The fourth industrial revolution – this time it’s exponential!

The World Economic Forum at Davos provides a reliable barometer of conventional wisdom amongst the globalised elite, so it’s interesting this year that, amidst all the sage thoughts on refugee crises, collapsing commodity prices and world stock market gyrations, there’s concern about the economic potential and possible dislocations from the fourth industrial revolution we are currently, it seems widely agreed, at the cusp of. This is believed to arise from the coupling of the digital and material worlds, through robotics, the “Internet of Things”, 3-d printing, and so on, together with the development of artificial intelligence to the point where it can replace the skill and judgement of highly educated and trained workers.

A report from the FT’s Izabella Kaminska of one session – Davos: Historians dream of fourth industrial revolutions – captures the flavour nicely. I’m struck by her summary of the views of the historian Niall Ferguson – “The fourth industrial revolution, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson notes, is distinctive because of its exponential rather than linear pace, not only changing what and how we do things but also potentially who we are.”

This succinctly summarises conventional wisdom, but almost every word of this statement is questionable or wrong.

Why do we talk of a fourth industrial revolution? Continue reading “The fourth industrial revolution – this time it’s exponential!”

Against Transhumanism – the e-book

Transhumanism: technically wrong, ideologically suspect, and damaging to the way we talk about technology…

As an experiment, I’ve brought together a number of the pieces I’ve written here and elsewhere about molecular nanotechnology, mind-uploading, and the origins and wider implications of transhumanism, to make, after some light editing, a 54-page e-book with the title “Against Transhumanism: the delusion of technological transcendence”.

It can be downloaded as a PDF here:
Against Transhumanism, v1.0 (PDF 7.1 MB).