by Klaus Schwab
Militarization of space: While more than half of all satellites are commercial, these orbiting communications devices are increasingly important for military purposes. A new generation of hypersonic “glide” weapons are also poised to enter this domain, increasing the probability that space will play a role in future conflicts and raising concern that current mechanisms to regulate space activities are no longer sufficient.
Wearable devices: They can optimize health and performance under conditions of extreme stress or produce exoskeletons that enhance soldiers’ performance, allowing a human to carry loads of around 90 kg without difficulty.
Additive manufacturing: It will revolutionize supply chains by enabling replacement parts to be manufactured in the field from digitally transmitted designs and locally available materials. It could also enable the development of new kinds of warheads, with greater control of particle size and detonation.
Renewable energy: This enables power to be generated locally, revolutionizing supply chains and enhancing the capacity to print parts on demand in even remote locations.
Nanotechnology: Nano is progressively leading to metamaterials, smart materials which possess properties that do not occur naturally. It will make weaponry better, lighter, more mobile, smarter and more precise, and will ultimately result in systems that can self-replicate and assemble.
Biological weapons: The history of biological warfare is nearly as old as the history of warfare itself, but rapid advances in biotechnology, genetics and genomics are the harbinger of new highly lethal weapons. Airborne designer viruses, engineered superbugs, genetically modified plagues and so on: all these form the basis of potential doomsday scenarios.
Biochemical weapons: As with biological weapons, technological innovation is making the assembly of these weapons almost as easy as a do-it-yourself task. Drones could be employed to deliver them.
Social Media: While digital channels provide opportunities for spreading information and organizing action for good causes, they can also be used to spread malicious content and propaganda and, as with ISIS, employed by extremist groups to recruit and mobilize followers. Young adults are particularly vulnerable, especially if they lack a stable social support network.
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Many of the technologies described in Box F: Emerging Technologies Transforming International Security already exist. As an example, Samsung’s SGR-A1 robots, equipped with two machine guns and a gun with rubber bullets, now man border posts in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. They are, for the moment, controlled by human operators but could, once programmed, identify and engage human targets independently.
Last year, the UK Ministry of Defence and BAE Systems announced the successful test of the Taranis stealth plane, known also as Raptor, which can take off, fly to a given destination and find a set target with little intervention from its operator unless required. There are many such examples.50 They will multiply, and in the process, raise critical questions at the intersection of geopolitics, military strategy and tactics, regulation and ethics.
New frontiers in global security
As stressed several times in this book, we only have a limited sense of the ultimate potential of new technologies and what lies ahead. This is no less the case in the realm of international and domestic security. For each innovation we can think of, there will be a positive application and a possible dark side. While neurotechnologies such as neuroprosthetics are already employed to solve medical problems, in future they could be applied to military purposes. Computer systems attached to brain tissue could enable a paralysed patient to control a robotic arm or leg. The same technology could be used to direct a bionic pilot or soldier. Brain devices designed to treat the conditions of Alzheimer’s disease could be implanted in soldiers to erase memories or create new ones. “It’s not a question of if non-state actors will use some form of neuroscientific techniques or technologies, but when, and which ones they’ll use,” reckons James Giordano, a neuroethicist at Georgetown University Medical Center, “The brain is the next battlespace.”51
The availability and, at times, the unregulated nature of many of these innovations have a further important implication. Current trends suggest a rapid and massive democratization of the capacity to inflict damage on a very large scale, something previously limited to governments and very sophisticated organizations. From 3D-printed weapons to genetic engineering in home laboratories, destructive tools across a range of emerging technologies are becoming more readily available. And with the fusion of technologies, a key theme of this book, unpredictable dynamics inherently surface, challenging existing legal and ethical frameworks.
Towards a more secure world
In the face of these challenges, how do we persuade people to take the security threats from emerging technologies seriously? Even more importantly, can we engender cooperation between the public and private sectors on the global scale to mitigate these threats?
Over the second half of the last century, the fear of nuclear warfare gradually gave way to the relative stability of mutually assured destruction (MAD), and a nuclear taboo seems to have emerged.
If the logic of MAD has worked so far it is because only a limited number of entities possessed the power to destroy each other completely and they balanced each other out. A proliferation of potentially lethal actors, however, could undermine this equilibrium, which was why nuclear states agreed to cooperate to keep the nuclear club small, negotiating the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the late 1960s.
While they disagreed on most other issues, the Soviet Union and the United States understood that their best protection laid in remaining vulnerable to each other. This led to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT), effectively limiting the right to take defensive measures against missile-delivered nuclear weapons. When destructive capacity is no longer limited to a handful of entities with broadly similar resources, tactics and interests in preventing escalation doctrines such as MAD are less relevant.
Driven by the changes heralded by the fourth industrial revolution, could we discover some alternative equilibrium that analogously turns vulnerability into stability and security? Actors with very different perspectives and interests need to be able to find some kind of modus vivendi and cooperate in order to avoid negative proliferation.
Concerned stakeholders must cooperate to create legally binding frameworks as well as self-imposed peer-based norms, ethical standards and mechanisms to control potentially damaging emerging technologies, preferably without impeding the capacity of research to deliver innovation and economic growth.
International treaties will surely be needed, but I am concerned that regulators in this field will find themselves running behind technological advances, due to their speed and multifaceted impact. Hence, conversations among educators and developers about the ethical standards that should apply to emerging technologies of the fourth industrial revolution are urgently needed to establish common ethical guidelines and embed them in society and culture. With governments and government based structures, lagging behind in the regulatory space, it may actually be up to the private sector and non-state actors to take the lead.
The development of new warfare technologies is, understandably, taking place in a relatively isolated sphere. One concern I have, however, is the potential retreat of other sectors, such as gene-based medicine and research, into isolated, highly-specialized spheres, thereby lowering our collective ability to discuss, understand and manage both challenges and opportunities.
3.4 Society
Scientific advancement, commercialization and the diffusion of innovation are social processes that unfold as people develop and exchange ideas, values, interests and social norms in a variety of contexts. This makes it hard to discern the full societal impact of new technological systems: there are many intertwined components that comprise our societies and many innovations that are in some way co-produced by them.
The big challenge for most societies
will be how to absorb and accommodate the new modernity while still embracing the nourishing aspects of our traditional value systems. The fourth industrial revolution, which tests so many of our fundamental assumptions, may exacerbate the tensions which exist between deeply religious societies defending their fundamental values and those whose beliefs are shaped by a more secular worldview. The greatest danger to global cooperation and stability may come from radical groups fighting progress with extreme, ideologically motivated violence.
As sociologist Manuel Castells, professor of communication technology and society at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, has noted: “In all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects”.52 Being overwhelmed due to ignorance is precisely what we should avoid, particularly when it comes to how the many diverse communities that comprise modern society form, develop and relate to one another.
The previous discussion about the different impacts of the fourth industrial revolution on the economy, business, geopolitics and international security, regions and cities makes it clear that the new technological revolution will have multiple influences on society. In the next section, I will explore two of the most important drivers of change – how the potential for rising inequality puts pressure on the middle class, and how the integration of digital media is changing how communities form and relate to one another.
3.4.1 Inequality and the middle class
The discussion on economic and business impacts highlighted a number of different structural shifts which have contributed to rising inequality to date, and which may be further exacerbated as the fourth industrial revolution unfolds. Robots and algorithms increasingly substitute capital for labour, while investing (or more precisely, building a business in the digital economy) becomes less capital intensive. Labour markets, meanwhile, are becoming biased towards a limited range of technical skill sets, and globally connected digital platforms and marketplaces are granting outsized rewards to a small number of “stars”. As all these trends happen, the winners will be those who are able to participate fully in innovation-driven ecosystems by providing new ideas, business models, products and services, rather than those who can offer only low-skilled labour or ordinary capital.
These dynamics are why technology is regarded as one of the main reasons incomes have stagnated, or even decreased, for a majority of the population in high-income countries. Today, the world is very unequal indeed. According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015, half of all assets around the world are now controlled by the richest 1% of the global population, while “the lower half of the global population collectively own less than 1% of global wealth”.53 The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that the average income of the richest 10% of the population in OECD countries is approximately nine times that of the poorest 10%.54 Further, inequality within most countries is rising, even in those that have experienced rapid growth across all income groups and dramatic drops in the number of people living in poverty. China’s Gini Index, for example, rose from approximately 30 in the 1980s to over 45 by 2010.55
Rising inequality is more than an economic phenomenon of some concern – it is a major challenge for societies. In their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put forward data indicating that unequal societies tend to be more violent, have higher numbers of people in prison, experience greater levels of mental illness and obesity, and have lower life expectancies and lower levels of trust. The corollary, they found, is that, after controlling for average incomes, more equal societies have higher levels of child well-being, lower levels of stress and drug use, and lower infant mortality.56 Other researchers have found that higher levels of inequality increase segregation and reduce educational outcomes for children and young adults.57
While the empirical data are less certain, there are also widespread fears that higher levels of inequality lead to higher levels of social unrest. Among the 29 global risks and 13 global trends identified in the Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016, the strongest interconnections occur between rising income disparity, unemployment or underemployment and profound social instability. As discussed further below, a world of greater connectivity and higher expectations can create significant social risks if populations feel they have no chance of attaining any level of prosperity or meaning in their lives.
Today, a middle-class job no longer guarantees a middle-class lifestyle, and over the past 20 years, the four traditional attributes of middle-class status (education, health, pensions and house ownership) have performed worse than inflation. In the US and the UK, education is now priced as a luxury. A winner-takes-all market economy, to which the middle-class has increasingly limited access, may percolate into democratic malaise and dereliction which compound social challenges.
3.4.2 Community
From a broad societal standpoint, one of the greatest (and most observable) effects of digitization is the emergence of the “me-centred” society – a process of individuation and emergence of new forms of belonging and community. Contrary to the past, the notion of belonging to a community today is more defined by personal projects and individual values and interests rather than by space (the local community), work and family.
New forms of digital media, which form a core component of the fourth industrial revolution, are increasingly driving our individual and collective framing of society and community. Digital media is connecting people one-to-one and one-to-many in entirely new ways, enabling users to maintain friendships across time and distance, creating new interest groups and enabling those who are socially or physically isolated to connect with like-minded people. The high availability, low costs and geographically neutral aspects of digital media also enable greater interaction across social, economic, cultural, political, religious and ideological boundaries.
Access to online digital media creates substantial benefits for many. Beyond its role in providing information (for example, refugees fleeing Syria use Google Maps and Facebook groups not only to plan travel routes but also to avoid being exploited by human traffickers58), it also provides opportunities for individuals to have a voice and participate in civic debate and decision-making.
Unfortunately, while the fourth industrial revolution empowers citizens, it can also be used to act against their interests. The Forum’s Global Risks Report 2016 describes the phenomenon of the “(dis)empowered citizen”, whereby individuals and communities are simultaneously empowered and excluded by the use of emerging technologies by governments, companies and interest groups (see Box G: The (Dis)empowered Citizen).
The democratic power of digital media means it can also be used by non-state actors, particularly communities with harmful intentions to spread propaganda and to mobilize followers in favour of extremist causes, as has been seen recently with the rise of Da’esh and other social-media-savvy terrorist organizations.
There is the danger that the dynamics of sharing that typifies social media use can skew decision-making and pose risks to civil society. Counter-intuitively, the fact that there is so much media available through digital channels can mean that an individual’s news sources become narrowed and polarised into what MIT clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology, calls a “spiral of silence”. This matters because what we read, share and see in the context of social media shapes our political and civic decisions.
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Box G: The (Dis)empowered Citizen
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The term “(dis)empowered citizen” describes the dynamic emerging from the interplay of two trends: one empowering, one disempowering. Individuals feel empowered by changes in technology that make it easier for them to gather information, communicate and organize, and are experien
cing new ways to participate in civic life. At the same time, individuals, civil society groups, social movements and local communities feel increasingly excluded from meaningful participation in traditional decision-making processes, including voting and elections, and disempowered in terms of their ability to influence and be heard by the dominant institutions and sources of power in national and regional governance.
At its most extreme, there is the very real danger that governments might employ combinations of technologies to suppress or oppress actions of civil society organizations and groups of individuals who seek to create transparency around the activities of governments and businesses and promote change. In many countries around the world there is evidence that the space for civil society is shrinking as governments promote legislation and other policies which restrict the independence of civil society groups and restrict their activities. The tools of the fourth industrial revolution enable new forms of surveillance and other means of control that run counter to healthy, open societies.
Source: Global Risks Report 2016, World Economic Forum
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As an example, a study of the impact of get-out-the-vote messages on Facebook found that they “increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes.”59 This research highlights the power that digital media platforms have in selecting and promoting the media we consume online. It also indicates the opportunity for online technologies to blend traditional forms of civic engagement (such as voting for local, regional or national representatives) with innovative ways to give citizens more direct influence over decisions that affect their communities.