Digital Pathology

History is interesting. On the one hand, we are told that it is bunk. On the other that if we fail to pay attention to its’ lessons we are doomed to repeat them.

Of course, both of these things are true. As Fernand Braudel said in another context “Who would not be bewildered by the hundredth debate on this topic?” We can, it seems be blinded as much by the past as by the future.

One much favoured trope currently available across the Internet is that we are in the middle of Industrial Revolution 4.0. But what is it? Perhaps history can tell us.

The significance of the original Industrial Revolution as a critical period of transition and redistribution in human history can hardly be overstated. Yet there remains little agreement on even the most basic issues. Was there only one industrial revolution, or several? Was the Industrial Revolution the dawn of the capitalist era, or actually its high noon? What were the basic causative forces? Why was England (Britain after 1707) the first nation to experience an industrial revolution? And more to the point, what were the real outcomes of this revolution?

Still further, what subsequent problems did these outcomes breed, and can we avoid them in IR4.0?

I am not, of course, talking about the current concerns regarding the potential jobs submerged in a rising tide of automation. This debate is interesting and amusing-often portrayed within varying scenarios as being a result of advances in Artificial Intelligence a “billion times smarter than humans. Of course, it could equally be caused by an anticipatory failure in skills specification and delivery.

When we consider the expansion of industry and technology from the latter half of the eighteenth century we can see it treated as a more or less direct response to new opportunities afforded by the dramatic expansion of commerce and demographic changes across Western

Europe.

We might see Industrial Revolution 4.0 as being the result of the failure of globalisation and the petrification of existing markets leading to high risk strategies such as those employed by the financial services industry which resulted in the crash of 2008. This has led to a need for -massive “strategic cost reduction” across many industries and in many markets. This might also be a significant factor in the tide of cheap money and the increasingly wild bets on new technology.

Perhaps the most significant lesson we can learn when we start talking about Industrial Revolution 4.0 is the problems Industrial Revolution 1.0 — urbanisation, labour flexibility, an empowered workforce with skills that shifted the social balance of power — slightly, social problems from the breakdown of community and family, climate change and many more, brought to the human race. Problems that we are often only — almost three centuries later- beginning to take seriously.

Now I am not suggesting that we try to stop IR4.0, because we can’t

Just that we try to anticipate the problems and design the systems with those problems in mind. Jist that we pay as much attention to the past as we do to the future?