“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost, in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Roy Batty, Blade Runner
BARCELONA was the first Spanish city to embrace the Industrial Revolution. With the natural advantages of a large port, the textile industry grew massively and raw materials were imported from around the world. The first railway line in the country was established in 1848, a year after the construction of the Liceu Theatre on Las Ramblas to cater for an increasing bourgeois class. The new-found wealth led to the 19th-century Renaixença (Renaissance), a heady time of artistic and economic growth that returned Barcelona to its medieval heights of great prosperity. However, the city became a victim of its own success and by the mid 1850s the city was on the brink of collapse. The population of 187,000 lived in a tiny area, confined by the city’s medieval walls, with population density more than double that of Paris. Life expectancy was 36 years for the rich and just 23 years for the working classes.[1] The government eventually bowed to the inevitable pressure to tear down the walls, but the problem then became how to house the growing population in the area around the old city.
Step forward Ildefons Cerdà, an engineer and progressive urban planner who had a clear vision for the ‘expansion’ he called Eixample. Cerdà designed to maximize sunlight, natural lighting, and ventilation in homes, the need for greenery in people’s everyday surroundings and the efficient movement of people, goods, energy, and information. He seized the problems of the old city as a creative opportunity to improve the wellbeing of the people of Barcelona.
Figure 2.1. Original plans of the Eixample, 1859
We believe that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is also a creative opportunity. The human race stands at an inflection point in history, and our assessment of the present context and subsequent choices will determine whether we thrive or destroy society and order as we know it. It really is that serious. Never before has the role of Chief Wellbeing Officer been so crucial, not just for companies but also for humanity. We must all get involved.
From zero to four – how did we get here?
First we developed steam power to mechanize production. Throughout the 1700s, various iterations of steam power and piston machines developed, but it was not until James Watt (another Scot!) developed his engine that the technology became applicable and useful. Many scholars say that this invention paved the way for the British Empire. The Second Industrial Revolution came with electric power. Mass production became possible and the very nature of work was altered. Many more things could be made for more people, and these were far cheaper than before, thus the masses could participate in the benefits produced. That is, they could afford a Model T Ford – it was not just for the rich! Then came electronics and information technology, driven by microchips with memory capacity and processing power that was unthinkable before. Just like cars became available for the masses in the previous Industrial Revolution, computing was possible in every household. Finally, we get to where we are today: 4IR. It builds on the third but is, like the previous ones, a step change. Now we consider the digital revolution with all its connectivity and exponential technology. We see a fusion and overlapping of technologies (biology, physics, chemistry, engineering…) and even the fusion of man and technology.
The first three revolutions started with a key innovation and then lasted for decades, or even centuries. The fourth one is much faster. Never mind change, rapid change is the new normal. The speed of current breakthroughs has no real precedent,[2] with exponential growth taking over from the previous linear reality. The numbers are so astronomical they can be difficult to grasp.
The impact of these emerging technologies is at every level and so profound that every single human and non-human living organism may be impacted by it – not to mention at a societal, governmental, or company level. Another important aspect of the 4IR is that we are already committed. There is no going back. All we can do is steer it in a certain direction. It will affect the very essence of what it is to be human, with the creation of new machines perhaps making us even more human.
Let’s step back for a second. Look up at the stars. There are, we think, 100 billion galaxies. One of them is ours, the Milky Way, which is made up of 100 billion suns. Our sun (that is, one of those 100 billion) is somehow positioned at just the right distance from a certain rock in order to make our existence possible, but not inevitable. The universe has evolved for about 15 billion years and it gave birth four billion years ago to our planet, Earth, with its atmosphere, its water, and its vast variety of living things.
The numbers are hard to fathom. Our minds are not built to handle such numbers. However, our minds themselves are as complex as the very universe around us. We may be discussing the emergence of superhuman machines, but each of us is already equipped with a machine of astronomical complexity. Like the universe with its 100 billion galaxies, the brain has 100 billion neurons and innumerable synapses, at least 1,000 times more than the number of neurons. That is over 125,000 trillion switches in a single human brain.
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Like the universe with its 100 billion galaxies, the brain has 100 billion neurons and innumerable synapses, at least 1,000 times more than the number of neurons. |
To put it simply, the universe is awesome, but so are we. Ultimately, 4IR is not about machines, it is about humans. People with values. People with the power to shape their future. There will be an ability to connect these people, to count on their collective wisdom, to enhance their collective knowledge, but not necessarily at the cost of individualism and liberty. A collective moral consciousness could prevail to shape our destiny. Collective reasoning will be more valuable than before, leading to creativity previously unimagined. There is no better time for us as humans to consider both our own and collective wellbeing, with changes afoot to potentially maximize that wellbeing.
The first task will be to use new technology to rid ourselves of the hangovers from other revolutions, including our unthinkable quantity of waste, massive overuse of plastics, and dependence on fossil fuels. Then we can move towards potentially staggering rewards, such as heightened standards of living, enhanced safety and security, and the development of superhuman ability. Machines will supply us with the insight and perspective we need to reach those solutions. But they won’t supply the judgment or ingenuity. People will.
The major medical breakthroughs of the previous industrial revolutions were about having a massive impact. There were mass vaccinations (the eradication of smallpox, for example) so epidemics were almost forgotten, and basic hygiene came to all. Countries needed people. The measure of a country’s development, something we touch on in the next chapter, depends on its population, and everything was done to increase the total. Countries needed armies and the economy needed employees. Size mattered! In contrast, individualization will matter more than ever in the future. Today, small countries including Switzerland and Singapore top the rankings for competitiveness.[3] The 4IR will scale-up such efficiencies, with individualization developing within commerce and extending to education, medicine, and beyond.
For thousands of years everything was geared up to defend us from ‘acts of God’. Famine was humankind’s worst enemy. A small mistake in the sowing of the crops, or error of judgment in choosing the right field, a run of bad harvests and millions of people would starve. In fact, as recently as 80 years ago, millions of people died from famine in Europe. Less than 20 years ago four million died from famine in the Congo. Epidemics killed millions well into the 20th century, with Spanish flu taking 100 million lives less than 100 years ago. That’s more than the combined impact of both world wars.
According to Yuval Noah Harari, in his epic book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:
“In ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15% of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence only caused about 5% of deaths, and in the early 20th century it is responsible for only 1% of global mortality. In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
Though there is an undoubted worldwide pandemic of type 2 diabetes, it is still only the ninth leading cause of death, as we see in figure 2.2 below, with heart disease and cancer the main causes. In any case, Harari’s point is that war, with no remaining justification, is not a likely event. Previously, the main source of wealth was assets like gold and diamonds, and countries went to war to get them. Now, in 4IR, the main source of wealth is knowledge. You can attack and acquire an oilfield through war but you cannot acquire knowledge that way. He adds that we now have new problems. We may have, for the most part, solved famine, plague, and war but more people now die from eating too much than eating too little. More people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. The average human is more likely to die from eating a Big Mac than from Ebola or drought.
Figure 2.2. Leading causes of death in the UK, adapted from the NHS Atlas of Risk
The end of death?
In the past, death was unconquerable. Now, in 4IR, it is seen as merely a technical problem that will be solved. Humans can now act with the superhuman powers we used to give deities. Greek, Roman, and Hindu gods were especially good at giving life, as well as causing war, pestilence, and famine. They were literally superhuman, but most things that made them ‘above’ human can now be accomplished with drugs or biotechnical engineering. And the current exponential growth in machine intelligence will make us even more godlike. The connectivity and convergence of augmented reality, cloud computing, nanotechnology, big data, and 3D printing, to name but a few, will push the boundaries on what is human and what is machine. Indeed, humans will increasingly have both organic and non-organic enhancements. After a while, we may not even be able to determine how much is human as digital, physical, and biological features are enhanced. But we will be better!
Perhaps the most compelling efforts we are seeing are the current life-extension projects, carried out not by governments, but the current technology titans. Companies like Google, through its project Calico, have invested more than a billion dollars focused on using the tools of technology – that is the chips, software programs, algorithms, and big data they use in creating an information revolution – to better understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body. Other examples include the work of Larry Ellison, who has donated half a billion dollars towards anti-ageing research. Then there’s Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs that exist to fund radical science and bold ideas, including projects to grow bones from stem cells, research ways to repair the cellular damage that occurs with age, and ways to quickly cool organs in order to preserve them. Sergey Brin of Google, who has a gene associated with Parkinson’s, has given $150 million to efforts that use big data to understand DNA. He thinks these could rapidly transform research into Parkinson’s (and other diseases), providing the keys to avoiding neurodegenerative diseases that cut life short. Not wanting to be left out, Mark Zuckerburg is awarding million-dollar prizes to support scientists whose discoveries extend life.
This may seem a little futuristic, but it is a current fact that for every year of life, life expectancy increases by three months. Most of us will live significantly longer than our parents, and many babies born today are expected to live for at least 100 years. Women born in South Korea in 2030 are projected to be the first in the world to have an average life expectancy above 90,[4] a far cry from 1850s Barcelona. And these projections do not take into account the potential changes from the technology advances outlined above. The implications are that across the space of the next two generations, individuals, institutions, and governments will have to accommodate two, possibly three more decades of life.
There are significant social and philosophical consequences to this extended life. A large part of our drive, belief systems, and creativity comes from the inevitability of death. George Bernard Shaw said it was death that gives us purpose in life:
“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
Steve Jobs shared a similar sentiment in his 2005 Stanford commencement address, urging people to find their true self in the limited time we have available. Reflecting on his own initial near-death experience he viewed death as “very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”
Will you be happy gardening all day?
The great opportunity, assuming we can focus on personal and mutual wellbeing instead of destruction, will be the pursuit of happiness. To be specific, the new project of the 21st century and 4IR is gaining immortality and bliss. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) taught that the purpose of human life was the pursuit of happiness, which could be achieved by the measured study of the natural world and adherence to a prudent and temperate hedonism. He added that the blind pursuit of more money (more aligned with the Third Industrial Revolution) will only make us miserable. Epicurus added that “being happy does not come easy!”
Yet as we touched on in the opening chapter, happiness hasn’t increased with the recent technology advances that will continue to characterize further movement into 4IR. Advanced technology-based societies such as South Korea have a suicide rate 30 times that of developing countries including Peru, Guatemala, and Ecuador.
Another consideration of 4IR will be the effect on employment. If we consider that many of today’s jobs will disappear through automation (9-90% of today’s jobs by 2050, depending on the study), what will happen to one’s purpose, and related happiness, that is a result of daily work? Of course, new jobs will appear as has been the case with previous technology disruptions that have been examples of job destruction, such as bank ATMs. These machines actually freed up bank workers to focus on more value-added services for their clients, resulting in a rapid increase, not decrease, in bank branches.[5] Nevertheless, not everyone will be able to retrain, and governments are today looking at the effects of mass automation and the feasibility of introducing a Universal Basic Income for all citizens. The concept of gardening leave may take on a whole new meaning for a transitionary generation.
Under the current global education model, kids who have a high IQ and study well at school choose a particular field when they are about 18 years old and get a place at university. They are there for three or four years and then work in a company for the rest of their life. The rest of their life is the next 40 years or so. They don’t learn much in those years but they work hard, and at the age of 60 they retire and live off their pension. This picture will be quite different if people are living to 150. It won’t just be about learning and then working in two big chunks. It will be a constant interchange of work and learning. People will have much longer careers and will have to reinvent themselves constantly. We may soon be working until we are 100 and lifelong learning will be the key! We look closer at this personal reinvention and disruption in chapter seven.
In any case, it is clear that many more of us will need to look for meaning beyond our daily struggles. There will certainly be more space in our lives, and people must realize this will be an opportunity. A new education model will help the next generation deal with the new normal.
A is for algorithm
Education will undergo extreme change. Students will not be trained to be merely job-ready – the focus will be on becoming future-ready. Being adept at thinking rather than knowledgeable in a specific subject will be of greater value. How can we teach people to do jobs that don’t yet exist? More specifically, there will be far more time provided for connection as well as for deep reflection. Everything will be done to nurture creativity and entrepreneurship. Education so far has been geared specifically for an industrial economy. In fact, not much has changed since the days of Plato: we sit in rows, listen to the oracle speak, and don’t ask questions. We teach students to follow instructions and manage facts. But this, after all, is what machines are good at. Let us leave the computers to do what they do well, and we can get on with loftier pursuits. Happiness, for example! Humans are better at thinking out of the box. Thus we must set students free. This will not merely be the era of freedom of speech but rather, freedom of thought.
Humans are good at connectivity and we should nurture this in school and university. Deep connection is essential for wellbeing, and we should encourage it at an early age. The new technologies available to us are a tool and we should use them responsibly. Even gaming is about making connections – indeed several authors, including Yuval Noah Harari, who we have noted here, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who we cover in the next chapter, have commented that the more life and work resembles a game, the more rewarding it is, and the happier we are. Storytelling, our ancestral means of communication, also increases connection. It is what differentiated us humans from the larger-brained Neanderthals, and delivered us victory over them. We must develop, learn, and improve this innate ability. Education needs to foster connections between humans and enhance collective wisdom. It needs to identify what kids are good at, and while assuring their basic skills are good enough, needs to help kids improve those strengths. In this way we will be fostering not mediocrity, but individual excellence.
We are beginning to see the seeds of a new education model. Students now have more opportunities to learn at different times and in different places. E-learning tools facilitate opportunities for remote learning and at the pace desired by the individual. Classrooms are increasingly being ‘flipped’, meaning that the theoretical part normally taught laboriously in class is learned outside the classroom, using different online means, and the practical part and what was previously homework is taught interactively in the classroom with other students, through discussion and debate. Learning is becoming far more tailored to the specific needs of each student, with the ‘oracle’ teacher becoming more of a facilitator and coach. Project-based learning (with several schools in Barcelona leading the way worldwide) is increasingly being used at an early age in place of developing subject expertise in order to drive the collaborative problem-solving and teamwork that will characterize the future of work.
The near future of learning will include much more personalization, just like medicine. Students will learn with study tools that adapt to their own capabilities. ‘Gifted’ kids will be challenged with more demanding materials, and those with learning difficulties, or below-average ability may be offered more time and opportunity to practice until they can raise their level. Teachers will be able to see who needs help, or who needs to be challenged more. There will also be more in the way of choice, and students will be able to modify their own learning process. Digital machine tools will also be employed to act as personal tutors, in whatever field is necessary. Skills currently taught in business schools, such as collaboration, time management, and even entrepreneurship, will be taught from a much earlier age. The pedagogical methodology will develop multiple intelligences, not just IQ and the regurgitation of facts. Exams will change completely, with coursework and class participation being celebrated more than relying upon day-long written exams as a way of measuring a student’s acumen. There will also be more in the way of field experience, with students completing internships, mentorships, and even apprenticeships at an earlier age than we see today.
Education will of course continue for life, supporting the personal-reinvention dynamic that we note above. The organization may provide the physical environment and stimulus for this learning process but the onus will be increasingly on individuals to invest in themselves. The democratization of learning – as evidenced by the world’s leading universities, including Harvard and Stanford, making their content freely available online through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – shows that the future will be led by curious, driven individuals, not just those who studied hard for a few years when they were a teenager.
For continuous learning, executive education, and personal disruption, Singularity University in Palo Alto could represent a model for a future 4IR world. Launched through a collaboration of science and industry, including Amazon and Google, its campus is located at the NASA Ames Research Center. The 1960s hangars, weird machines from the Cold War, and general Space Race feeling give a taste of the past and urgency around the future – you feel as though there’s about to be a mission launch. University content is driven by identifying global challenges and bringing together a diverse talent pool to address them – this may include actors, screenwriters, entrepreneurs, savants, and even astronauts in addition to scientists and academics. Adding students to the mix, usually from companies, the university creates a type of open-source collective wisdom to “prepare you to seize exponential opportunities. Our mission is to educate, inspire, and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.” The curriculum changes so fast that accreditation for the courses isn’t possible, with emerging technologies in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and digital biology, creating an inspiring environment. Our own experience there, though expensive at around $200,000 for a week-long team workshop, creates a convincing vision that the future will be one of abundance and opportunity for all.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution sounds like a solely technological concept, but it will be the biggest step for liberty, freedom, and equality that humankind has ever made. With responsible actions, supercomputers, big-data processing skills, human physical enhancement, cyborgs, and the leveraging of collective wisdom will unite to create a new free abundance for all. True happiness will be the goal and never before has the role of a Chief Wellbeing Officer been so important. Through education we can leverage the radar of technology and hone the compass that is humanity.
Merging the best bits of humanity and technology will create many more visionaries who can look beyond the walls of our present reality. Ildefons Cerdà was one such visionary of the First Industrial Revolution. He invented urbanization, with his work on the expansion of Barcelona representing the first meticulous scientific study on the use and possibilities of a city as a place fit for human habitation. He was able to see into a bright new future. The chamfered corners of the new city blocks was his idea to deal with traffic, allowing people to see more clearly what was happening left and right. Cars had yet to be invented, but when he discovered railways he figured there would soon be “some sort of small machine powered by steam that people could park in front of their houses”.
Figure 2.3. Aerial view of the Eixample today
Though not all of his vision for the Eixample was realized due to political squabbling, a lack of trust from architects, and the greed of speculators, who, for example, rejected his idea for gardens in the middle of resident blocks in favour of more residences, this grid pattern with octagonal intersections remains a significant influence on the present day in which Barcelona is playing its part in 4IR. Recognized as a global leader in areas such as smart cities, mobile technology, and the Internet of Things, such technological advancement and progress will only be sustained, we believe, if the city nurtures the wellbeing of its current residents, and attracts the best global talent available who are prepared to make Barcelona their home.