Is it driving progress or leading to unemployment?
Nowadays, smart teapots, intelligent homes, and other high-end devices are making our lives easier and better. But what if I tell you that there’s another side? The Internet of Things can change the world, but it can also steal your job. How?
If you hear the word Internet and think of information, you’re right. If of course, you’re in 2003. But things online have changed a lot in the last few years. Most people don’t understand how the current internet came to be.
It’s been unveiled over time in several distinct stages. Each stage has a name web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
Web 1.0 read-only was the original World Wide Web, a read-only internet with static pages written in HTML. And all the content was created by only a few chosen ones. But with the advent of the millennium, Web 2.0 was born.
It allowed interactive communication, including social networking. Then, by around 2008, Web 2.0 evolved into Web 3.0, known as a semantic web. And that’s the stage we’re in today. Up until now, the web has solely been about information. Web 3.0 added hardware and software standards like XML, HTML Five, and metadata.
And that allowed web pages to be understood directly by computer search engines like Google and Yahoo. It became possible for machines to search, aggregate, and combine virtually all information without any help from human operators. But ultimately, it’s still all about information. The amount of available information has greatly increased over the years, but it’s still the same type of stuff websites, blogs, documents, images, and videos. But that is all about to change.
Web 4.0 is already existing, and it represents a set of changes that are going to usher in a completely new era. It’ll be the single most important leap in technology in this century. Web 4.0 is also known as the Internet of Things. The plan is to tightly integrate physical devices into networks that can act autonomously without human input. I’m talking about mobile phones, cars, trucks, door locks, thermostats lights, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, virtually everything.
But that’s just a small part of it. The Internet of Things is going to be much bigger than that. It’s a revolutionary change in the fundamental way that goods and services are going to be delivered. I’m talking about interconnected factory robots, 3D printing machines, self-driving delivery trucks, and even the final manufactured products being intelligently linked together. Advanced artificial intelligence will analyze how, where, and when the products are needed.
Shipping will be entirely automated, requiring little to no human intervention. The resulting economic benefits are obvious. Think about it just in time. Custom manufacturing for almost everything, little to no need to keep inventory on hand, a massive increase in efficiency, and a steep drop in the cost of both manufacturing and distribution. In the end, smart power grids, virtual power plants, smart homes, intelligent transportation networks, hordes of self-driving cars and trucks, and other self-regulatory systems are going to be everywhere.
It’s so big that forecasters are predicting that Web 4.0 will usher in an entirely new industrial revolution. And that already has a name. It’s called Industry 4.0, and it’s going to be powered by the Web. The connection of all these machines will increase company profits even as consumers enjoy faster, easier access to more and better products. The interconnected devices will control each other.
They’ll interact through cloud computing and artificial intelligence. As a result of all this, forecasters predict a massive increase of $12 trillion worth of world GDP by 2030.
For one thing, when everything’s connected to everything else, a lot of serious privacy and security issues are going to arise. Also, the reliability of hardware and software will be far more important than it is today. That’s because small errors like the type that now plague most hardware and software products could result in a massive problem. If even just one interconnected device misbehaves, it could bring down the entire system and supply chain. All these technical challenges can be dealt with, but the single biggest downside is going to be the impact on current jobs.
According to Wired magazine, this isn’t the first time that a naysayer has predicted doom. In fact, a group of English textile workers and weavers called the Luddites were actively smashing loom machinery two centuries ago in protest over job losses. Similarly, innovations like the steam locomotive and the internal combustion engine led some people to believe that the world was coming to an end, as blacksmiths, saddle and bridle makers, feed operators and a host of other people found themselves unemployed. Cars, trucks, propeller-driven aircraft, and steam locomotives did damage the horse-related industries. However, they also opened up a whole new world.
Places like the rural American West, previously inaccessible, were suddenly able to deliver goods to consumers in faraway cities. That created more new jobs than the innovations took away. For example, farmers of corn, wheat, and dairy products, as well as ranchers could sell goods to faraway markets and buy complex manufacturing products in return. The new technology spawned a need for railroad, automobile and propeller, aircraft assembly workers, gas station attendants, mechanics, and more. It opened up suburban construction, creating a huge number of construction jobs as people chose to live in single-family homes.
In the end, city dwellers and rural residents alike ended up with a richer life and a more varied diet. Just as with previous innovations, web 4.0 and Industry 4.0 will free up human time, energy, and effort to accomplish things we cannot even imagine today. Consider, for example, that interconnected 3D printing machines will allow objects to be created as easily as we now create documents. There’s likely to be an explosion of creative object writing that will require skills and inspiration that no machine, no matter how interconnected and artificially intelligent, can ever provide. So, yes, Web 4.0 will automate mundane tasks like driving, and it may make some people’s current jobs redundant.
But it will also free people up to apply themselves to making new dreams come true. There are going to be new jobs for programmers, designers, engineers, objects, craftsmen, and maybe even space mechanics and meteor miners.
That’s Web 4.0 and Industry 4.0. In a nutshell, that’s where we’re headed, and there’s no amount of luddite narrow mindedness that’s going to stop it. The new Internet of Things is about to revolutionize our lives, and we’ll all need to adapt.
Will it free humanity from a boring routine? Or will it turn human beings into a bunch of jobless losers, ushering in a type of machine age depicted in Hollywood movies like The Terminator?.
