The big buzz at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this year is about the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, described by the founder and executive chairman of WEF, Klaus Schwab, as a “technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another”.
The fourth industrial revolution is conceptualised as an upgrade on the third revolution — and is marked by a fusion of technologies straddling the physical, digital and biological worlds. In a paper on The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond, Schwab says that three things about the ongoing transformation mark it out as a new phase rather than a prolongation of the current revolution — velocity, scope, and systems impact. The speed of change is utterly unprecedented, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country, and it heralds “the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance”.
Case of India:-
In 1750 AD, India’s share of global industrial output was 25%; by 1900, this had declined to 2%. The reasons were the chaos triggered by the decline of the Mughal empire, colonization by Britain and the first industrial revolution.
Like China, India missed out on the industrial revolution which saw the invention of the steam engine and powered looms and unleashed a productivity revolution. As a result, our handloom industry was decimated; India became deindustrialized and fell into abject poverty. China has re-industrialized with a vengeance, while India is still struggling to catch up.
This bit of history is more relevant than ever. The industrial revolution was a massive disruption. Countries that drove it or embraced it went from rags to riches, while those that missed out went from riches to rags.
Today, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution that promises to be profoundly more disruptive. The question is whether India is positioning itself to ride this tidal wave or whether once again we will be swept away by it.
The world is at the beginning of a revolution where there are huge advances in genomics, artificial intelligence, materials and manufacturing technologies. Machines are closing in on human ability with astonishing speed. Robots are replacing humans not just on factory floors but in homes too. Reusable rockets promise to make space travel and colonies on Mars and the moon a reality.
Possibly in our own lifetime, we will reach a point called “singularity” where machines become as smart as humans and then keep getting smarter. We will soon be able to edit genes to create favourable traits and new life forms. Science fiction is becoming reality.
As with previous industrial revolutions, new technologies will create new jobs and simultaneously destroy many old ones. The rise of machines, from robots to smart software, threatens to impact not just low-skilled factory workers, but everyone including software engineers, stock traders and taxi drivers.
Even chief executive officers are not exempt; a recent McKinsey study estimates that half the tasks done by CXOs can be automated. While in the long run, it is possible that more jobs will be created than are destroyed; in the medium term, the opposite will be true.
An Oxford study estimates that 47% of the jobs in the US, 69% of the jobs in India and 77% of the jobs in China will not exist in 25 years. This is not conjecture. China’s factories are adding robots faster than they are hiring people. India’s information technology sector is already witnessing jobless growth and total employment may have peaked.
The really vital question is this. While lots of people will lose their jobs all over the world, where will the new jobs be?
Today, much of the world’s fundamental research and innovation is happening in the US. Disruption is being driven very disproportionately by American companies such as Google, Amazon, Tesla, Illumina or First Solar.
The chances are quite high therefore that the bulk of the new jobs will be created in the US. This is important. In the first industrial revolution, Britain and Europe were able to export the job losses created by machinery to colonies such as India. Productivity growth and trade eventually resulted in enormous job and wealth creation in Europe even as it resulted in famine and devastation in India, China and Africa.
Let us assume that all the new developments will create five new high-end jobs and destroy 10. Current trends would suggest two of these will be in the US, two in China and perhaps one in Europe. If this is true, do countries like India once again become colonies? Not of countries perhaps but of companies such as Google, Pfizer or Monsanto? Do we simply become markets for innovations developed elsewhere? Will the vast majority of our people then live on subsistence-wage service jobs? Is India doomed to remain a low-middle-income country?
India is already facing a severe jobs crisis. The consequences of the fourth industrial revolution are truly frightening unless, of course, we learn to ride this wave. But what exactly does that take?
People often wistfully wonder whether India will have its own Microsoft or Google. This is exactly like wondering when we will win an Olympic gold medal. If we win a gold medal, it will be because of a freak event—a person of extraordinary ability and tenacity—not because of the system.
What allowed Apple, Microsoft and Google to emerge is fundamental scientific research at world-class corporate labs such as Xerox PARC or Bell Labs and universities such as Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The US government has played a vital role in underwriting high-risk, long-term research projects through institutions such as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation; virtually all the technology in the iPhone was funded this way.
Sensible immigration policies attracted the brightest minds from India, China, Russia and Hungary to these labs. Finally, a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem allowed the commercialization of research.
The contrast could not be more stark. There is almost no understanding or discourse on these matters in India; our policymakers, scientists and business leaders are firmly stuck in the old paradigm.
Not one Indian university is ranked in the global top 300. It is hard to think of a single Indian company that is at the leading edge of any of the disciplines that matter to the future. To do cutting-edge work in most scientific and engineering disciplines, our finest minds have either to join the research and development centre of a multinational company or leave the country. Government funding for science-based technology research has been minuscule. It is no wonder that all our entrepreneurial activity is restricted to me-too businesses rather that game-changing ideas.
The fourth industrial revolution simultaneously poses the biggest opportunity and the largest threat to a prosperous future. India cannot afford to squander this moment. What we need urgently is a national mission like the Apollo space programme.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.