What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

we are wondering what it is happening to the world everything is changing the very idea of human being some sort of natural concept is really going to change our bodies will be so high-tech we won't be able to really distinguish between what's natural and what's artificial inside our own heads is the most complex arrangement of matter in the known universe you might ask yourself can we get to be superhumans the original Industrial Revolution was driven by the discovery that you could use steam engines to do all kinds of interesting things but that was followed by

additional revolutions for electricity and computers and communications technology we're now in the early stages of the fourth Industrial Revolution which is bringing together digital physical and biological systems one of the features of this fourth Industrial Revolution is that it doesn't change what we are doing but it changes us with the ability to visualize brain activity for example through a simple consumer-based EEG device it gives us access to ourselves and ways that we've never before thought possible it unlocks the black box that is brain and enables us to really truly be able to realize an identity

that is aspirational there's now a scientific foundation for the effects of mindfulness on the brain on the genome on biological aging when the human mind does know itself then you get the potential for a new renaissance that restructures itself in terms of our relationship to life our relationship to the planet our relationship to work we need a different economic model by that I don't mean capitalism versus communism what I'm talking about is a shift in the system along the lines of the two big changes that happened in the 20th century Keynesianism was a much greater

focus on health and education and government working with business and then a reaction against that in late century to neoliberalism where the focus was in free markets freedom the individual and getting government's out of the way we need shift to a new system that will allow us to meet the basic needs of every human on the planet that will live within plan she means don't be fairer and that will be focused as its key goal not on growth per se but on maximizing human well-being and history tells us that a value shift is triggered by

creation of a new story about how we want to live I see the circular economy is something which fits very closely with mankind's goal to be innovative and creative and to always progress we can use asset tracking we can use IT we can use 3d printing to enable this different economic model to recover materials feed them back into the economy and really to decouple growth from the resource constraints we have the reason we live in cities is not different today than it was ten thousand years ago even if you have got networks connecting us we

still want to have places where we meet in person this means the place where we work in the place where we live are much closer to each other a city where we don't need to have big supply chains in order to produce things but many things can be sourced locally thanks to 3d printing and robotics so if we are able to do something to transform cities to make it more efficient then the impact can be huge think about the prospect of getting rid of plastics we must not only be inspired or informed by nature but

actually use natural organisms with which to design products and building parts only instead of very material properties were varying biological functionality design is critical today because it's the first signal of human intention for the question of adding quality to quantity but isn't a matter of simply circulating the things that are potentially toxic it's circulating things that are safe and healthy for all generations so the goal is no longer I want to be less bad less monotonous less unsafe less I just it's really about a diverse safe healthy adjust world with clean air clean water clean

soil clean energy together we are fighting to preserve our fragile climate from irreversible damage and devastation of unthinkable importance we think about the original Industrial Revolution it was an energy revolution I like to think of it as a kind of book ending of a period in human history during which we use fossil fuels and it worked very well for us for a long time but now we have to bring back to an end we have energy technologies that can power our civilization solar wind biomass so then the question is well how do we get good

integration maybe the wind is blowing in Denmark the sun is shining in Germany and now you can move that electricity through an integrated grid you can supply energy to everyone who needs it and you can supply energy at all times walking around you do see different stuff far as like the body marriage line they use a lot of things that help them lift up and move things to the car we just sit there and you know program something and if it has gone set mine so go ahead and do everything and then as humans we

just come in and take the extra step to help technology it's not the the cure-all for everything there's definitely a lot of things where people perform the operation better but certainly for the right applications robotics and are a huge improvement to the process the prediction of five million jobs lost by 2022 technology is serious but it's not the main question construction manufacturing services public health and education these industries will still exist the main question is what will be the future of work how will we define work how will we share the wealth from the viewpoint

of the labor board jobs my idea we really need new education or new training we're working with a world in motion in FIRST Robotics trying to encourage students from third grade all the way up through the end of high school we had students make sailboats and then we had them race him and so they could see how quickly they could move and they immediately went back and started to say oh I saw what happened I'm going to go change this or that and that was third graders I just given a prize to a kid of

18 years old that has discovered something really very very unique came up with how to get better productivity and better yields for seeds of corn and so he basically came with the idea that if you would perforate these seeds you would get more food and you think about they say but he didn't go to university so how does it get all that knowledge and he told me I mean I've been watching YouTube since the age of 12 and I'm so interested that I've seen everything about it I've read everything about it the world is really

open to learning the thing is how do you give incentive to your kids to do that it's this ability of digital technology to change outcomes to truly empower people all over the world that can create a more equitable growth because I think the world needs that fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to make inequalities visible and to make them less acceptable in the future and hopefully together and garner political support to take the necessary decision to reduce the gap humans have always been using tools but because of the recent advances in technology we're beginning to

have machines that can augment us in all sorts of interesting ways I was the first person in the world to be able to voluntarily move my legs while stepping in a robot by exciting the nervous system using electrical stimulators directly up to the spine we believed that a cure will be possible if enough of the right people have the will to fast-track a cure for paralysis we take two things from the patient first we take a three-dimensional x-ray and we extract the three-dimensional data out of that so we can make a perfectly shaped puzzle piece

and then we also take a sample of that tissue from the patient so that we can extract the stem cells out of those and we use those stem cells with this three-dimensional scaffold that we fabricate and after three weeks we have a piece of living bone that's ready for implantation being able to use genome editing to understand the genetic changes that lead to cancer and technologies like a drug delivery getting molecules into particular types of cells there's a lot of excitement about being able to move much more quickly on this disease one of the things

that I think is so essential to free and open societies is freedom of thought and up until now the conversation we've been having is around freedom of speech once we can access people spots and access people's emotion we have to create a space that enables people to think freely to think divergent thoughts to think creative thoughts and in a society where people fear having those thoughts the likelihood of being able to enjoy progress is significantly diminished we need to take responsibility at every level of society from the individual and the person's of institutional to the

global to adapt to these technological challenges and changes without redefining what it means to be human what it means to work what it means to be completely embedded in this world people always ask me if I'm an optimist or pessimist the technology exists but how do we get it and implemented at the scale we need at a price that people around the world can afford even though we have everyday problems we have to solve we have to find a way to lay the foundations for the innovations of tomorrow