After an unhealthily long time, I have managed to get back into my dusty and barely used blog from years ago, just in time to post this:

Klaus Schwab, 2016, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum), pp.14-26, 47-50, 67-73, 91-104

This week’s reading sees a broad overview of the megatrends, major movements and trends in a global sense, and the digital industry and economy that is forming. It looks at the various ways that this “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the speedy rise of connected technologies and the “internet of things” can and has affected governmental bodies and national economies, through things like the transfer of money and the birth of decentralised payment methods, the transparency of government proceedings and foreign relations and data mining and privacy breeching, to a changed job market brought about by a more on-demand economy. Then there are the ways shifting technologies can affect society, mainly how this new technology and digital lifestyle can affect the distribution and retention of personal and/or private information, how it might affect people’s social skills and ability to empathize through the human connection, and majorly, how it can affect communities, in all senses of the word, and how they can empower and disempower citizens in different ways.

One of the issues I began to debate in my head was brought up early on the reading. The first subsection of the reading dealt with the new innovations and trends in the physical world, from driver-less cars to 3D printing and advanced robotics. During my first read through, I was drawn to this section purely out of amazement of what the technology could do and how exponential the rise of creation had become due to these technologies building and connecting with each other. It wasn’t until the second look, after having read the sections on how new technology could affect both economies and individuals, did I note how these new technologies were not just mere expansions of previous technologies, but could in fact shift the current notions and basics of industry and completely revolutionise, in both positive and negative ways, how the economy and corporations, from factory workers to scientists and engineers and creatives and performers. New jobs in fields no one have yet dreamed of arise, whilst others become obsolete. Practices and teachings completely reworked due to key pieces of new technology, technology that could become obsolete within years of inception. The global marketplace as we currently see it may be unrecognizable in just a few decades’ time.