A reinvented revolution

Photo by SasinTipchai

For the last few years, we've heard a lot about something called the “fourth industrial revolution”. Now, you might think that a great committee of technologists and social scientists got together and examined the world of innovation and the material constitution of our world and declared this fourth industrial revolution, but they didn't do that. It’s a reinvented concept because we've been here before. The fourth industrial revolution was already happening, according to some, in the 1940s.

We also have to ask ourselves other questions: what happened to the first, second and third industrial revolutions? What were they about? Why is the one we're living through the fourth and not the second or the third or the sixth or the twenty-third? In fact, the promoters of this idea of a fourth industrial revolution have no answer to those questions.

Back to the future?

If these experts were asked what they thought the first, second and third industrial revolutions were all about, they'd say something like this: the first one was about steam and textiles; the second was about electricals and chemicals; the third may have been about atomic power or automation or something of that sort. However, they'd have got this from books that said exactly that. They wouldn’t have gone back to re-examine the story.

There are extraordinary parallels between the discussions of the 1950s and the discussions of today, which are put under the heading of the fourth industrial revolution. The fourth industrial revolution is supposed to be about artificial intelligence and the elimination of humans from the workplace by artificially intelligent computers. However, the same story was being told in the 1950s around this concept of automation. Jobs were about to disappear. Factories would be taken over by effectively intelligent machines that made no great requirement on the labour force.

Therefore, even the argument has not changed very much at all – even though the central claim is that due to this fourth industrial revolution, things will never be the same again. Concepts like the fourth industrial revolution are decades old, as is the very structure of the argument. Furthermore, the very examples that are used in the argument for the fourth industrial revolution are themselves long known.

Propagandistic visions

It’s a wonderful irony that the prophets inform us of an unknowable future that the world will be just like we were told it would be in the 1880s, the 1920s, the 1950s or the 1970s. The world around us is full of novelties, but it seems our capacity to discuss this world of novelties has not advanced very far.

We have to take these concepts of industrial revolutions, technological revolutions, technologically driven long waves or cycles and general-purpose technologies with an enormous pinch of salt. They are not based on profound research or profound knowledge of the realities of the world. They are propagandistic visions, which are all too familiar.

How can we think seriously about innovation? The first thing is to ask what innovations are taking place because we don't know what they are. Then we need to ask who is making these innovations and why? Those are the questions we need answers to if we want to shape, respond to and make use of these innovations. However, we are a long way from being able to do that at the moment.

A very old-fashioned discourse

Photo by Dmytro Zinkevych

We are repeatedly told that we live in an age of disruption and creative destruction, where nothing is stable; that we live in a world of radically different technologies and something called artificial intelligence.

How should we respond to all of this? Fundamentally, by understanding that this is ideology. This isn't a description of reality; it’s an interested discourse. Moreover, it's an old fashioned discourse. Indeed, our most potent weapon against this discourse is to remember how old fashioned it is. We heard exactly these same sorts of stories about atomic power, space travel and automation in the 1950s. We’ve heard this idea that technologies in their infancy would so radically transform the world that our understanding of the past and present would no longer be efficacious. We've been here many times before and we shouldn't fall for this old fashioned, childish rhetoric any longer. We shouldn't accept the premise that we are living through a fourth industrial revolution. We should refuse to answer the question: how should we educate our children for the fourth industrial revolution? Instead, our answer to such arguments should be, ‘What fourth industrial revolution?’.

Who is creating the future?

When thinking about the future, we should think about who is making the future, who is trying to make the future and what future we would like to see. What is the role of new materials, new processes, new techniques in these futures that we want to create and that others want to create for us? There is no shortcut to doing that. We have to find out who's doing what, why and to whom. We cannot rely on imposing these crude models from our past onto this fundamental question of our relationship to the material.

Unfortunately, there’s a strong temptation to do just that. As in the past, the social sciences rely on very particular models of the material (which they recognise as essential to modernity), rather than on an empirical, historical understanding of the material. We tend to believe we know what the transformative techniques of particular historical eras were, and how they affected social life. We have a very moralistic way of thinking about the material, which I think is inappropriate. We think the material is changing in ways that will either radically dehumanise us or liberate us from the past and everything that has been holding back humanity. Neither of those scenarios is the basis for a rational conversation about the future.

Let’s exorcise the technology phantasm

The discourse around technology is utterly primitive when compared to, for example, the discourse around health or the discourse around the economy or geopolitics. We talk like grown ups on questions of party politics, war or the economy but as extraordinarily naive, not to mention stupid, children once we invoke this concept of technology.

This is one reason why we should simply ban the use of the term technology and talk about specific things. Let’s talk about the motorcar. Let’s talk about the camera, the computer or the aeroplane. Let’s talk about medicine, roads and buildings. Once we do that, we will talk at an immeasurably higher intellectual level about the material world than if we invoke this technology phantasm that profoundly shapes the way we think about the past, present and future.

I say that as a historian of technology who wants to ban the central concept of the field of technology as profoundly unhelpful. However, that reflects my belief that material invention and innovation are profoundly important, and that they deserve the kind of proper understanding that they tragically lack right now.

Technology alone won’t solve climate change

Photo by Proshkin Alexandr

Dealing with something like climate change illustrates very well the limits of our concept of technology. Many people argue that the problem of climate change will be solved by technology. We will have some miraculous new invention that will make the problem of CO2 emissions disappear.

That's not a helpful way of thinking about things – not least because what we might consider old forms of energy are becoming increasingly important. Oil production is increasing. Coal production is increasing. The number of cars using petrol and diesel in the world is increasing.

We need to think, therefore, about how we change those things that we are already doing rather than leaving these problems to be sorted out in the future. Lack of knowledge is not the limiting factor in social, political, economic and technological change in the world today. It's the unwillingness to use that knowledge.

Discover more about

the discourse of technological revolutions

Edgerton, D. E. H. (2019). Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (re-issue). Profile Books.

Scranton, P. (2000). Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton University Press.

Fields, A.J. (2003). The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the Century. American Economic Review, 93(4), 1399–1413.

The "fourth industrial revolution"