Foundations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

[Yuli Ban]

A short thread, made just for my own personal fun, to explore the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
First of all, a recap of the previous three industrial revolutions and the inter-revolutionary periods. At least according to my own interpretation.

Quasi/Proto-Industrial Revolutions: Southern Song China, Mughal India. The Southern Song came closer to an industrial revolution than anyone else in world history, even closer than Ancient Rome and Mughal India. So close that some might even argue they temporarily crossed over and were actively industrializing at one point in the 12th century. However it's controversial. The Mughal Empire didn't come quite as close, but it was more due to material conditions. They had the culture and even some of the technology necessary, but never had the drive to go as far. Perhaps if they had Chinese steel manufacturing and oil drilling, they could have done it and we'd all be speaking an Indo-Arabian language right now.

First Industrial Revolution: 1760–1840, defined by steam power and textile industry. This was a truly revolutionary period in the history of life on Earth, the point at which human technological development achieved truly exponential growth. Except not quite. Life in 1840 was not much different from life in 1760. Outside the general background technological progress being known, your daily life and the general human condition had not meaningfully changed since the days of Ancient Greece other than the increased number of machines and better nutrition. This industrial revolution largely benefited only the capitalist owners, undermining the aristocracy and causing a drop off in the quality of life for the working class. The Napoleonic Wars had a big effect in causing the revolution to continue past the point it would have otherwise ended by delaying the industrialization of Europe until it all started happening at once.

First Inter-Revolutionary Period: 1840-1870, which started because technology got about as good as it possibly could at the time. This was the era of an economic recession as a result of the end of the industrial revolution, of technological refinements to what came before, the maturation of the telegraph, and the birth of the technologies that would later define the Second Industrial Revolution, such as the telephone, recorded sound, automobiles, atomic physics, modern medicine and germ theory, and more. Otherwise, little changed in the daily life of the average person.

Second Industrial Revolution: 1870-1914, defined by the maturation of electricity, electric light, advanced steam power, nuclear physics, early quantum physics, the telephone, automobiles, the birth of modern medicine, modern agriculture, advanced mechanics, radio, and so much more that it boggles the mind. For the first time, technological change had a direct effect on the human condition, changing the quality of life for even the poor. The Industrialization of life itself wrought great optimism, but it also directly led to the bloodshed of the first World War.

Second Inter-Revolutionary Period: 1915-1945. Capped by the First and Second World Wars, this was an era where the fruits of the Second Industrial Revolution really ripened and matured, but the rate of world changing innovations slowed in the meantime. The foundations for the Third, Digital Revolution were established, but technological limitations prevented a flourishing. The average futurist of this era would have been flummoxed at where the great innovations of the previous generation had gone, and why it had all been replaced by countries and reloading for another pointless world war. Of course, these innovative discoveries and inventions still happened, such as jet propulsion, digital computing, penicillin, nuclear power, space exploration, and the Chemical Revolution. However, the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution wrought great horrors upon the world due to society developing slower than technology. Most notably through the rise of totalitarianism, fascism, communism, and industrial genocide.

Third Industrial Revolution: 1945-1995, which was defined by nuclear power and advanced energy production, digital computing, the birth of the internet, genetic modification, jet flight, space flight, early robotics, television, mass media, mass electrification, home automation, personal computers, and much more. The human condition changed at a rate so extreme that the future was no longer easily predictable based on past performance. In fact, even the poorest could now live better than kings of olde.

Third Inter-Revolutionary Period: 1995-Present (?), marked by the maturation of digital technology and the overwhelming sense of technological stagnation. Also known as the Smartphone Era, the Social Media Era, and Y-2-Lame, the expectations of the new millennium being an era of science fiction dreams come true initially seemed to be dashed by the arrival of Y2K in a society that seemed otherwise unchanged since the 1970s sans advanced computing. However, in the background, the paradigms of the next industrial revolution were being established, such as machine learning, artificial general intelligence, genetic engineering, metamaterials, fusion power, advanced solar and wind power, automation, room temperature superconductors, transhumanism, mixed reality, the metaverse, passenger drones, commercial space exploration, advanced space industry, graphene, advanced robotics, brain computer interfaces, and more.

Fourth Industrial Revolution: Present (?) What's going to happen next?

First, I have to stress "my own interpretation" because some of these are speculative. A lot of people claim the Third Industrial Revolution didn't start until 1970 and is still ongoing, while others claim there's only one industrial revolution and everything since has just been sub-periods within it. And a good number include the inter-revolutionary periods in their accompanying revolutions.

I personally see the Third Industrial Revolution as having started around the end of WW2, with the advent of digital Turing-complete computers, applied atomic physics, and modern medicine.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the upcoming/current one. And this goes into my second point: we won't know when the Fourth Industrial Revolution started until WELL after it's underway.

Next, "inter-revolutionary period" refers to the fact that technology generally progresses in inter-twining S-curves and right as one paradigm peaks, another troughs before rising. This is why people between 1920-1940 and between 2000 and 2020 felt like all the great technologies of their preceding industrial revolutions had given way to incremental iterative improvements and great laboratory advancements that never seemed capable of actually leaving the laboratory. If you ever wondered why the 2000s and 2010s felt indistinguishable and slow, as if nothing changed from 1999 to the present, it was because you were living in that intermediate period between technological revolutions. During that time, all the necessary components for the Fourth Industrial Revolution were being set up as the foundations for what we're seeing now while simultaneously all the fruits of the Third Industrial Revolution were fully maturing and perhaps even starting to spoil, with nothing particularly overwhelming pushing things forward. You might remember this as "foundational futurism."
As it stands, a lot of foundational stuff tends to be pretty boring on its own. Science fiction talks of the future being things like flying cars, autonomous cars, humanoid servant robots, synthetic media, space colonies, neurotechnology, and so on. Sci-fi media sometimes set years for these things to happen, like the 1990s or 2000s. Past futurists often set similar dates. Dates like, say, 2020 AD. According to Blade Runner, we're supposed to have off-world colonies and 100% realistic humanoid robots (e.g. with human-level artificial general intelligence) by now. According to Ray Kurzweil, we were supposed to have widespread human-AI relationships (ala Her) and PCs with the same power as the human brain by 2019. When these dates passed and the most we had was, say, the Web 2.0 and smartphones, we felt depressed about the future.
But here's the thing: we're basically asking why we don't have a completed 2-story house when we're still setting down the foundation, a foundation using tools that were created in the preceding years.

We couldn't get to the modern internet without P2P, VoIP, enterprise instant messaging, e-payments, business rules management, wireless LANs, enterprise portals, chatbots, and so on. Things that are so fundamental to how the internet circa 2020 works that we can scarcely even consider them individually. No increased bandwidth for computer connections? No audio or video streaming. No automated trading or increased use of chatbots? No fully automated businesses. No P2P? No blockchain. No smartphones or data sharing? No large data sets that can be used to power machine learning, and thus no advanced AI.
Finally and a bit more lightheartedly, I'd strongly recommend against using this to predict future industrial revolutions unless you're writing a pulp sci-fi story and need to figure out roughly when the 37th industrial revolution will be underway. If the Fourth Industrial Revolution pans out the way I feel it will, there won't be a Fifth. Or perhaps more accurately, we won't be able to predict the Fifth, specifically when it'll take place and what it will involve.


Onto the meat of this post: what will define the Fourth Industrial Revolution? What are its foundational technologies?
To summarize, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be THE biggest and MOST sweeping of them all. It will have more quality-of-life impacts on the human condition than even the Second Industrial Revolution, which saw humans going from horse-and-buggies and prayer-and-gin to automobiles, airplanes, and penicillin in just a generation. Indeed, the whole reason I'm making this thread (besides just having something to do) is because I had an epiphany last night about just how obscenely overwhelming the Fourth Industrial Revolution is going to be. Nothing we've experienced thus far has adequately prepared us.

In no particular order of importance, the technologies that will have the most impact over the next 30 to 40 years:

• Artificial Intelligence. Advanced artificial narrow intelligence and artificial general intelligence will be the steam and electricity of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, allowing for a lot of what we're soon to be capable of. Indeed, my honest opinion is that without digital computing and narrow artificial intelligence, we as a technological civilization would have stagnated around 1970 much the same way we could have stagnated in the 1800s without steam power. On its own, AGI almost certainly means the Singularity, a revolution so far beyond anything we've ever seen in the history of life on this planet that it'd essentially begin a new epoch of the universe itself. Of course, that's IF the Kurzweilian Singularity proves true. The sheer range of changes that will come from artificial general intelligence is so absolute that I'd undermine this whole post if I listed them here. This— is— the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

• Advanced metamaterials. Materials that have unnatural properties are going to unlock a world of massive technologies for us, such as nearly perfect solar panels, invisibility cloaks, ultra-fast computing, earthquake protection, totally silent transportation, and much much more. On their own, metamaterials could trigger a small industrial revolution.

• Room-temperature superconductors. On their own, RTSCs could trigger an industrial revolution the likes of which will extend far beyond Earth. The sheer range of applications is mind-boggling and would very easily lead to a classically sci-fi lifestyle of flying cars, space colonies, advanced fusion power, long-performing robots, and much more.

• Graphene. The wondermaterial is just now starting to be mass produced and it will still be a while before it takes off, but once it does, we'll have yet another "minor industrial revolution-tier technology" to add to the list. Graphene is superior to carbon nanotubes and rivals metamaterials in terms of potential applications.

• Genetic engineering. With the human genome now completely decoded and technologies like CRISPR starting to mature, we're rapidly approaching an inflection point where modifying genetic material can be done on an industrial, ultra-precise scale. The very nature of what it means to be human is going to change— and that's without getting into other lifeforms. We could engineer more nutritious food, domesticate wild animals in a single generation, resurrect extinct species, create entirely new species that have never existed before, and so much more. The question isn't "can we?" but "should we" and "will we?" You know my opinion on these matters: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, we should.

• 3D Printing and Micro-Manufacturing. There was a time around 2013-2015 when 3D printing was overhyped and seen as the next big thing. That hype faded as the limitations of 3D printers became obvious, but that doesn't mean the technology is dead. Rather, it's just maturing in the background. Once atomically-precise printing becomes feasible, all bets are off, and we could see an industrial explosion. 3D printing also ought to make space exploration much, much easier since it would only require us bring raw materials off world (and that's when we couldn't fabricate materials out of extraterrestrial resources, such as for things that require biological matter). The laws of thermodynamics prevent us from creating full-fledged Santa Claus machines, but there's still a wide range of possibilities even with current technology.

• Robotics and automation. Once we have even proto-AGI, let alone the full thing, we'll be living in neo-Antiquity. Robots are the final true stepping stone to a "sci-fi world," because once we have robots, we will have The Future™. Robots mean industry wherever. Robots mean abundance. The lines between capitalism and the idealized version of socialism will blur with the introduction of a technological helot class, and in more entertaining fashion, robots mean almost any fictional creation can be realized in our real world. Barring thermodynamics, robots resolve many of the crises of labor such as the need to eat and rest or the inefficiencies of human labor. But this will only be realized through AI.

• Autonomous vehicles and personal aero-transport. Another technology enabled by AI, autonomous vehicles will be realized once we have commonsense-understanding perfect vision systems, which all but heralds AGI itself (hence my opinion that we need AGI for autonomous vehicle technology to truly take off as promised). As a side effect, autonomous vehicle technology will make the dream of flying cars feasible by cutting out what has always been the biggest obstacle to personal air transport: the need for a human pilot.

• Transhumanism and neurotechnology. Brain-computer interfaces alone are going to upend everything, with techno-telepathy possibly becoming the next big medium of communication. As I posited in the Man of 2022 thread, we're only about a decade out from having a more unified non-invasive regime of changes, and probably two or three from more invasive methods becoming dominant. By the end of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, there WILL be a sizable number of humans who are extensively techno-augmented. Where I disagree with the likes of Kurzweil is in the idea that this will be a majority or even a sizable minority of humans; I think even by the 2060s you could still measure the number of transhumans with "tens of millions" rather than anything larger unless you're being particularly liberal with your definition of transhuman (to the point you include all humans with glasses and a smartphone "transhuman") As for posthumans? Trickier to say...

• Metaverse and augmented reality. I view the Metaverse as being a 3D internet more than whatever buzzword neoliberal rags are using, and mixed reality will overlay that next generation internet over our actuality. As a result, I see the metaverse as also being a place plenty of people will choose to escape into as an alternative form of proto-transhumanism, and plenty of those aforementioned transhumans will be defined by the fact they use technology to sustain themselves IRL so they can live out other lives in the metaverse.

• A resolution to the energy crisis. Solar, wind, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, tidal, geothermal, and space-based solar power will converge to push humanity to realms of energy production so outrageous in such short order that we'll laugh and cringe at the fact we were so dependent upon burning dinosaur-era plants just to keep our civilization functioning. Solar in particular has already passed the terawatt mark, and is almost certainly going to double in about four to five years presuming current growth sustains itself, and that growth will similarly double, to the point solar alone could supply 30% of our global energy needs by 2035 (I think 2030 is too soon, and 2050 far too late). Of course, the more power, the merrier our civilization, and even as solar dominates, we'll still be developing fusion power. Presuming our civilization is still intact by then, we ought to have an extreme energy surplus by 2050, with most of that surplus being stored and/or used for scientific experiments and computational resources. This because if RTSCs, graphene, and metamaterials take off as they ought to, our civilization will simultaneously become extraordinarily more energy efficient and won't require even half the amount of power we use now for far more advanced technology. We as a civilization will probably never become a "Type 1 Civilization" on the Kardashev Scale in terms of energy consumption save for said experiments and computations, hence why I agree with funkervogt's claim that we should instead measure our civilization category through other means. Or perhaps we could become a Type 1 civilization through energy production, generating energy we might never actually use but will still have. Solar is going to dominate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with fusion coming online in the middle of it. So in an indirect way, fusion will still dominate the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

• Blockchains. This is almost certainly going to be more of a banking and economic thing than anything impacting wider society like those behind NFTs like to claim, but I still do think that blockchain technology will be an important aspect of this era. They may allow for more decentralized economic activity to take root, which would certainly upset world governments but could, in theory, be useful in our upcoming automated society.

• Quantum computing. The most discrete tech of the Fourth Industrial Revolution but still an important one, quantum computers are fantastic for crunching extraordinary amounts of data, making them perfect for artificial intelligence and genetic engineering applications. Even with RTSCs and more advanced material science, I strongly doubt these will ever be in your home. But coupled with cloud computing and more advanced data transmission, it may not matter.

• Space colonization: Space exploration will advance, but it's going to be driven heavily by robots and 3D printers, almost completely ruining old pulp visions of rugged lunar and Martian pioneers braving extraterrestrial lands to carve out their own way. We're going to send up the machines to construct colonies first. Indeed, robotics and additive manufacturing are going to prove to be that "secret ingredient" for advanced space exploration. Once we have capable artificial intelligence and fully omni-purpose machines, the heavens will open up to us in ways that truly seem like science fiction. We'll see far more advanced space stations and space colonies be constructed in very short order, as well as those aforementioned extraterrestrial bases and colonies. Proto-transhumanism will undoubtedly exploit this, as VR already allows people to telepresence to other worlds today— those who live in the metaverse could essentially already "live" in space if they so choose.

• In vitro food production and next-generation agriculture. As a byproduct of advanced biotechnology, we're going to see the next big food and consumer materials revolution through lab-grown foodstuffs and other lab-grown materials, like lab-grown leather. Couple this with indoor farming and you could see a much more sustainable agricultural economy. Indeed, once you have such agricultural technology, you actually no longer need full-fledged globalism as individual regions could create just about anything they desire. You could have Canadian chocolate, Caribbean whale blubber, Mongolian bananas, and more. Thus it's possible that next-gen agriculture could actually trigger a wave of "benevolent nationalism" as megaregions no longer have a reason to be interconnected economically besides some larger resources that can't be made in a lab without nucleosynthesis.

• Next-generation medicine. With artificial intelligence and genomics, we're going to see the formal "end" of diseases as we know them between now and 2060. We already see this today with the advent of mRNA and T-cell treatment, but it's going to become much more advanced as we solve things like protein folding and gene modification. Diseases like all known cancers, diabetes, heart disease, even prion diseases might be resolved in less than a generation, and again, you can thank artificial intelligence for enabling such progress. We've made such predictions before, predicated on that classic "Well, we'll solve them somehow through sheer human ingenuity and black-swan breakthroughs," but it's since become clear that we're only going to accomplish such things with AI. Quantum computers may be needed for the most complex of diseases. The holy grail of this is undoubtedly life extension. Once medicine can reliably allow people to live to 120 and beyond, we'll know that the human condition has truly and irrevocably been changed forever in ways beyond anything we've ever known.


These are the major trends I feel will define the next 40 years of technological progress, the ones I feel are absolutely certain to come to pass.

Remember when I said this was going to be a short thread? I lied.
Remember when I said that it was in no particular order of importance? That was mostly the truth, but I started with artificial intelligence precisely because it IS going to be the single most important technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We could still have a Fourth Industrial Revolution without it, because just look at the sheer number of technologies that are going to mature at roughly the same time, but it's going to be the driving factor. Indeed some technologies will only reach their maximum potential BECAUSE of it. Like medicine and robotics— without AI, medicine would progress slowly and unevenly for the rest of the century, with life extension and cures for deep diseases like cancer, diabetes, and prion diseases being forever just-round-the-corner, while robots flat out would never progress beyond where they are now without AI (barring something unusual like VR remote control of robots becoming a major industry). In fact, the impacts of AGI alone are so great that when I set out to revise my bullet point for it, I accidentally wrote about 400 words REDESCRIBING THE ENTIRE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. I mean AGI is going to be freaking extreme.

I also didn't include synthetic media as its own unique bullet point because that's ultimately a direct impact of AI. Indeed, I view synthetic media— the Age of Imaginative Machines— as the direct precursor to artificial general intelligence. There are good reasons why generalized AI only started becoming a thing through synthetic media.

Finally, I know my point about blockchain was pretty small. Unlike the points about metamaterials and RTSCs, which were small because I wrote them early on, I don't care much about blockchain and need to be convinced it's going to be a major technology. I don't doubt it could be, but everything I've seen of it thus far has been more or less crypto-bros meming about how much it's going to change the world rather than it actually changing the world.

[raklian]

An enjoyable read!

[erowind]

A point on blockchain as a crypto-investor. It is mostly bullshit. Within the logic of capitalism blockchains, and more specifically decentralized cryptocurrency and smart contracts have very applicable use-cases. Namely, decentralized finance enables ease of capital flow and accumulation outside of state control. It also removes middlemen like SWIFT or the Federal Reserve from the equation and provides financial services like collaterized loans among others outside of a regulated context.

However, outside of a capitalist context this technology provides next to nothing for society. The only real scientific gains being made through its development are advances in decentralized computing at large, which don't require a token to function if people simply volunteer server space like the torrenting community have for decades, and some niche cryptography and mathematics research, which is cool, but not civilization changing. The immutability of smart contract platforms like ethereum could all the same be provided in a volunteer context without monetary incentive. Where use-cases exist outside of abstract finance there's little reason that the same protocol couldn't be run for free without a token in a volunteer context.

TL:DR blockchain is mostly hype in terms of contributions to the fourth industrial revolution.

[Vakanai]

I agree with most of this, although I would argue we're probably already in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, albeit in the very earliest days of it, just because a lot of what you're talking about either already exists in some small form, or is being worked on steadily until it will exist. There's only a couple other things I disagree with, first being "plenty of those aforementioned transhumans will be defined by the fact they use technology to sustain themselves IRL so they can live out other lives in the metaverse" aka people living permanently in the Matrix/full-dive VR while their bodies are in life support in a pod somewhere. I just don't see a majority of humanity deciding to go into videogames forever, or that it would be culturally acceptable to do so. But that's just me. The last bit is "those who live in the metaverse could essentially already "live" in space if they so choose" and that's just because the speed of light makes telepresence "living" on another planet too difficult a prospect I think. Humans just probably will get too frustrated not being able to react in real time, we already see it when computer connections lag, and light speed is a lag we can not fix (unless worm holes are included as part of the FIFTH Industrial Revolution, which would be pretty awesome).

But otherwise, I think you're pretty spot on with most of this. The only real question is when can we expect to see most of this happen, and if we'll live long enough to enjoy most of those benefits (especially the ones allowing for life extension, because then we might live forever, or close enough to it).

[Tadasuke]

Have you perhaps heard about Henry Bessemer, who between 1850 and 1855 came up with the Bessemer process (converter) of improved steel production, much better than blister steel and crucible steel production processes used earlier (William Kelly in the USA worked on the same thing in the same time)? Or about Carl Wilhelm Siemens, who also in 1850s patented the open-hearth process, which was a good alternative to the Bessemer process and had some advantages (like the ability to recycle, it's slower, but more fuel-efficient)? For comparison: in 1850 Great Britain (the #1 producer) produced only 60 000 tones of steel, in 1870 worldwide steel production rose up to 500 000 tones and soared to 28 000 000 toned by 1900.

The open-hearth process was so important that it is still used in some countries today, like Russia and India. The most developed countries used these two 1850s processes up to the middle of the XX century.

How does this go along your 1840-1870 "Inter-Revolutionary Period"? What I wrote about was extremely important for industrial revolution. And if I thought hard enough, I would come up with more examples. Or I will give two more examples: the first self-serve grocery store ("Piggly Wiggly") happened in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee, the first modern-looking automatic washing machine started selling in 1937 (by Bendix Home Appliances) or in your second "Inter-Revolutionary Period".

And the average person in 1914 didn't have access to electricity, automobiles, radio, modern medicine or X-Ray machines. The average person in 1914 was illiterate btw (see https://ourworldindata.org/exports/cros ... 50x600.svg).

[Yuli Ban]

Have you perhaps heard about Henry Bessemer, who between 1850 and 1855 came up with the Bessemer process (converter) of improved steel production, much better than blister steel and crucible steel production processes used earlier (William Kelly in the USA worked on the same thing in the same time)? Or about Carl Wilhelm Siemens, who also in 1850s patented the open-hearth process, which was a good alternative to the Bessemer process and had some advantages (like the ability to recycle, it's slower, but more fuel-efficient)? For comparison: in 1850 Great Britain (the #1 producer) produced only 60 000 tones of steel, in 1870 worldwide steel production rose up to 500 000 tones and soared to 28 000 000 toned by 1900.

The open-hearth process was so important that it is still used in some countries today, like Russia and India. The most developed countries used these two 1850s processes up to the middle of the XX century.

How does this go along your 1840-1870 "Inter-Revolutionary Period"? What I wrote about was extremely important for industrial revolution. And if I thought hard enough, I would come up with more examples. Or I will give two more examples: the first self-serve grocery store ("Piggly Wiggly") happened in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee, the first modern-looking automatic washing machine started selling in 1937 (by Bendix Home Appliances) or in your second "Inter-Revolutionary Period".

And the average person in 1914 didn't have access to electricity, automobiles, radio, modern medicine or X-Ray machines. The average person in 1914 was illiterate btw (see https://ourworldindata.org/exports/cros ... 50x600.svg).

All these examples remind me quite a bit of the World Wide Web and the commercialization of the internet, which happened smackdab in the middle of the Third Inter-Revolutionary Period. It really comes off as proving a point I made in an earlier thread, that when technological revolutions end, that doesn't mean all technological progress ends. Indeed, in these inter-revolutionary periods, there's always some major innovation that helps set up for the next big revolution. It's almost always a case of something major from the previous revolution being refined or a set-up for the next revolution to truly exploit. What matters is that the compounding rate of progress slows for the major on-going trends during these times.

And true, most people circa 1914 didn't have access to all those modern marvels. But they were indeed available, or more accurately, would be greatly disseminated in the coming years. Similarly to how advanced information technology was created during the Third Industrial Revolution but the vast majority of it didn't reach your hands until the 2000s and 2010s— technically smartphones were invented during the Third Industrial Revolution, but maybe a couple thousand people at absolute theoretical maximum would have owned one circa 1995.

Similarly, my favorite example for an innovative technology from an inter-revolutionary period is penicillin. It was invented in 1928, smack-dab in the middle of that second inter-revolutionary period, right on the cusp of the Great Depression at that. And yet it wasn't widely used until the 1940s.

Another technology that wasn't technically invented in an inter-revolutionary period but was "figured out" during one has to be aluminum— discovered in the 1820s, but industrially produced in the 1850s. And yet again, it took until the Third Industrial Revolution for it to be truly mass-produced due to requiring a lot of surrounding industrial infrastructure to produce at scale.

It all goes back to S-curves:
https://blog.carnegieinvest.com/market- ... ig-s-curve

[Tadasuke]

According to this graph, we are now during the fourth industrial revolution and only at the beginning of it:

[Yuli Ban]

Exactly, and that's why I've made the argument that 2005-2015 was the most atrocious time to be a futurist in the 21st century, with a sort of depression peak (trough?) around 2009-2012. This is because this is the point when sci-tech was at its least hyped, with nothing particularly interesting going on in any field that wasn't already underway before or wouldn't be vastly surpassed in the coming years. Probably the single most impressive sci-tech news story of this era was IBM's Watson. I actually missed Watson when it first hit because I didn't have internet access and wasn't too terribly interested in actual futurology at the time.

But I feel that there is a quality to this era of futurism that we've since lost.

When 2000 came and went, we noted that we were still "doing things," to use a phrase I coined before. We were still getting in rattly elevators, driving our own cars, planting on our food, flipping off light switches, walking to places we wanted to be, hanging out with friends in meat-space, shopping in physical stores, and otherwise living lives that could best be described as "high-tech 1970s."

There were no flying cars. There were no domestic robots. There were no smart-glasses. There were no virtual reality headsets (on the mass market). There were no driverless cars. There were no holograms. There were no colonies on the moon or Mars. Militaries weren't using ray guns or force fields. We weren't becoming cyber-augmented transhumans. We weren't living in mile-high starscrapers. Buildings were still rectangles in the sky. The best chatbots were still Markov chains that didn't understand anything past the fourth thing you told it. And even though we got some form of home robots with the Roomba, it was the dumbest thing imaginable. It felt like even the Ancient Greeks could have developed something like it. Plasma screen TVs and big stereoes were a poor replacement for the future we were promised. As has been mentioned before, this was the era of a yuppie with a pager and PDA bicycling to work while a Boeing 747 flies above the smoggy, boxy metropolis filled with rose-petal highways. In some ways, that was futuristic, if you compared it to life in, say, rural France in the 1600s. But compared to our sci-fi visions of tomorrow, this was the lamest possible future imaginable.

Everything still felt humdrum and "normal," even though technology was unfathomable by historical standards. The year 2000 came and went feeling like the year 1970 with cell phones and GPS. There didn't seem to be anything particularly interesting about what technology was like. And this was right after a final dying burst of innovation from the Third Industrial Revolution. The late 90s gave us things like widespread internet access, GPS, cloning animals, more capable robots, the International Space Station, cruise control in cars, and much more. So there was at least some incentive to think that technology was about to go crazy.

Instead, we got the most 2000s technological era imaginable, where the Future became peer-to-peer networks, voice over IP, enterprise portals, bad chatbots, wikis, infrastructural projects like dams and public transportation terminals, and post-modern globalism. This was futurism that was only interesting to the most boring class of people, those who don't even believe in a sci-fi future to begin with. Though as it would happen, this is precisely what we needed to bootstrap us to the current era we're in now.

Still, after ten years of business technology dominating the Future™ with scant few news stories of interesting technologies that never seemed to leave the lab, it was easy to grow disillusioned. Reading the first iteration of the Future Timeline forums when it was still active, you just got this visceral sense that the Future was dead or, at best, was so far away that it felt pointless discussing it. The Obama era saw definite technological improvements, but it was all a pitance compared to what we were promised. One such technology that comes to mind was brain-computer interfaces. One of the most advanced technologies imaginable, BCIs actually date back to the 1920s. This is referring to EEG technology, however, which was interesting in its time but has an upper limit on what it can usefully do. One EEG headset from around 2009 involved a man typing on Twitter with only his thoughts, something which might have inspired Will Fox to predict that texting by thinking would be commonplace by 2020. This didn't even begin to come true.

Some other news stories involved the replacement to the space shuttle being discussed, new robots that could walk a few miles, further developments in driverless cars in controlled situations, and some plans for gene modification in plants. And there was also 4G technology being rolled out. Otherwise, it was still very much 2000s business technology futurism.

The first Future Timeline forum lived and died in the deepest trough of this era— 2009 through 2011. This was the period in which the Future seemed more distant than it ever has. We could see it. We could see what the Future™ held and just what might be possible because we were developing it all.

But it wasn't here. Worse, we had absolutely no idea when, if ever, it would get here.

For those unaware, this was the "original" FutureTimeline forum: https://web.archive.org/web/20200106180 ... forum.html
Most of it isn't archived anymore, though a few pages still linger. It dates back to around, IIRC, February or March 2009 and came to an end in May 2011 (almost a full decade to the day before the second version of the forum would be retired).

When it was still up, I'd pity-read this forum because of how badly I felt for the users on it at the time, damned to deal with the absolute worst era of sci-tech progress in the new millennium.


This was an era before deep learning took the AI world by storm, so we didn't even have the promise of ultra-rapidly developing artificial intelligence to boost our faith in tomorrow. As far as we knew, the 2010s and 2020s were going to be more hit-or-miss machine learning experiments that eventually culminated in something interesting by the 2030s. If it sounds like that's exactly what's happening, let me explain the context. When I say "something interesting," I don't mean "artificial general intelligence" or even "proto-AGI." I mean something on par with ImageNet circa 2015. Something that could reliably classify images on par with a human, suggesting vision modeling is roughly and effectively solved. Something like AlphaGo would have been seen as heralding the Singularity itself, and plenty around 2011 thought that a computer defeating a human champion at Go wasn't going to happen for another 20 to 30 years. Sure, there was a minor blip around 2007 of an AI defeating a high-level human player at Go, but in a very, very restricted situation that gave the AI every possible handicap it could have, playing on a tiny board that vastly reduced the number of computations needed, and in a truncated game. This was the Go equivalent of Eugene Goostman passing the Turing Test in 2014.

This era of futurism was tragic because everything we wanted felt so distant in the future. All those news stories about future technology on the way felt horrifically sad in retrospect because I would read them and think "You're going to have to wait many, many years to see anything come of this, my friend." And that's when whatever was mentioned didn't turn out to be a dead-end or vaporware.


The summer of 2010 was hot, muggy, and hazy in a world where advanced AI was a bunch of magic tricks in a barely-elaborate Potemkin village. The best robots could barely walk without being tethered, and ASIMO seemed to almost be light years ahead of the competition just because it could navigate stairs reliably. This was supposed to be the technology that replaced human workers? Even if you claimed it wouldn't happen for another century, it was a hard sell.

Hence why I say this era of futurism reached its nadir in 2009 through 2012 in my opinion because that was the point at which we had a full decade to reflect upon the failure of the year 2000 to bring us into the glorious cyberpunk future we were promised. We didn't even have virtual reality yet, and drones were just barely a niche blip on hobbyist radars. We were so starved for interesting technological breakthroughs.

We saw IBM Watson come and go, and for a time, it seemed to revitalize interest in AI, but by 2016, it became clear that it was a dead-end thanks to the explosive success of deep learning. Dead ends, false starts, and vaporware. That was the late 2000s and early-mid 2010s in sci-tech in a nutshell. And perhaps for that reason, the Y2K aesthetic faded from public view hard around that time as designs became more indie, lo-fi, kitsch, and homely, deliberately trying to convince consumers of just how retro and NOT futuristic these advanced products like smartphones and social media were.

As a futurist-adjacent youth in this time period, it felt so bad knowing that all the fun sci-fi technologies were probably decades away. I wanted my virtual reality headset. I wanted a domestic robot. I wanted to see images of futuristic cityscapes. I wanted to know that there were space colonies. I wanted to hear more about cyborgs and transhumans. I wanted to see flexible smartphones and smartglasses. I wanted there to be holograms in downtown Hammond and flying cars up above. I wanted to talk to an artificial intelligence.

And yet it wasn't there. And as I've been repeating, the absolute most dire part about living in this time was that visceral, raw sense that it wouldn't be there until I was a decrepit old man, or worse, long after I was dead. It's one reason why I love reading through the second FutureTimeline forum, the one that's actually archived— especially all the posts from around 2011-2013 because that painfully slow rate of progress was still so damned overwhelming. Knowing how things actually turned out makes it funny to read nowadays.


Even now, at the very earliest start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (assuming history says it started by now), things are so much more exciting than they were a decade ago.

[caltrek]

I know that, generally, citation of news articles are not always welcome in the Science and Technology of the Future forum, but this opinion piece is so on point that I hope it is welcomed in this thread:

Opinion: The Next Eight Years Will Make All of the Difference
by Felix Dodds, Caroline Duque Chopitea, and Ranger Ruffins

https://ensia.com/voices/opinion-the-ne ... ifference/

Extract:

(Ensia)...we find ourselves in the throes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with disruptive change in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data and analytics, biotechnology, augmented reality and virtual reality, the Internet of Things (IOT), blockchain, self-driving transportation, quantum computing, and energy.

As U.S. President Joe Biden said in his 2021 address to a joint session of Congress, “We’ll see more technological change in the next 10 years than we saw in the last 50.”

The Question Today

The question for us today — right now, in 2022 — is whether we will harness these innovations to achieve those goals or squander the opportunities they offer.

Between now and 2030, AI will make our homes smarter and IoT will give us new ways to control appliances. Will we use these simply to become more entertained and less capable of doing things ourselves? Or will we apply them to boost energy efficiency, reduce food waste, stay healthy and help people with physical limitations lead more fulfilling lives?

By 2030, driverless cars will be more common and short-haul flights might be on electric planes. Will we just drive and fly all that much more, or will we take advantage of the opportunity these technologies offer to reduce fossil fuel use and transition to a clean energy economy?

[TrueAnimationFan]

All of this makes me remember those first few years of the 2010s; mainly 2011 to 2014. Year after year as a kid in school interested in the future, I'd see effectively no news at all about AI, robots, supercomputers or speech synthesis, with the two most fascinating AI-related things for me to do being maybe Cleverbot and Siri, the former being popular for what seemed almost exclusively due to how dumb and laughable its "ability" to have conversations was. After some number of years, I began to get the sensation that something was...wrong. I thought to myself "Why...? Why isn't anything tech related advancing at a speed you'd think it would given how far we are into the 21st century? It's just Watson after Watson; IPhone after IPhone..."

By around 2015, I was 13 years old and going through a stressful period of my life following my parents getting divorced, which took until around 2018 to wear off. I had basically given up on expecting any life-changing advances in supercomputers or AI while I was still under the age of 30.

But then suddenly, I leave my depression behind, it's 2019 and...WOOOOAAAAHH! THERE'S SUDDENLY A BAZILLION COOL NEW TALENTS THAT COMPUTERS AND ROBOTS HAVE! They walk like a person! They dance! They do stunts! They let you say swear words in SpongeBob's voice! They create perfect photographs based soley on what you type!

Looking back on the first two decades of my life, I feel like one thing can be said with decent confidence: 2018.

That was the year. The year that, to me, felt like the first year in my life where all of the above fields were at last progressing at a rate that they feel like they should have already been progressing at by the time it was 2010.