“For some companies,” Schwab writes, “capturing new frontiers of value may consist of developing new businesses in adjacent segments, while for others, it is about identifying shifting pockets of value in existing sectors.” (This could have been true at any time in the last century.)Īs usual, this high-management style contains much fashionable vacuity (we should avoid “linear thinking”, it says, which is meaningless however you interpret it), and also a weird kind of imagistic brutality – the “gig economy” companies such as Uber or Taskrabbit are “human cloud platforms”, as though the serfs who work for them are euphoric angels playing harps on a bed of cumulonimbus. It is composed in the deadening language of executive jargon, addressing “leaders” who want to know how to navigate an era of “exponentially disruptive change”. I say “book”, but it is written more in the bullet-point language of a thinktank report, with very little discursive argument, opinion or illustration. So how will we manage? Enter Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, with this slender book laying out the challenges and opportunities that await us. Nevertheless, many think this sort of thing is going to happen one way or another. Inevitably, some bored teen will hack your smart fridge to flood your kitchen while you’re away the more urban infrastructure is computerised, the more vulnerable it will be to cyber-attack. The dream of networking ordinary objects with cheap processors and wireless communication comes under the rubric of “the internet of things”, which is (or ought to be) short for “the internet of things that should not be connected to the internet”. The first was steam-powered the second electrical the third the birth of the computer age and the fourth – which some argue is just a continuation of the third – is the era of wearable gadgets, 3D printing, gene editing, machine intelligence and networked devices such as street lights full of electronic sensors, or smart fridges that order eggs when you’ve run out. One may be forgiven for suspecting that Corbyn had not a clue what he was uttering, but the “fourth industrial revolution” is an actual thing, at least according to some analysts. Much mirth ensued recently when Jeremy Corbyn’s crack publicity team issued a photograph of the dear leader with a compressed quote from his speech: “ We now face the task of creating a New Britain from the fourth industrial revolution – powered by the internet of things and big data to develop cyber physical systems and smart factories.” Wait, what?
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