Power at the top of the pyramid

It’s not a pretty picture. The World Bank data sets on rate of change in GDP of the world’s pre-eminent capitalist economies in the Western world like the US, the UK and France point to a marginal rise between 2006-10 and 2011-15 and then the curves flatten out. The important dates were in 2008’s last quarter and mid-year 2015.

By the last quarter of 2008, the US, the UK and France were showing negative growth. The creepy, crawly line-graphs rise marginally by 2011 and then they flatten out going forward up to the second quarter of 2015. The sense of gloom and doom are almost universal in the global North.

In those circumstances the world’s high priests of politico-economic influence, who gather annually at picturesque Davos in Switzerland to decide upon humanity’s collective fate, had to find a new message, a new idiom.

Davos WEF conference’s primary mover and shaker, Klaus Schwab, along with the recently re-appointed IMF priestess of all seasons, Christine Lagarde, have discovered that.

They have found the world entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab has actually written a book on it. That is being given free to those who take out an annual subscription of the rather stentorian Foreign Affairs magazine.

Now, the seer of the only Industrial Revolution the world knew till now was Charles Dickens. He wrote about its travails.

When was the second Industrial Revolution, you may ask? Schwab, Lagarde et al say that it was when steam engine was introduced. And the third, when 1960s dropouts — the post-War baby boom generation of the US — Bill Gates and Paul Allen and the like found a meaning for their lives in the zero and one algorithm, the first binary the world came to know.

Around the time Europe was preparing for its first War, soon after steam was moving railways, another American gentleman, Henry Ford, found oil — called ‘rock oil’ to distinguish it initially from other forms edible oils – could drive a small internal combustion engine that could make small box carriages move.

Ford found that it’s worth producing automobiles, as they were called, on commercial assembly lines to revolutionise road travel. He figured out that if provided decent wage to his workers, they could be his first buyers. Thus was born Fordism.

But when Gates, Allen and Co founded simultaneously with the invention of personal computers, the language that could that could run them, the global Left was rightly up in arms. For, the early personal computers called for major re-skilling of those low skilled, white collar job workers who could type, or count cash on mechanical calculators.

A lot of them had to be replaced with younger set, more savvy with the skill of computing. Net-net it worked out, as new jobs were created at a greater number than the jobs lost.

Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, however, talks about ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) embedded in new nano materials — robots as they are called when they take some physical form, can virtually replace humans. Only exceptions will possibly be when humanity decides to go to war, or produce babies.

This AI business is of serious concern. For, the world is still divided into the same one per cent who have 59 per cent of the total wealth of the world, and the remaining 99 per cent having to do with the remaining 41 per cent.

A revolution is already under way in nations like Japan, where the demographics are anti-babymaking — and more geriatric. The CNN has declared that the after a hiatus of three decades, ‘Made in Japan’ is back — and with more bang for the buck.

A society obsessed with cartoon characters, there are even robots that to take the place of a woman companion in congested Tokyo, by the side of a bed. The Japanese are making robots that can create the environs of ‘pillow talk’ sans the trouble of catering to tantrums.

On a serious note, the technological breakthroughs of Schwab’s revolution will cut the jobs of pure white collar office managers — the pillars of the middle class — who could be replaced by robots that not only can wing door-to-door selling wares, but actually strategise how to raise the sales of the wares they are hawking. This is not just ‘bean counting,’ but creative thinking of the temporal level that humans thought was their monopoly.

So what is the upshot of this Aldous Huxley world of the ‘braves?’ The jobs lost and cuts in wage bills shore up the bottom-line the easiest way. Every HR manager of today’s world knows that.

Middle age crises will deepen. Socio-economic processes will be disrupted. The top one per cent will take away the cream, wiping their moustaches on the way. And the bottom 99 per cent will have to pay not just by losing their pay cheques, but also by consuming what these robots that have replaced them to do, thus paying up doubly. The gain is expected in the GDP, which will get concentrated in hands of a few who fund this revolution.

In other words, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will create a fresh set of challenges like all the other capitalist revolutionary regenerations, thus causing more pain. Only be warned; buy Schwab’s book even if it calls for paying for his fat royalty cheque, but create your ‘competitive advantage’ to stave off the coercive pink slip.

Remember, Karl Marx did warn you that capital will over-produce, get into a crisis, create new production relations and produce anew, and the cycle can go on, unless it is disrupted by the silent but seething majority.

The writer is a senior journalist