The rapid advancement of technology in all areas of life and work is set to destabilise everything from our patterns of consumption and ownership to the ways in which we govern and regulate ourselves.
Whether we are now facing the fourth or fifth industrial revolution, as was under discussion at Davos last month, and discussed online on Progress, matters less than what this new age of integration represents for global societies and livelihoods. We are entering an age of assimilation: nano and biotech, additive manufacturing (3D printing) and artificial intelligence, big data and new materials – and with it the disruption of business models and industry sectors through digitisation and decentralisation. No part of society, including political parties, will remain untouched by these monumental changes. And as the party created to represent the interests of working people above all else, this is an age Labour should be seeking to get its head around, and quickly.
Peter Marsh, author of The Next Industrial Revolution and founder of MadeHereNow, explains this new frontier in terms of ‘communication, customisation and creativity’: the linking-up of ideas, people and things through technology, the advent of ‘batch sizes of one’ and a desire for bespoke over mass production, and the ability to splice together applications that were never previously combined – such as in the burgeoning wearable tech industry (think Apple watches and fitbits).
According to Paul O’Donnell from the Manufacturing Technologies Association, value in this new world order will increasingly come from data and not raw materials. The so-called Internet of Things will transform our household items into intelligent repositories of statistics, relaying information about everything from how many times we brush our teeth to how much milk is left in the fridge. With this merging of hardware and software manufacturers will have to adapt to become conduits and arbiters of data: ‘we are resetting the parameters’, says O’Donnell, and the new paradigm provides an opportunity for a knowledge-intensive economy like the United Kingdom to regain its position as a powerhouse of manufacturing.
Before Christmas I spoke at a conference run by the University of Exeter on redistributed manufacturing (defined by the EPSRC and ESRC Research Councils as ‘encompassing technology, systems and strategies that change the economics and organisation of manufacturing, particularly with regard to location and scale’) where there were several examples of how additive manufacturing is already radically affecting the performance of the industry. One dental implants business had printed several million teeth with an unprecedented degree of accuracy using data sent in by individual dentists, and with the arrival of new, cheaper printers was set to begin production on a localised scale. Other SMEs demonstrated the capacity for repair of high-value components, and most also alluded to the massive reduction in wastage enabled by the additive, as opposed to the traditional subtractive, processes. Associations like Made in Britain also attest to a growing enthusiasm for home-grown items and an increase in re-shored production.
But in every revolution there are winners and losers. As manufacturing output has continued to rise in the western world over the last 40 years, so the numbers of those employed in the sector have fallen. And, as workers are edged out by robots (who will not be paying taxes) and the gains in productivity fail to trickle down from the owners of the capital, the fear is that these technological advances merely serve to exacerbate growing wealth disparity. James Tooze, the RCA’s Project Lead on its Future Makespaces in Redistributed Manufacturing work, argues that redistributed manufacturing is ultimately not about redeploying the making process, but reallocating power and control. ‘We need to reimagine where value is’, he says, citing shared or open-source IP structures as one way in which this is happening. And of course, in light of what we now know about the consequences (waste, environmental devastation, ill health) of linear manufacturing processes, we must also rethink the costs and externalities.
There is also the less predictable element of human choice: just because we can develop a new technology does not always mean that we should. In fact recent research by the RSA suggests that the growing ‘maker movement’, which is seeing more and more people come together to create and modify things in a traditional and very physical way, is ‘a reaction to significant technological upheaval and indicative of a desire among people to have more control over their lives.’ The very act of making, suggests the report, ‘is one means of regaining mastery over technology.’
Most importantly perhaps, it is imperative that this new industrial revolution is aware of its direction and reflects on its purpose. The Future of Life Institute recently released an open letter signed by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak, calling for new advances in artificial intelligence to benefit society and acknowledging that until now the field of AI ‘has focused largely on techniques that are neutral with respect to purpose’. Similarly the Manufacturing Commission’s recent report on Industrial Evolution and sustainable manufacturing promotes the role of the state as an ‘active player in the innovation process, not merely a positive corrector of market failures’. The revolutions of industry may be bloodless, but we must nevertheless be clear about what we are fighting for.
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Lucy Chamberlin is head of the Great Recovery programme at the RSA. She tweets @LucyChamberlin
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