Reclaiming the Revolution: Extraordinary Adventures in Politics and Leadership at the Inflection Point of Industry 4.0

Introduction:

Dawn of the Inflection Point

‘Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future.’

I

A world in which each of us has a digital twin would offer very different possibilities from today. It would offer extraordinary possibilities. And yet, we are fast approaching a time when everything that exists around us physically can be replicated digitally: you, me, each of us, our homes, societies, towns and cities, workplaces, even the planet itself. Existing in the metaverse, and powered by Artificial Intelligence and deep learning, these replicas can and will experiment, model, and help improve our physical world.

The potential of this technology is transformative. With our organs all replicated digitally, it will tackle disease, making us healthier and longer lived. Our towns and transport infrastructure will be planned to better suit our needs. Organisations will be more efficient, effective and performance strengthened. Products will be designed better and more cost-effectively. Communication will take place on a more immersive level. With a virtual twin who is less easily tired or distracted, our own productivity and creativity will be magnified. It is a step towards what Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, described as ‘a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities’.1

DestinE (or Destination Earth) is the European Commission’s ambitious large-scale development to create a digital Earth. In collaboration with the European Space Agency, DestinE will model and simulate our planet’s systems. It will mitigate the impact of natural disasters, manage water, improve food production, and understand the impact of human activity. It will model, forecast, visualise, test scenarios and ultimately help solve the biggest challenge facing the world: climate change.2

This technology is amazing, of course it is. Not simply owing to the possibilities but because, alongside advances in AI, bio science, quantum computing, the internet of things, the internet of bodies, it represents change so profound, so significant, that it alters the trajectory of our societies, our communities, our workplaces, our economy and our politics. This is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is a moment in history. It is a transformative revolution that needs to be understood and acknowledged as the principal political challenge of our era. It is a challenge that requires transformed leadership and new ways of doing politics. And while digitally driven, it is a challenge that must be reclaimed for humanity.

Reclaiming the Revolution is about this inflection point.

II

In today’s democracies there is a messy tussle playing out. It is a tussle between the forces of mainstream politics - who have existed in a sort of political market place for a quarter of a century and which no longer speak to a significant portion of the electorate – and the destructive forces of populism – which threaten the stability of the system, the economy and society. While progressives cheer at each victory, big or small, the forces of populism prevail, dividing and damaging. Such unexpected polarisation has not only emerged at this inflection point, a specific reality that appears to concern so few commentators of our era, but more pointedly, is a consequence of the period of globalisation through which we have recently lived, a by-product of the third industrial revolution which brought us telecommunications and the microchip. The interconnectedness of globalisation has delivered great prosperity and opportunity. But it has also meant that so many ordinary people, voters, in post-industrial towns and cities of the developed world, feel left behind, abandoned almost by mainstream politics. And so, both sides of the political divide find themselves fighting the battles of the past and generating arguments of frustrating simplicity.

And the point is that neither side seems to have any convincing answers to the questions of the revolution before us. No, politics seems to have barely acknowledged the existence of the challenge. But the challenge is immense. What is this revolution for? Who will use it? Will it overwhelm humanity? Will it be democratic? Will it provide opportunities? Will it address the other challenges of our age? How can we prepare for it so that we can all benefit from its possibilities? How can we ensure this new world is inclusive?

You will see how this should be accepted as central to politics and policymaking, central to decisions we make about the economy, society, education, housing, transport, investment. And yet, it barely features in public discourse. Politics should be discussing and debating, it should be deciding how to harness the transformative power of this so that this, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is not something done to us, but something shaped by our values and ambitions.

But to do this, our politics not only needs to prepare for the dramatic transformations of the future, it also needs to really understand the present and that means appreciating the episodes, stories and developments of our past which have conspired to create today. That is the ambition of this book.

III

Ethel Merman was born at 359 4th Avenue in Astoria, Queens, in 1908. The daughter of an accountant and a teacher, she would become a performer of stage, screen and audio recordings through the 1930s right up to her death in 1984. In many ways, she was the natural choice to open the 1939 World’s Fair. This huge exhibition was built upon a 1200 acre site, once a giant ash dump, just a few blocks away from her maternal grandmother’s house where Ethel first entered the world.

The World’s Fair was about the future. It was optimistic and ambitious. Physically, its great Trylon and Perisphere structures dominated the site, reaching into the air. But its genesis was in the experiences of the present. The 1930s had been a tough decade for America. The Great Depression had brought hardship and degradation for millions. Now, the Fair’s organisers felt, was the time to be entertained and to look into a brighter future.

Admission, for those who wanted to attend the opening on April 30, cost 75c, and over the coming weeks some 44 million people passed through the gates, to gaze at the exhibitions. Merman’s job was simple. She sang the Fair’s song. Written by George Gershwin, it shared its title with the show, ‘Dawn of a New Day’:

Come to the Fair! (To the Fair, To the Fair)

It’s the Dawn of a new day!

Sound the drats, roll the drums.

To the world of tomorrow we come!

From the Sun through the gray

It’s the dawn of a new day!

Here we come young and old

Here to watch the wonders unfold

And the tune that we play

Is the Dawn of a new Day!

Tell the world (And the Door)

That we don’t want to ground anymore

Better times here to stay

As we live and laugh the American way

Listen up one and all

There could be no resisting the fall

But tis the dawn

Of a new day!

Optimistic, cooperative, democratic, and egalitarian, there was a tacit recognition that the world was at an inflection point and it was one which would have to wait for a bloody world war before it could be realised. The new day was to be the space race, the atomic age, the superpowers, digital revolution of the 1960s and 70s, computers and the information age. And it all built upon the first industrial revolution which created the world we recognise today.

The World’s Fair ‘Dawn of a New Day’ pamphlet declared a simple dictum: ‘Familiarity with today is the best preparation for the future,’ it told its excited readers. That could be the maxim of this book.

IV

We once again find ourselves gazing at the dawn of a new day, or more acutely, the inflection point of a new great adventure. It is one which will mark a change in our world as profound as that from agrarian to industrial society in the seventeenth century and from the Great Depression of the 1930s to the golden age of capitalism, eyed so optimistically from the World’s Fair. But it is also a great adventure grounded in the disruption of today.

An inflection point is some significant transformation, event or development that changes or hastens the trajectory of an organisation, an industry, a society, a country, an economy or a geopolitical system. It can be seen as a good or a destructive phenomenon sparked intentionally or by accident, but it is a change so significant that circumstances are altered permanently. It changes our environment, our behaviour and the way we think. The inflection point we find ourselves reaching today is so significant that it has the power to transform our organisations, industries, workplaces, societies, nations, economics, political discourse, leadership and geopolitics. Think about the potential power of DestinE and our digital twins and consider that this is just one tiny development in a sea of transformative digital invention. Consider that Artificial Intelligence built to discover new lifesaving drugs can be just as proficient at creating new deadly warfare agents.3 Welcome to the inflection point – it is time we started talking about how we want to harness its great power.

In a sense that is what visitors to the World’s Fair, listening to Ethel Merman’s stirring rendition of ‘Dawn of a New Day’, were being invited to do. Because the Fair did not simply showcase invention from across the world, it went much further. In this period of economic hardship, the World’s Fair also promoted the ideas and values which might shape the new era.

And as we consider our own inflection point, the path which led us here and the state of our world today, we might reflect on the values, ideas and humanity that we wish to preserve and to promote. We might consider the great adventures that led us to this point and the lessons learned for our society, economy, politics and the sort of leadership we need. With this in mind, there are three factors which could be said to represent the most critical intersection of our disruptive age and which hold out warnings and opportunities for the age to come. These are the extraordinary adventures in the Fourth Industrial Revolution; extraordinary adventures in politics; and extraordinary adventures in leadership. It is around these big themes that this book is based.

V

Why write a book about this? Because too much of the current exploration is stuck in a sci-fi world of technology when the role of humanity is so much more vital and so overlooked. And because so much of contemporary debate fails to move beyond the parameters of today without learning the lessons of yesterday. This book is set firmly in the extraordinary adventures of our time, looking into the future and reaching into the past to understand industrialisation itself. There are stories big and small, connected and disparate. But each, in their own way, are about humanity and values as much as technology. Some are positive and uplifting, others dark and concerning. Perhaps what they all highlight, however, is that at this inflection point we need to understand our values more than any time before. The reason Ethel Merman was asked to perform back in 1939, after all, was because of humanity not technology. It was about familiarity not uncertainty. We must not forget that lesson today.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution really will revolutionise our way of life, and while it will alter our politics, it is essential to recognise that our politics is the only vehicle available to shape the revolution, to harness its power and to imbue it with the ideas we value. This is a deeply political book that raises questions about our capitalist systems, our democratic processes, our leadership and why decisions are made in the way that they are. Humanity must not be some sort of passive observer to this inflection point; the digital revolution must be shaped by us.

We need to accept the determinism of a book like this. It is possible that we create some sort of self-fulfilling fantasy, and that is a danger in all the enthusiastic analysis of what is about to befall us. That is, the mountain of opinion that foresees a particular future – fantastical, digital and transformative – makes that future more likely. The more that influential opinion anticipates what this inflection point will look like, the more that businesses, public bodies and people will prepare for it. The more we do this, the more likely it is to happen. And it is for that reason that the book is organised around these three big themes and that each of these themes is grounded in our own human experiences. It delves into the stories that shaped our world and connects them in often unforeseen ways. That is why this is a book that segues from Ethel Merman into the Coronavirus, and from eighteenth-century inventions to Donald Trump’s rhetoric and then into advanced AI, with as much purpose as ease.

This is a book peppered with the real adventures of our times which together paint a picture of the future and allow us to understand the past. After all, the genesis of all that we know is in the present or the past. These adventures hop from country to country, from continent to continent, from century to century and decade to decade. This is not a dystopian treatise; it is optimistic, enthusiastic and realistic. These adventures are intended to provoke and to inspire.

This future has been foreseen for decades and there has been lots written about it. The difference today is that the future is upon us, it is a revolution, we need to understand it, prepare for it and respond to it. More than that, this is a revolution that must be reclaimed for humanity, for democracy and for all of us.

Reclaiming the Revolution is also a call to arms

PART 1:

EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES IN THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

What a Sexist Robot and Suicide

Have to say about Industry 4.0

‘It’s like you guessing or flipping a coin’

I

Pepper has large black eyes with a periwinkle glow and a porcelain white face which is friendly and innocent. Pepper will engage in conversation with you, speaking in a cartoonlike way, gesticulating throughout with ten nimble fingers. Standing at just four feet tall, Pepper is unthreatening but hard to ignore. Pepper is, of course, a robot.

Pepper was born in 2014, created by the French firm Aldrerban Robotics before becoming part of the Japanese multinational Softbank, which had been a partner through development. And it is in Japan that Pepper has become part of the here and now. The first 1,000 sold out in the first minute of going on sale, with new owners parting with 198,000 yen for each unit. Pepper’s semi-humanoid form is intended to facilitate interactions with people and with the 10-inch display seemingly hanging round Pepper’s neck, there is more than a passing resemblance to Twiki the cheeky ‘Ambuquad’ of Buck Rogers.

And like Twiki, this real android is designed not simply to respond to commands but to actually read human emotions. This is becoming a commonplace AI capability and unsurprisingly is being deployed to sales activities where the technology can monitor and assess customer mood, engagement or sentiment.1 In a similar way to people, Pepper listens to tone of voice and scrutinises facial expressions. The idea is that this is not a simple programming trick but that Pepper will learn from the personality of its owner, meaning that its own ‘personality’ will develop over time. And this means that each of those 1,000 units sold in the first minute or the subsequent tens of thousands sold across the world will all behave a little differently. In time technology will learn, adapt, ‘think’ and act. Pepper is part of the digital transformation which is disrupting and reshaping our world.

II

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, is what is happening today and what it means for the future. It is the automation, digitalisation and artificial intelligence represented by everything from Pepper the robot to the interconnectivity and internet of things, the possibility of biotech, big behavioural data and machine learning.

This chapter rethinks how technology is revolutionising how we live and work – in a similar way to the first industrial revolution. But rather than viewing this from the standpoint of the technology itself, it argues that today it is artificial intelligence that is shifting fundamentally what it is that humans can contribute to society and the economy. The inflection point we are reaching suggests wholesale change in the way we work, produce, interact and grow. It means that we will organise ourselves differently and our role in life is less certain. But humankind is not redundant and this is not a passive process. Indeed, those uniquely human skills are all the more crucial in this world. Humanity matters more. And those human skills needed in the coming decades include adaptability, leadership, creativity. It is here that new economic and social value will be created. AI is so often portrayed as a story about what technology can do. But it should also be a story about what people can do, about what technology can help humans to achieve. Technology cannot be something which is done to us against our will but rather a great opportunity to unleash human possibility.

III

Pepper is designed as an open platform, and this is one of the reasons why the robot has proved so attractive. Already Pepper can be found taking your order in restaurants, greeting you at office receptions and helping you to buy a new motor in car showrooms. You see, Pepper is much more than a ‘plug and play’ device and is better thought of as a canvas onto which innovation can take place. The vision is that ‘the developer community will progressively sustain Pepper’s growth.’2

Two people with an idea were Gurch Randhawa, Public Health Professor at the University of Bedfordshire, and his colleague Dr Chris Papadopoulos. Among many interests, Gurch and Chris had been concerned about staffing in care homes, the places that look after the elderly when they cannot take care of themselves.

Western populations are aging. Medical advances and lifestyles have extended lives while fertility rates have declined. That is, the elderly of today are living longer than their parents but had fewer children themselves. The result is that the fastest-growing demographic is the retired, with fewer younger people in work as a proportion to support them through their taxes. Meanwhile that aging population demands more and more medical and social care. Our demand for healthcare can be thought of as a U-shaped chart (with a long flat bottom). For most people, there is a need for resources at birth and early childhood, but that rapidly tapers off such that most of us need little attention until we get into our 60s or early 70s. But then the demand increases rapidly, and those in their 70s, 80s and 90s (and 100s) consume vast amounts of health care and social care. And it is care homes which are dealing with this on a day to day basis.

Short of resources with stretched staff, the problem in many homes is that with all the routine tasks of changing sheets, clearing up, tidying, bringing food and the like, staff simply do not have time to talk to those they care for. And yet that essentially human interaction is so desperately needed by many elderly; it is what caring is about. And it is all the more important when one considers that rates of depression and suicide are relatively prevalent amongst those residents in care homes. While still rare to completion, a systematic review conducted in 2014 showed just how common suicidal thoughts in care residents are and the suggestive evidence of the importance of the care environment including staffing has on this.3

So imagine if a low cost resource could be introduced to care homes which would mean those tasks get done but the elderly enjoy much more interaction and attention to their needs. For Gurch and Chris, Pepper was an obvious solution and they set about developing a robot to perform these functions. ‘We put social robots in care settings to evaluate what additional impact they might produce alongside the routine provision of care, particularly in terms of loneliness and health-related quality of life for the older adults,’ explains Chris. ‘We felt this was vital given how stretched the care sector is, with care staff struggling to cope with demand