The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
In 1973, the American sociologist Daniel Bell, in his book, The Coming of the Post Industrial Society predicted that advanced societies would change from being based on manufacturing of goods to ones in which knowledge workers would occupy a central position.
This did happen, but because of the meteoric rise of Big Data, the role of the knowledge worker is in danger of being eclipsed by the widespread adoption of smartphones.
These technologies are changing not only society, but the economic models on which society is based.
Jeremy Rifkin remembers Bell’s book very well: “Think about what has changed, it is amazing,” he says.
Over the last few years Rifkin has been traveling the world, predicting a society orchestrated by an all-encompassing communication system, the Internet of Things. It is also the subject of his latest book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society and The Third Industrial Revolution. Spectrum magazine asked him about it.
Spectrum: We are all familiar with the Second Industrial Revolution, the use of steam power, later internal combustion engines, the beginnings of long-distance communication with the telegraph and telephone, cheap travel, etc. What is different today? We have more sophisticated technology, but don’t we basically operate the same way?
Rifkin: That “general purpose” technology took us through the 20th century, and I really believe that it peaked in July 2008 when crude oil hit US $147 a barrel and purchasing power shut down all over the world. I think that was not just the beginning of the Great Recession, but the beginning of the long sunset of the Second Industrial Revolution. I think it is a 30 to 40 year sunset.
Spectrum: So the Third Industrial Revolution would be a consequence of the cost of energy?
Rifkin: From a thermodynamic point of view, we are continuously borrowing low entropy inputs from the planet—that can be a rare earth, a metallic ore, or a fossil fuel—and at every step of conversion across the value chain we are embedding energy from the planet into a product or service, but we are losing energy in this conversion at every step.
We started the Second Industrial Revolution in 1905 with about 3 percent aggregate efficiency. Aggregate efficiency is the ratio of the potential to do useful work. This means that 97 percent of every conversion experienced during the value chain—‚from marshalling resources, shipping them, storing them, producing them, distributing them, recycling them—in every step 3 percent got into the product and service, and 97 percent was lost. By the 1980s we got up to about 13 percent energy efficiency in the United States, and Japan got up to 22 percent. Nothing has moved since then, so you see how the economists keep wondering why productivity has stalled for 25 years, even with all the innovation. The reason it stalled is that our aggregate efficiency maxed out on the Second Industrial Revolution’s …