The fourth industrial revolution: Are we ready?—Part I

Md. Fakrul Islam Chowdhury writes for DOT : 
In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation that the Fourth Industrial revolution is about to bring will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.
The First industrial revolution was about the mechanization of productionusing water and steam. The second used electric energy to create mass production, The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
The scope of the changes that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing is transformingthe entire systems of production, management, and governance on both global and local scales.
The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
With the emergence of the Internet in 1969, this is the first industrial revolution rooted in a new technological phenomenon—digitalization—rather than in the emergence of a new type of energy.
These innovations and improvements are gradually optimizing production tools and creating possibilities for the future of industry 4.0, the crossroads for an interconnected global system.
The industry of today and tomorrow aim to connect all production means and processes to enable their interaction in real time. Factories 4.0 make communication among the different players and connected objects in a production line possible thanks to technology such as Cloud, Big Data Analytics and the Industrial Internet of Things.
The Fourth Industrial revolution gives us the opportunity to reverse the catastrophic ill effects of climate change as the fourth industrial revolution could be the first to deviate from the energy-greed trend in terms of nonrenewable resources.
The Fourth Revolution enables us to integrate more and more possibilities to power our production processes with alternative resources. Factories 4.0 will be embedded in smart cities and powered by wind, sun and geothermal energy.
Technological innovation will bring long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.
However, the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee have warned, the revolution could yield greater inequality.
For many economists, inequality represents the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The largest beneficiaries of innovation tend to be the providers of intellectual and physical capital—the innovators, shareholders, and investors—which explains the rising gap in wealth between those dependent on capital versus labor. Technology has resulted in an increasing demand for highly skilled workers while the demand for workers with less education and lower skills has decreased.
The writer is Consulting Editor, Amader Notun Shomoy