their survival. If they prove capable of embracing a world of disruptive change, subjecting their structures to the levels of transparency and efficiency that will enable them to maintain their competitive edge, they will endure.
If they cannot evolve, they will face increasing trouble. This will be particularly true in the realm of regulation. Current systems of public policy and decision-making evolved alongside the Second Industrial Revolution, when decision-makers had time to study a specific issue and develop the necessary response or appropriate regulatory framework.
But such an approach is no longer feasible. How, then, can they preserve the interest of the consumers and the public at large while continuing to support innovation and technological development? This means regulators must continuously adapt to a new, fast-changing environment, reinventing themselves so they can truly understand what it is they are regulating.
To do so, governments and regulatory agencies will need to collaborate closely with business and civil society. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will also profoundly impact the nature of national and international security, affecting both the probability and the nature of conflict. The history of warfare and international security is the history of technological innovation, and today is no exception. High-pressure steam engines also powered railroad locomotives, which operated in Britain after Railways spread rapidly across Europe and North America, extending to Asia in the latter half of the 19 th century.
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The Industrial Revolution was the transition from creating goods by hand to using machines. Its start and end are widely debated by scholars, but the period generally spanned from about to According to some, this turning point in history is responsible for an increase in population, an increase in the standard of living, and the emergence of the capitalist economy.
Teach your students about the Industrial Revolution with these resources. Industrialization ushered much of the world into the modern era, revamping patterns of human settlement, labor, and family life.
A map of westward expansion of the United States from the 18th to the 20th century. The four-wheeled transportation vehicle symbolizes the promise and the pitfalls of the modern age. This rapid urbanization brought significant challenges, as overcrowded cities suffered from pollution, inadequate sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water.
Meanwhile, even as industrialization increased economic output overall and improved the standard of living for the middle and upper classes, poor and working class people continued to struggle. The mechanization of labor created by technological innovation had made working in factories increasingly tedious and sometimes dangerous , and many workers were forced to work long hours for pitifully low wages. In the decades to come, outrage over substandard working and living conditions would fuel the formation of labor unions , as well as the passage of new child labor laws and public health regulations in both Britain and the United States, all aimed at improving life for working class and poor citizens who had been negatively impacted by industrialization.
The beginning of industrialization in the United States is usually pegged to the opening of a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in by the recent English immigrant Samuel Slater. By the end of the 19th century, with the so-called Second Industrial Revolution underway, the United States would also transition from a largely agrarian society to an increasingly urbanized one, with all the attendant problems.
By the early 20th century, the U. Historians continue to debate many aspects of industrialization, including its exact timeline, why it began in Britain as opposed to other parts of the world and the idea that it was actually more of a gradual evolution than a revolution. The positives and negatives of the Industrial Revolution are complex. On one hand, unsafe working conditions were rife and pollution from coal and gas are legacies we still struggle with today.
On the other, the move to cities and inventions that made clothing, communication and transportation more affordable and accessible to the masses changed the course of world history. Regardless of these questions, the Industrial Revolution had a transformative economic, social and cultural impact, and played an integral role in laying the foundations for modern society.
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