The Fourth Industrial Revolution can be described as the advent of “cyber-physical systems” involving entirely new capabilities for people as well as machines. While these capabilities are reliant on the technologies and infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution, the Fourth Industrial Revolution represents entirely new ways in which technology becomes embedded within societies and even our human bodies. Examples include genome editing, new forms of machine intelligence, breakthrough materials and approaches to governance that rely on cryptographic methods such as the block chain.
The First Industrial Revolution utilised water and steam power to enable mechanised production. The Second used electric power to produce mass production. The Third made use of electronics and information technology to automate production. Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, which is the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is done so through the combination of the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
The First and Second Industrial Revolution spoke to the manual production of goods process, however, it was much of a higher cost to firms which were producing these goods. Hence many critics of the current regime would easily pronounce/ use utterances such as “employment was much higher within the apartheid regime than it is now”. That is true, as mass production was a result of mass manual labourers (High employment at the time). The cost of production was indeed high; however, government subsidies were in place to ensure consumer price index is much more favourable to economic participants. The skills within the lower middle-employment were highly in demand and did not need one to enrol in an institution of higher learning to assimilate such skills, thus this made an expression of Vocational training institutes with the education fraternity.
The third industrial revolution was much characterised by the introduction of electronics and information technology, which saw a massive continuous decline in the lower-employment grades, such as reflected on thisismoney.co.uk
Taking note of inequality, unemployment and skill shortages within SADC. The unfortunately due to globalisation we are subjected to the fast rapidly changing models within the workplace controlled and determined by global markets.
A research by the UK Times showed a great 56% decline of employment in London’s corporate sector, as electronics are replacing human labour. Note (example) in South African context, a number of Accounting Software are replacing Creditors & Debtors clerks as these software’s are automated to synchronise with bank accounts are a typical of artificial intelligence mechanism that has already taken place, leaving bookkeeping graduates more unemployable.
What does the Fourth Industrial Revolution mean to a country with inequalities?
One can easily say THE RICH ARE TO BE RICHER AND THE POORER ARE TO BE POORER.
The richest 1% global population now owns half of all household wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015. Oxfam’s new report presents an even more dramatic concentration of assets, finding that 62 individuals controlled more assets than the poorer 3.6 billion people combined, half the world’s population. This is stunning gap – particularly given that researchers such as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have found that unequal societies tend to be more violent, have higher numbers of people in prison, experience greater levels of mental illness and have lower life expectancies and lower levels of trust.
Contextualising these research papers/ articles, it becomes easier for one to articulate that the third industrial revolution, gave rise to increased crime rates, due to deepened socio-economic standards. As the unemployment rate of 26.60% (14 619 360 people) of which approximately 600 000 are unemployed graduates. This is results of the skills acquired, not being required within public and private institutions.
Guidelines for global trade, facilitated by the WTO and other regulatory bodies, make an expression for basic requirements for production, trade and organisational functionality. Electronic & IT programs have been formulated to standardise production and organisational practices, this included environmental Information control measures, such as financial controls which sync with business transactions (As a result book-keepers are becoming less relevant), mechanical warehouse dispatch systems (Which makes Pickers less relevant), automated chain production for branding bottles as well as packaging. This led to firms decreasing its cost of labour through retrenchments and expanding its capital infrastructure.
The automation of production has made the cost of labour to be much cheaper for factories as we have chain productions instead of actual humans. Labour capital becomes to only need skills in the upper/ executive skills needed to run organisations within the private and public sector. Within the SADC context, our local universities continually offer academic courses which are backwards and limited to the 2nd and 3rd Industrial Revolution. Vocational colleges are being not globally competitive skills offering institutes.
One would ask if we have more production output (which has cheaper products offerings) but lesser economic participants, wouldn’t this mean we would be going towards recession and a declined economic growth? We would actually be having economic growth as output would be cheaper for export, companies only care about the increase of the returns of capital, not economic development and its associated HDI. Thus a greater level of economic growth would be seen and SADC being globally competent trade partners.
The problematic factor remains: Which group has capital investment or should it be simplified to FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTORS are the ones who hold major investments within firms within the SADC, as such THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION is beneficial more to them than to actual South Africans, as we are entrenched in global capitalist community, that is rapidly changing and we are without choice subjected to it.
Written by Sizwe Shiba, a former BEC member of SASCO in UJ Soweto Campus
References
- World Economic Forum: The Forth Global Revolution
- UK TIMES MONEY News publication
- Statistics South Africa
- Trading Economics
- Southern African Institute of Internal Affairs
- Oxford Economics institute