The (actual) four industrial revolutions
Some time ago, I ran a marathon while wearing a Stryd powermeter, a device which tracks active power output while running. The ordeal took three and a half hours and at the end of it, my average power was 237W.
That means my total energy output to complete a marathon was 0.83 kilowatt hours (kWh). According to the EIA, the average US household uses around 26 kWh per day, or 31 marathons’ worth. Electricity represents just 38% of energy consumption in the US, which means that the overall energy footprint of an average US household is roughly 82 marathons per day. There are a bizarre handful of people capable of running one marathon a day for an extended period, but that’s under carefully controlled circumstances and involves considerable preparation. Even then, if you deduct the energy content of the products that are used to support such herculean efforts you will find that even those remarkable people are not breaking even in terms of energy.
This illustrates the profound impact of the first two industrial revolutions. Each of us casually commands quantities of energy surpassing anything that the human body could ever hope to produce. The steam engine, archaic as it may seem now, increased human productivity by an order of magnitude, completely changing every aspect of our economy and our daily lives. A shift of similar magnitude happened with electrification, which placed superhuman power in every home and has shaped just about every moment of every human life ever since.
The advent of the digital age has been somewhat less clear-cut in its impact. Electronics are certainly ubiquitous and shape many aspects of human life but the differences to our daily lives are far less sweeping. Outside of the area of communications, the involvement of electronics has been a thing of incremental improvement rather than radical transformation. Instead of reading a newspaper, for instance, we read news on our phones. Cars and appliances come loaded with electronics which subtly improve their usability, but their basic functions are unchanged.
Digitization has had a far more subtle effect than the first two industrial revolutions, comprised of myriad marginal improvements rather than profound transformations. The ubiquity and convenience of consumer products, probably the greatest change to modern lifestyles, are attributable more to the plastics industry than to the electronics sector which is, itself, heavily dependent on the use of plastics in its products.
During a session in South Africa’s parliament, the Vice President was asked for a definition of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which the governing party had been hyping up in their election campaigning. His lengthy and verbose failure to respond went viral. Initially, he was clearly stalling for time until he could get an answer via ear-piece. He quickly transitioned to stalling until he ran out his allocation of speaking time. Apparently, none of his analysts had a clue either.
I don’t blame them. The third industrial revolution was poorly-defined compared to its predecessors, ambiguous and possibly less impactful than plastic. The supposed fourth one is mostly a continuation of the third, but even more vague and without the support of a transformative miracle material like plastic boosting the sense of broad societal change.
It is premature to call ‘fake news’ on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but scepticism is merited. The hype seems forced, even artificial. The dotcom bubble and more recently, Bitcoin, stand as reminders of the dangers of hype in the tech sector. The internet is the most pervasive means of communication yet invented so by its very nature it is superbly suited to generating hype, merited or otherwise. We are naturally suspicious of anyone telling us how tremendous they are; that instinct should apply equally to industries, particularly if that industry is based on selling ideas rather than tangible goods, and more so if that industry has a history of flimsy market bubbles.
It would be a shame if a genuine industrial revolution were to be buried beneath empty hype and have no doubt about it, there is one underway as we speak. The first two industrial revolutions were about drastically increasing our energy consumption and from a certain point of view the third was about replacing just about all consumer materials with plastic. It is becoming apparent that none of these things are remotely sustainable and so, our current lifestyles cannot continue without a brand new technological revolution to support them. The ongoing proliferation of automation and digitization will play something of a role in that, but once again it will offer incremental improvements and efficiencies rather than anything profound.
And have no doubts; something profound is needed. The depletion of fossil fuels means that we will simply lack the energy source to run those 82 marathons a day for us, while all of that plastic is rapidly contaminating every eco-system. As yet, neither of these problems are remotely close to being solved.
The real fourth industrial revolution will be one of sustainability or extinction. Either way, we’ll have more electronics around us as it happens. In the former case, that will be nice, I suppose. In the latter, it will be irrelevant.
