The Fourth Industrial Revolution
A tsunami of change.
Author- Jim Jensen
The Birthplace of a Revolution?
Natalie Gochnour is an associate dean in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah and chief economist for the Salt Lake Chamber. (I know, sounds impressive, right?) In her 2019 Deseret News op-ed, she makes the argument that Utah should be the “birthplace” of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Setting aside the absurdity of the notion, the word of caution at the end of her column grabs your attention.
The Fourth Industrial Resolution will come with some costs, she promises:
• Increased inequality
• Displacement of workers
• Violation of privacy
• Hollowing out of the middle class
• Increased class structure division
And this from an advocate who wants to make Utah the 4IR cradle? I’d hate to see what the detractors say about it.
These costs sound like gouging, intractable damage to the fabric of society. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but no matter what “mammoth opportunities” might come from the 4IR, the cost/benefit doesn’t pencil.
But, like all good globalists, Gochnour has a solution. Governments will need to “invest” in a more generous safety net.
Gouchnour’s assessment of the heralded Fourth Industrial Revolution is typical of new world order types. They promote, invite, and embrace the revolution, regardless of the fallout, because they see themselves as the beneficiaries. The costs will be borne by the unfortunate masses left to subsist on a universal basic income.
What Is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is likely the first industrial revolution to be proclaimed before it actually happened, which has led some critics to dismiss it as a marketing strategy.
Popularized by a 2016 book of the same name by none other than Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Fourth Industrial Revolution is best defined as “the blurring of lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” It consists of technologies, products, and services that will not only change how you work and live, but also, as promised by Schwab, who you are. (But what if you don’t want to change who you are?)
Think Zuckerberg’s Meta or Musk’s Neuralink. Artificial intelligence (AI), big data, quantum computing, driverless vehicles, drone deliveries, restaurant automation, blockchain, 5G/6G, the Internet of Things (IOT), the Internet of Bodies (IOB), the Internet of Humans (IOH), N3 technology (next-generation, non-invasive, nanotechnology), gene editing and splicing, polygender folk, or BCI (brain-computer interface) and the “rights” of sentient machines.
Yes, all of these exist, and they are at an alarming stage of advancement. And the one thing they all have in common is that they point to transhumanism.
Image source: Facebook
Transhumanism is an ideology that advocates for the “transformation” of the human condition by developing technology to enhance human intellect and physiology. For example, you can now skip the AirPods (and your ears for that matter) and have a computer chip implanted in your head that could, among other things, play music directly to your brain. There are plenty of people who embrace transhumanism and see becoming “cyborg” as the way of the future. They have no problem with the idea of implanting chips, nodes, monitors, or game controllers.
We expect people will have implants and be connected, literally, to the Internet. The nano chip implants will be able to gather and transmit health data. We will come under constant monitoring and assessment about everything . . . what and how much we eat and drink, smoke or snort; what we buy, how much energy we use, and, ultimately, what we think and feel.
If you think this is fear-mongering or an exaggeration, ask yourself why Chilean lawmakers recently sought to amend their constitution with language that aims to define “mental identity” and establish a “non-manipulable right to protect [one’s mental identity] against technological advancements in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.”
Their intent is to protect the right to mental privacy, personal identity, and free will of thought. Obviously, Chilean politicians are privy to enough uncomfortable information that they felt compelled to preemptively protect their citizens’ right to preserve their personal identity.
Klaus, tell me again how 4IR is going to change who we are?
Why Should I Care About the 4IR?
Something big is coming. Maybe you caught a glimpse after your friend told you about a sale on super cute lululemon capris and moments later you saw ads for them while scrolling Instagram. Or maybe you had a premonition on a Sunday afternoon when you ordered some garden hose washers on Amazon, and they showed up on your doorstep a couple hours later. You’d have to be asleep to not be aware of the accelerating rate of tech advancements.
We used to feel a sense of anonymity online. Who cares if Google knows everything about me? Nobody can process the personal data for 6 billion people. Guess what? Now we can. And much more. And it’s not just our data. It’s our images, video, who you interact with, where you go, your opinions, preferences, and biases. Google Timeline anyone?
This is amid declining consumer trust of commercial data collection. According to a Salesforce.com report, over two-thirds of consumers feel companies collect too much data and are not transparent with how they use it. Opacity breeds mistrust.
We used to feel everyone has a right to their opinion. But in an age where mothers attending school board meetings are labeled as domestic terrorists by the DHS, we begin to see that you really only have a right to the “correct” opinion. The endgame of the 4IR is total and absolute control over the wills of the global population. This will be carried out by everincreasing and intrusive monitoring into all aspects of our daily lives.
Think this is wild-eyed conspiracy? Ask yourself why a 4IR article on weform.org lists as a top concern the question of: Who has algorithmic accountability for stopping the spread of “fake news?” Of even greater concern to us is: Who writes the algorithms that decide which news is fake?
Image Source: Deloitte
Some of the Pros of a Fourth Industrial Revolution
It’s fascinating to learn that there appears to be many more articles online written about the problems and challenges of 4IR (and there are many concerning issues) than there are about all the benefits. This may be because people are just worried about the future and express their concerns online. Or because no one really knows how things will turn out, so you can’t author an article about the unknown.
We assume there will be a rapid evolution of technology, but the discovery of an abundant, clean, low-cost source of energy could change the entire landscape and makes all predictions obsolete.
The pros of the 4IR seem to be few and vague. The cons are many and specific. The benefits tend to target people higher up on the economic scale who can afford to take advantage of or invest in them. The cons tend to roll downhill to the already less fortunate.
Here are a few of the promising outcomes for the wealthy.
Autonomous Vehicles
With increased computing capacity comes the ability to make vehicles safer and more efficient. Autonomous vehicles communicate with each other while moving, so they can always anticipate what the other vehicles are going to do.
The vehicle you currently pay a few hundred dollars a month for typically sits parked 95% of the time. Imagine a timeshare, autonomous vehicle that has a pre-programmed daily route that could service a dozen families each day at a fraction of the cost you’re currently paying. Put more shared vehicles without a human driver in service and there’s no question roads will be less crowded and safer. This scenario also comes with an obvious reduction in road rage and air pollution.
Blockchain Technology (more on this fun topic in a coming blog)
Blockchain promises to increase financial transparency by making an irreversible timeline of data, as each block is always stored chronologically. Transactions remain visible to all users in the network and cannot be changed or altered once added to the shared ledger. This linear, linked structure prevents users from making changes to transactions, making the system transparent and tamper-proof. Imagine if politicians were required to post all their financial transactions to a shared ledger. The public trough could be emptied, and most politicians would have to go back to work for a living.
Virtual Reality
Aside from the obvious entertainment value, the use of computer simulation and modeling allows a person to interact with a 3D environment. This has already been shown to be valuable in reducing risks associated with training in dangerous jobs. The military has been using this technology for years to train fighter pilots. Imagine touring your new home before you break ground. Home buyers will be much more satisfied if they can easily resize rooms and reconfigure layouts to better fit their needs.
Improved Personal Care
Medical devices, including in-home (and in-patient) monitoring devices, are on the forefront of 4IR technologies. Chat bots have been shown to improve symptoms of depression. Every imaginable sensor transmitting real-time vitals and other medical information to care providers helps improve response times to dangerous health conditions.
We now have FDA-approved sensors the size of a grain of sand that can be ingested and transmit readings via a wearable patch to a smart phone app. These sensors can report whether the patient is ingesting their prescriptions. Sadly, they haven’t (yet) been able to force compliance with a treatment plan.
Add to this the wonders of gene manipulation. Personalized medications can be developed by scanning a patient’s genetic record. Gene therapy is a way of replacing a faulty gene to cure or fight disease. Gene editing is making targeted changes to a genetic code. Exon skipping is a procedure used to cause cells to ignore faulty or misaligned sections of genetic code. What could go wrong here?
Smart Everything
From smart fridges to smart cities, the promise is that everything is going to be more efficient and save us time and money. In the same way that advanced thermostats can learn and adapt to your living patterns to save energy on your indoor climate, big data can be leveraged to automate or eliminate every dull and trivial task such as making a grocery list, commuting, and even, hopefully, waiting at the doctor’s office.
All these technological advancements are coming fast. And these are just some of the benefits to which consumers can look forward. There is another list of benefits that will accrue to industry. These will come in the form of automation at the expense of existing jobs. This is where the downside begins.
Things to Watch Out for in the 4IR
This following list is just scraping the surface. Each topic could be elaborated on in a separate article.
Increased Inequality
In 2016, Schwab predicted inequality would be the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The individuals who currently have access to education, technology and capital are poised to reap most of the gains. It is expected that low-wage workers, whose jobs require moderate skills that could be easily replaced by artificial intelligence, will experience downward pressure on their income.
There is also a risk of furthering inequality between men and women. Job opportunities will increase in IT at the expense of other sectors. Only about 24% of IT and communications positions globally are filled by women. Only about 10% of software developers are female.
As much as the WEF globalists preach to the contrary, it’s difficult to imagine that those bringing these technologies into existence are primarily driven by their interest in making society a fairer and more equal place for everyone at all class levels. Rather they seem to be pursuing ways to position themselves at the top of the food chain for as far into the future as possible.
Displacement of Workers
To give some context for this concern, listen to the words of Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese computer scientist, businessman, and writer currently based in Beijing, who spoke about how robots are replacing people. Robots and cobots work 24/7. They don’t call in sick or complain to HR. “If a lot of people can find happiness without working,” he hoped, “that will be a happy outcome.” Something intangible and good comes from learning how to work hard. What does a society look like where most of the population never learned that?
It was a simple thing to find dozens of articles and in-depth research papers that highlight the employment concerns that go with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. By many accounts, around half of all jobs in the United States and Europe are at risk of automation. Seventy-seven percent in China.
Those most at risk have low levels of education, training, and work experience. Routine jobs with a high volume of tasks related to information exchange, sales, data management, manual work, product transfer and storage, construction, and office work can easily be automated.
Violation of Privacy
The watchword of the 4IR is “monitor.” Everything from our breathing to the entire globe is subject to the constant monitoring of Big Tech. It began with security and traffic cams and has evolved to automated speech monitoring on social media and satellite monitoring of all the forests on the entire planet. Make no mistake. The leaders of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are setting up a giant surveillance grid.
Our phones, HomePods, and Alexas are already constantly listening to everything we say. Every word is transmitted to the cloud for processing and from there it’s a short step to having a government-programmed AI bot watch for certain words and phrases.
With high resolution cameras, facial recognition technology, and a repository of billions of selfies, systems are being put in place that can personally identify every single person seen walking in a busy mall on security monitors.
Social Credit Scores
In a report on the 2022 World Government Summit, Derrick Broze noted that the 4IR “lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores.”
Social credit scores are already in place in China. If you’re considered a “good” citizen by the government, then your score goes up. If you run afoul, maybe smoke too much, receive a traffic violation, are late on a bill, or even express dissatisfaction with policy in your living room, then your score plummets.
Many Chinese people approve of the system. They have been taught to think that people with lower scores deserve what they get and view them as second-class citizens. But for a dissident journalist who can no longer buy bus passes or obtain a driver’s license, it is exceedingly difficult to recover from speaking your mind.
Uncontrollable Mega-Corporations
There are valid concerns that the world is increasingly being run by giant corporations headed by billionaires rather than by governments with constitutions. Only a few tech giants will be able to ward off the expected cybersecurity threats as innovative technology proliferates and falls into the hands of (or is developed by) bad actors. Smaller, more vulnerable companies are likely to faint under withering IT attacks. The innovation they offered is then susceptible to being scooped up by the survivors.
As companies like Google, Amazon, and Alibaba continue to scale, and accrue the technological advancements of the 4IR to themselves, only a few countries will be able to reign them in with law. Companies like these routinely pay “fines” in the hundreds of millions of dollars and make slight course corrections, but it’s hardly a speed bump in their meteoric trajectory.
As David Lye, Director and Fellow of Sami Consulting observed in an article on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, “Governments could find themselves increasingly powerless against mega-corporations. Regulating the activities of these global behemoths (and raising taxes from them) may be beyond the grasp of all but the largest countries.” This essentially leaves large swaths of the globe open for mega-corps to do business as they please.
Loss of the Middle Class
The middle class is the class of hope, according to Lara Logan. When you’re in the middle class, you have a hope of working hard and getting lucky and substantially improving your position. If you are in the lower class, the middle class gives you a hope to rise up. It’s much more difficult to move from low class to high class without the middle-class steppingstone.
If, as Gochnour predicts, the 4IR will “hollow out the middle class,” rising unemployment and inequality could lead to social unrest on a scale we’re not accustomed to. Look at recent events in Sri Lanka as an example of what this looks like.
Governance Failure
Governments at all levels are notoriously slow in adapting to and adopting the latest technology. As an example, visit the disastrous maze known as irs.gov. It looks like a web site straight out of the 90s. But at least they got their hyperlinks working.
As citizens adopt the technologies of the 4IR, they could increasingly use it to seek greater autonomy and try to break free from the grip of government and other institutions. For example, what is to stop people from trading with each other in crypto rather than the government-sponsored fiat currencies? This could threaten the sovereignty of any nation. This is likely a big part of the reason China and other autocratic nations (like Egypt, Iraq, Qatar, Oman, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Bangladesh) have moved to ban the use and trading of digital coin. (That’s one list you don’t want to see your country on.)
What if the 4IR leads to renewable energy technology that allows people to easily go off grid? Top-down control freaks have never looked kindly on Branch Davidian types who are aggressively self-reliant. Government leaders don’t have a contingency plan for people who don’t need the government.
There are countless articles advising governments on how to deal with the 4IR. Suggestions range from trying to legislate stability or appropriating the innovative technologies to just trying to surf the tech wave if you’re not able to control it or downsizing with radical decentralization and sort of getting out of the business of government. There’s no one-size-fitsall solution. But unfortunately, that is exactly what the New World Order proponents are rapidly working toward.
Conformance to the United Nations
The World Economic Forum has filled a thought-leadership vacuum created by a billowing explosion of digital progress. For over 50 years, Schwab and team have been grooming and recruiting the most promising talent from around the world into their army of business executives and globalists. They have positioned themselves as the source for political and business leaders to find pre-shaped policy recommendations.
Image source: World Government Summit Website
The vast research and publication library at the WEF is well-funded by businesses and governments from around the world. WEF also appears to enjoy a near monopoly on future-think. The WEF has made it their business to predict and prophesy while the rest of us are busy grappling with the present chaos brought on by the dawn of the 4IR. The WEF will be influencing future government policy in many ways and for many years, so it behooves us to understand their Agenda.
Let’s be crystal clear on this point: you don’t hold an international meeting called the “World Government Summit” with dignitaries from all over the globe unless you’re working on implementing a world government. Let’s take that as our premise.
The leaders at the UN are in charge. Set up through the UN Global Compact, the SDGs (sustainable development goals) are the blueprint for “incentivizing” businesses worldwide to conform to UN values. The framework for advancing the adoption of the SDGs is known as the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) approach.
ESG is defined as “an approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation works on behalf of social goals that go beyond the role of a corporation to maximize profits.” Understand what this means. Business are now being assessed, not just on product and profitability, but on whether they are furthering the UN’s social goals. This helps explain why we see virtue-signaling corporations jumping on the latest flag-waving bandwagon at the expense of aggravating at least half their customer base.
According to the UN Global Compact, corporations should be working to achieve a “certain set” of environmental goals, as well as a set of goals having to do with supporting “certain” social movements, and a third set of goals having to do with whether the corporation is governed in a way that is consistent with the UN goals of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
It is no longer enough for a corporation to recycle their printer paper and support a Sub-for-Santa at Christmas. They need to be achieving specific goals prescribed for them, regardless of whether the goals align with the company’s values.
Lest you think this is so much hot air, you should know that the UN has set up the Principles for Responsible Investment (unpri.org), which represents asset managers and owners with well over $45 trillion (that’s trillion with a T) in capital that is reserved for “promoting ESG adoption throughout the investment value chain.”
The UN social goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion will be forced upon businesses whether we like them and agree with them or not. What other “goals” will the UN come up with for us in the future? What happens when all investment capital falls under the PRI umbrella? Your business goes nowhere without the UN stamp of approval. This is how they intend to coerce us into submission to their Agenda. This is how they establish a world government.
What Can I Do About It?
The globalists, with their Agendas and New World Orders and rats’ nest of acronyms, are out for global domination. Their metastatic plans have been in motion for decades and are as advanced as a stage-four cancer. They have the support of the billionaires, mega-corporations, the United Nations, and individual nutjobs like the associate dean in the David Eccles School of Business.
Get yourself educated. Really educated. Not associate dean-level education. There is a tsunami of unrest headed our way. Don’t go around spouting inanities about how we want our state to be its “cradle.” That is utter nonsense. We are not in the bon voyage phase of this cruise. We are scrambling for the lifeboats. We must go into this with our eyes wide open and not be lulled onto the rocks by the siren song of convenience and economic growth.