5IR: Inventing a positive world

Amidst the bewildering advancements and debates surrounding technology, Pranjal Sharma's book offers a peek into the potential benefits of the Fifth Industrial Revolution

The Next New: Navigating the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Author: Pranjal Sharma

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 268

Price: Rs 699

Going by the headlines in news outlets nowadays, it is easy to be bewildered if not frightened by all that is going on in the technology world of our times. Driverless cars are supposed to be taking over from drivers not just for personal cars but also for ride-sharing. Then, there is talk of an automated mass transit market not just for passenger movement, but also goods movement. We are barely getting to have 5G networks and there is talk bubbling up about 6G networks.

This where this book under review can come of use in unravelling some of this bewilderment and see some positive benefits from all this tech activity. As I see it, the author in this book paints a picture about a world that we can choose to invent, that has all the positive things that our world needs to have.

For instance, says the author, in the field of healthcare, a positive focus could be on the “preventive” aspects of healthcare. Nursing robots could, he suggests, take over the heavy workload from nurses by monitoring patient vitals and lifting and transferring patients when needed, artificial intelligence (AI) could be deployed to diagnose X-rays and other medical images apart from lending a hand in making sense of the giant-size data sets that the healthcare industry generates. These are all positive things.

For most of us, the term “Industrial Revolution” conjures up a nightmarish vision of little children being forced to work whole days on spinning or weaving machines in soot-covered factories in places like Manchester. But of late, it has become a way to classify types of technical innovations. Thus, the term First Industrial Revolution means the use of spinning and weaving machines to create low-cost cotton cloth, the Second Industrial Revolution has come to mean creation of steel, chemicals and electricity, the Third Industrial Revolution brought computers, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the one that we are now living through, stands for Cloud computing, AI and the like.

If you insert the term, “Fifth Industrial Revolution” in Google Search you will be redirected to a page titled “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” and that too with a warning, “This article’s factual accuracy is disputed”.  In other words, there is no agreement yet on what makes up the Fourth Industrial Revolution let alone the Fifth.

Keeping such tech argumentation aside for the moment, the author’s concept of a Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) sees three pillars in this new and emerging world, of which one has to do with technological breakthroughs such as AI. The second pillar is a governance system that focuses on values such as safety and social equity, and social inclusion. The third pillar is a focus on climate change and sustainability.

Even the established science of chemistry is going to start focusing on “green chemistry”. As an example, a pair of jeans for its manufacture today, uses up 2,500 gallons of water and every year two billion jeans are manufactured in the world. Work is underway, he says, to make “green jeans” through a process that uses 92 per cent less water and 30 per cent less energy compared to the conventional production process.

The book has many such energising examples, including Indian ones. For example, Hindustan Unilever in its factory near Mumbai where it produces three million units of products such as Surf Excel, Vim and Rin has, using machine learning, reduced water consumption by 31 per cent and lowered greenhouse gas emissions by 54 per cent.

The author points out that these efforts are not just idealistic endeavours but open vast new markets. For instance, he says, the smart manufacturing market, which was $89 million in 2021, is expected to reach $228 billion in 2027. The wireless charging market (for charging electric cars) is expected to grow from $32 million to $1.35 billion in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 65 per cent. Such growth, he says, is “fundamentally changing professional careers and revenue models in every industry”.

The author has earlier written books such as India Automated: How the Fourth Industrial Revolution Transforming India  and Kranti Nation: India and The Fourth Industrial Revolution.  He comes from a print and television media background with experience of over 25 years with organisations like the Times of India Group, India Today Group, CNBC Network 18 and Bloomberg UTV, which perhaps explains how he can explain complex scientific and technological trends in an easy to understand manner.

The reviewer is an internet entrepreneur. He can be reached at ajitb@rediffmail.com