In his recently released book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum states “I hope this book serves as a primer and guide, equipping leaders to grapple with the political, social and economic implications as well as to understand the advances in technology that create them.” What is the thing they are grappling with? It is “…the new technology revolution, which entails nothing less than a transformation of all humankind.”
Schwab says we are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another. The world is currently seeing “profound shifts across all industries, marked by the emergence of new business models, the disruption of incumbents, and the reshaping of production, consumption, transportation, and delivery systems.”
Professor Schawb goes on to give many examples of the disruption caused by manifestations of this revolution such as the emergence in Germany of “Industry 4.0” – a term coined to describe the fundamental impacts of emerging technologies on automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies within global value chains.
