While the fifth industrial revolution seems a long way away from the first, both in time and technological advances, looking at each progressive step between them shows that, in fact, they build on each other.
Yet, man’s progress in terms of developing better and better technology is far from over, with predictions around the sixth industrial revolution (IR) already happening.
It’s almost inconceivable to wrap our minds around the future, even as there have been hints at the progress to come all the way through each stage – both from artists and popular culture.
Leonardo de Vinci developed drawings for ideas that were far ahead of his time. As an engineer and scientist, he foresaw the parachute, the helicopter, an armored fighting vehicle, the use of concentrated solar power, the car and a gun – all things that are now commonplace and some of which we now take for granted.
The movie The Fifth Element, which dates to 1997, had flying cars in it, as well as automatically generated food, doors that open on command, and artificial intelligence-generated and communicated penalties for bad flying. The Back to the Future franchise famously had time travel. Who knows, that may one day be a reality too.
The hype cycle will, as always, pass and be replaced by common sense, in as much as humans are capable of common sense.
Our progress towards a life aided, or sometimes hindered, by technology also didn’t start that long ago.
In fact, María Branyas Morera – the oldest living person at age 116 as of January – has lived through a rapid pace of change, having seen two World Wars, the Great Depression, the commercial advent of flight, a spaceship being sent to the moon, computers, cellphones, smartphones, the global financial crisis, and talk of fridges that will automatically order more milk when you run low (although that never really took off, unsurprisingly).
Now Morera is living in an age of artificial intelligence (AI) and the fifth IR.
The first IR, generally agreed to have started in England somewhere between 1760 and 1830, led to an economic shift from a largely agricultural base, to one driven by factories and fossil fuels.
Urbanisation, market expansion and economic growth were all part of this process, which spread around the developed world.
Overlapping the end of 1.0 was the second IR, which is said to have started in the late 19th century and carried over to the 20th century. This stage in history saw the advancement of mechanisation on assembly lines. The light bulb was invented. Samuel Morse created the telegraph, Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb and the phonograph, and Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone during this period.
The digital, or third IR, started in the 1950s, and brought with it semiconductors, mainframe computing, personal computing and the internet. It is generally the phase of a shift from analogue ways of doing things, to digital methods, and laid the technological groundwork for the use of current tools in everyday life.
Industry 4.0 saw a rapid scaling of its predecessor, and included further manufacturing digitisation, the initial forays into robotics, the rise of connectivity and the use of data, as well as the human and machine interaction that has since become characteristic of 5IR. Kicking off not even 20 years ago, 5IR is disruptive and sees man and machine working more closely than ever before. And there are now self-driving cars too.
The intelligent use of data through business intelligence has enabled AI to come to the fore and has, just this year alone, excited markets to the point where everyone is chasing an AI investment – be it in shares, or in chip manufacturing capabilities. We’ve seen some wild rides in S&P500 stocks, like Nvidia, which surged only to come down when its stellar results didn’t shoot the lights out.
There’s a lot hanging on such companies, but the hype cycle will, as always, pass and be replaced by common sense, in as much as humans are capable of common sense. Gartner’s Hype Cycle tells us as much, and we’re in the peak of inflated expectations now.
In much the same way as hype will taper off, we will all settle into working alongside machines just as previous generations became used to production lines. And we still have the sixth IR to look forward to: taking 5IR a step further into the future.