Silicon Valley leaders tell us that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will bring untold benefits. They say it is already underway and accelerating, powered by artificial intelligence and other technologies, and warn that we will be left eating dust if we don’t get with the programme.
This is a general-purpose revolution. Its leaders and their boosters promise that it will help societies to tackle climate change, address poverty and inequality, and stem the dramatic loss of biodiversity. The revolution might play out like that. Or it might not.
Consider the most recent digital revolution, which brought us Google, Facebook and Twitter, and changed the way information flows around the world. At first, the ability to connect to others online, and to create and share digital content seamlessly through ever-growing virtual social networks, seemed straightforwardly…
