The internet and information communication technologies are changing major aspects of our lives and world. They are affecting and disrupting many existing and diverse models of government and business, not to mention personal experiences and relationships. They are increasingly extending across political, economic, cultural, social, and personal realms, directly impacting the ways in which we live, work, consume, produce, and interact.
These changes, wrought by the internet and information communication technologies, are so significant, complex and widespread that the world is arguably on the threshold of a profound shift.
According to the World Economic Forum, the reach and impact of the internet and information communication technologies are so widespread, complex and significant that they represent a so-called fourth industrial revolution. These technological transformations are revolutionary because of their velocity, scope and systems impact.
First, their speed of development and expansion has no historical precedent insofar as their exponential instead of linear pace. Second, their scope is global and granular as they are directly affecting and disrupting every government and industry in every country. And, third, their breadth and depth are necessarily changing entire systems and practices of governance, management, production, and consumption.
This revolution also depends upon data, especially large amounts of data. The internet itself depends upon, generates and uses massive amounts of data. The size and scale of data are growing at breakneck speeds. The World Economic Forum, for instance, estimates that data volumes are growing at a rate of 40 per cent per year and will increase 50 times by 2020. As another example, according to estimates by the information analytics firm Aureus Analytics, by 2016, 90 per cent of all the world’s data was created in the preceding two years.
Further, it is not only the unprecedented size and scale of data, but also the growth of diverse kinds of data that is compounding this revolution’s widespread and large-scale impacts. Personal, industrial and political data, for example, are growing at previously unimaginable rates. Personal data – its amounts and kinds – are experiencing explosive expansions every time individuals use their information communication technologies, like their smartphones, or engage with social media, online shopping, financial transactions, and other digital and internet-based services. As personal mobile usage increases worldwide, so too does the sheer volume of personal data.
Consider that China alone has 1.3 billion mobile subscriptions out of a population of 1.36 billion, or that India has nearly one billion mobile subscriptions out of a population of 1.25 billion.
Industrial data’s growth, meanwhile, is even greater than that of the exploding volumes and kinds of personal data. The internet is increasingly being embedded within every aspect of our surroundings, from cars and clothing to buildings and furniture. Technology research firm Gartner estimates that presently, there are nearly 4.9 billion internet-connected devices – part of the vast internet-of-things – embedded in diverse products including cars, buildings, appliances, and medical and industrial equipment. It is estimated that by 2020, the number of products connected to the internet will reach 25 billion. Information communication technologies and services, moreover, are increasingly being used for many industry and business activities, from operations and transactions to logistics and supply chain management.
Political, or government, data is also growing at unprecedented rates and scales. Many countries, in fact, increasingly depend upon this massive amount and diverse kinds of data for their political functioning and economic growth. For example, the G7 group of countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US) require and generate massive amounts of data because of and for their functioning and growth. Their GDP in fact is about 70 per cent based or dependent upon information-based intangible products, information-intensive services, and information-oriented sectors, not material goods, services, or sectors.
This fourth industrial revolution, in other words, is creating more data than humanity has ever seen in its entire history. The accelerated growth of these massive amounts of data is accompanied by challenges and opportunities as we figure out the best ways to process, govern, organise, manage, and analyse it.
In The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Penguin, 2017), Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, argues that this revolution’s opportunities are exciting and endless. He states that billions of people being connected by the internet and information communication technologies “with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing”.
Another feature of this revolution is the merging of the virtual and physical. Schwab argues that this revolution “is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”. In The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford, 2016), Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of information at Oxford University, concurs with this assessment, arguing that the internet, coupled with information communication technologies, is creating a new kind of reality in which the threshold between the offline, real, physical world is blurring with the online, digital, virtual world. The latter is spilling over into the former and merging with it to establish an “infosphere” that, in turn, is shaping our intellectual and physical realities, changing our self-understanding, modifying how we related to each other and ourselves, and altering how we interact with and interpret the world.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution promises a new kind of world
Floridi argues that “as a consequence of such a transformation in our ordinary environment, we shall be living in an infosphere that will become increasingly syncrhonized (time), delocalized (space), and correlated (interactions)”. The infosphere is gradually, but quickly, absorbing all things and spaces as more of our lives and the world become increasingly “informatised”. More objects and places are becoming, or will soon become, part of the growing internet-of-things with their own “ITentities, able to learn, advise, communicate, and interact with each other”, often without any human intervention.
Current RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, for example, are used to store, monitor, and retrieve data from an object and give it a unique identity like a barcode. RFID tags are on most commercial products from books to foodstuffs. Floridi states that incorporating RFID tags into “everything, including humans and animals, and you have created ITentities. Imagine networking these tags together with all the billions of PCs, iPods, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, digital cameras, and other ICT devices available and you see that the infosphere is no longer ‘there’ but ‘here’ and it is here to stay. Your Nike Sensor and iPod already talk to each other”.
Individuals are consequently beginning to live a so-called “onlife” in which they are existing in, experiencing, and expecting to have internet access and use anywhere, anytime, for anything. Indeed, many individuals are almost always connected to the internet, conducting many of their activities online and devoting significant portions of their attention to internet-related endeavours.
Floridi predicts that therefore, in the near future, the distinction between the online and offline will completely disappear, leaving us living the onlife. He argues that it will become normal to consider our lives and world as part of the infosphere. The physical and digital worlds will be conflated as synonymous realities, with the former increasingly interpreted and understood informationally as a part of the latter.
Presently, however, most people still consider cyberspace as a place one logs into and logs out from. Indeed, our view of the world is that it’s comprised of inanimate things (clothing, buildings, furniture) that are non-interactive and incapable of communicating, learning and memorising. But as this revolution progresses, and the infosphere becomes more entrenched, what we currently experience as the offline world will become more fully interactive and responsive as pervasive, distributed, and wireless a2a (anything to anything) information processes that work 4a4 (anywhere for anytime).
The fourth industrial revolution and the accompanying infosphere present many complex, yet interrelated, opportunities and challenges.
This revolution, for example, provides many economic opportunities, such as developing new kinds of and markets for diverse businesses. As Schwab notes, it is helping lay the foundations of “a supply-side miracle, with long-term gains in efficiency and productivity. Transportation and communication costs will drop, logistics and global supply chains will become more effective, and the cost of trade will diminish, all of which will open new markets and drive economic growth.”
Indeed, businesses, both large and small, are experiencing efficiency and productivity gains, particularly as they harness and use their increasing data to create new products and services, tailor offerings to customers, and streamline their operations, supply chains, and transactions.
This revolution also presents many other economic as well as political, cultural, and social opportunities for people around the world, such as increasing income levels, expanding educational options, democratising political, economic, cultural, social, and professional participation and contributions, spreading and sharing all kinds of information, promoting cross-cultural communication and understanding, improving entertainment, leisure, and recreational interests, and, ultimately, improving people’s overall quality of life.
But this revolution also comes with many challenges, which are, in some ways, the flipside of its opportunities. There are, for example, economic challenges accompanying the economic opportunities. This revolution is disrupting many established businesses and their products, services and practices, which in turn are disrupting labour markets.
As Schwab notes, “as automation substitutes for labour across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labour”. More and more jobs at all levels and across all industries are being affected, reduced and even replaced by the internet and information communication technologies.
Real incomes, moreover, are stagnating and declining. As Schwab argues, these technologies are “one of the main reasons why incomes have stagnated, or even decreased, for a majority of the population in high-income countries: the demand for highly skilled workers has increased while the demand for workers with less education and lower skills has decreased”. The result is an increasingly stratified job market segregated into high-skill/high-pay and low-skill/low-pay segments and a hollowing out of the middle.
This revolution could therefore exacerbate inequality, which, according to Schwab, “represents the greatest societal concern associated with the fourth industrial revolution”. As these technologies increasing threaten and undermine people’s livelihoods, many individuals will become, and are becoming, more dissatisfied, disillusioned, and disgruntled. These experiences, in turn, adversely affect political, social, cultural, and personal realms; for example, with the emergence and growing spread of political and economic nationalism, democratic dereliction, cultural xenophobia, and group and personal prejudices.
As this revolution alienates and marginalises more people, another of its opportunities – the spread of information – confront the challenge of being exploited, not for the sharing of knowledge, but for the spreading of extreme ideas and ideologies. Indeed, while the internet and information communication technologies facilitate beneficial and constructive information sharing, they simultaneously permit the spread of disinformation, misinformation and fake news.
This kind of so-called dark information is particularly popular in times of economic stagnation and decline, growing unemployment, and political malaise and cynicism.
Another major challenge presented by this revolution is a growing dependency upon these technologies and a concomitant withdrawal from the world. As the technology writer Nicholas Carr argues, the internet and information communication technologies “promised to set us free” but instead they “trained us to withdraw from the world into distraction and dependency”.
He argues that these technologies are “becoming, as all mass media tend to become, an environment, a surrounding, an enclosure, at worst a cage”. Individuals within this cage are becoming increasingly disempowered and distracted by, and dependent upon, it. Carr declares that “what I want from technology is not a new world. What I want from technology are tools for exploring and enjoying the world that is”.
It will soon probably be difficult to understand, and even one day remember, what life and the world were like in pre-infosphere times. Indeed, for someone born in and after 2000, the world will always have had the internet and been wireless. The world will have always been in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, everything will always have been wireless and connected to the Internet, the world will always have been awash in big data, and people will have always been living an onlife in the infosphere. But, the world will also have always been segregated between the information-haves and have-nots, diverse kinds of digital divides, predatory automation, economic stagnation and decline, and fake news.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution indeed promises a new kind of world. But perhaps, as Carr argues, it is placing us in a cage of dependency, distraction and withdrawal. After all, this promised new world not only presents its own disadvantages, but also exacerbates, instead of solving or mitigating, current problems. The emerging and future onlife in the infosphere, in other words, in many ways mirrors and is just as problematic as our current world.
Marc Kosciejew is a lecturer and former head of department of Library Information and Archive Sciences at the University of Malta.