Recently World Economic Forum hosted its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Like in the recent past, the fourth industrial revolution drew significant attention in this year's annual dialogues of global policy makers and thought leaders as well. There has been growing concern that technology progression, primarily driven by robotics and automation, is leading to human-free monopolistic production, creating new form of economic imbalance-not seen ever before.
Industrial revolution having the root in the 16th century is primarily blamed for greenhouse gas emission, causing global warming and climate change. Addition of economic imbalance to growing concern of climate change appears to have worsened the menace caused by the industrial revolution. But, there appears to be a silver lining in the Fourth industrial revolution as far as climate change, or CO2 emission is concerned. Although, the fourth industrial revolution is perceived to be the cause of job-less economic growth and growing market power of monopolies, it has the potential to begin the process of decarburisation of global environment. So far, regulation, which is perceived to be a drag to the industrial growth causing conflicting policy options, has been the only tool to rein in climate change. Instead of regulation, the fourth industrial revolution has the potential to create possibilities of profitable competition to reduce greenhouse gas emission-ushering in a new era of lasting climate change solution.
With the filling of patent of James Watt, in 1781, the burning of coal in steam engines accelerated, so did the growth of carbon emission. With the progression of steam engines, many other technologies were invented for burning fossil fuels to generate usable energy for the industry, like coal fired power plant to generate electricity, and internal combustion engine to generate mechanical energy by burning liquid fuel as well as natural gas. Such fossil fuel burning technologies powered the growth of industrial economy. As a result, the carbon footprint has been growing since the beginning of industrial civilisation-which now stands at 50 tons CO2 per year per US household. Starting from the transportation to food consumption, basically every human activity of modern civilisation has been contributing to the carbon footprint. Growing carbon emission has been contributing to global warming leading to melting of polar ice cap raising the sea level. Such temperature as well as sea level rise poses serious threats to the even the existence of certain countries and geographies such as Bangladesh or Maldives, having low altitude flatland. A recent World Bank report has cited Bangladesh as one of the more "potential impact hotspots" threatened by "extreme river floods, more intense tropical cyclones, rising sea levels and very high temperatures". For example, it has been reported that "flood areas could increase by as much as 29 per cent for a 2.5 ° C in Bangladesh."
Technology-centric industrial revolution has been the main cause of the growing climate issue. The endangered countries had not contributed to the cause. On the other hand, both technology progression and the integration of technology in every sphere of life across the globe have been accelerating. Is such progression pushing the situation from bad to worse? Is the journey of industrial revolution to its Fourth stage pose bigger threat to climate change? Or, rather it could be the beginning of reducing the carbon emission- termed as decarburisation.
The journey of industrial civilisation, since the invention of Steam Engine, has been increasing global carbon emission. Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900-from less than 1000 million metric tons of carbon in 1900 to above 9000 million metric tons in 2011-- about 90 per cent. Economic reality encouraged competition to increase carbon emission to grow profit. So far, regulation has been the sole tool. But within the context of economic reality, regulation failed to rein in carbon emission.
Does the Fourth Industrial Revolution create the possibilities of competition for reducing carbon emission for increasing profit? If it does, it could be our only hope to deal with climate effect to support sustainable growth as well as existence of human civilisation.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is about adding sensing, perception and decision making abilities to machines-often termed as automation, robotics or artificial intelligence-and connecting them to the Internet-coined as Internet of Things (IoT). Such capability addition opens the growing opportunity of delegating many core tasks, requiring cognitive abilities, from human workers to machines. As a result, the erosion of human role in manufacturing has simply accelerated, leading to deindustrialisation in advanced economies. The progression of the Fourth industrialisation also poses threat of premature deindustrialisation in developing nations like Bangladesh, as some of the labour intensive manufacturing jobs, which have been relocated to developing nations, primarily caused by the globalisation trend, are target of automation. Such job loss has projected the progression of the Fourth industrial revolution as a threat to human civilisation. There is no doubt that the progression of the journey of industrial economy to human-free production plants creates many new challenges. Instead of competition to maximise the socially optimal quantity, monopoly emerges as the dominant force dictating the production and consumption. There is no denial that such reality should be dealt with, but certainly not by impeding the progression of this stage of industrialisation.
The addition of intelligence to machines and their connectivity to Internet opens up two opportunities: 1. Remote operation and supervision of machines, and 2. Built-in intelligence increases the effectiveness and efficiency of operations of machines. The first opportunity could be capitalised to reduce the need for transportation of both human and material, which is now contributing to 14 per cent of current emission, resulting in less carbon emission. Similarly, remote supervision of household energy consuming items could lead to reduced household energy foot print. The inclusion of intelligence has the potential to reduce emission in production of electricity and heat, which now contributes to 25 per cent of global carbon emission. Industry and agriculture, contributing to carbon emission by 21 and 24 per cent respectively, have the growing opportunity of benefiting from machine intelligence to consume less materials as well as energy to produce growing outputs to increase profit. among other possibilities, these two opportunities could be capitalised, with the growth of the Fourth industrial revolution, to create the possibilities of profitable competition to reduce emission.
It seems that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will open the possibilities of competition as a vital tool to reduce emission of harmful green house gases to increase profit. Instead of being occupied with regulation, it's time to take advantage from competition powered by the fourth industrial revolution to reverse the trend of climate change. Every nation should bring changes in policies to create possibilities of profitable competition by taking the advantage of the Fourth industrial revolution to reduce emission, causing less harm to the environment, while empowering the private sector to increase production to maximise profit-to support the sustainable growth of wealth creation to meet increasing consumption.
M. Rokonuzzaman, Ph. D, academic, researcher and activist: Technology, Innovation and Policy, is Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Bangladesh. [email protected]
