As usual, this high-management style contains much fashionable vacuity (we should avoid “linear thinking”, it says, which is meaningless however you interpret it), and also a weird kind of imagistic brutality – the “gig economy” companies such as Uber or Taskrabbit are “human cloud platforms”, as though the serfs who work for them are euphoric angels playing harps on a bed of cumulonimbus. To complete the style, just add a heavy dose of tech-utopian boilerplate, such as the claim that “digital technology knows no borders”, which of course it does: witness Facebook’s recent decision to comply with China’s censorship laws so it can operate there.
To be fair, Schwab shows in an appendix that he does know that the idea that “digital technology knows no borders” is simply false, and throughout he is careful to be even-handed about the upsides and downsides of every technology he discusses. Artificial intelligence might be super-useful, or it might constitute “an existential threat to humanity”. Biotechnology might cure all diseases, or it might create a schism of bio-inequality. The overall problem is that this is basically all Schwab does: describing some future development or its opposite and essentially asking: “Is this brilliant? Or is this terrible?” The purchaser of such a book might expect the author to have a reasoned opinion on the matter.
Instead, Schwab offers policy recommendations, which – perhaps by design – are vague enough to be useful to a politician of any stripe. On the future of employment, he allows that “human cloud” workers might find themselves engaged in “an inexorable race to the bottom in a world of unregulated virtual sweatshops”. So what to do? Schwab writes sagely: “The challenge we face is to come up with new forms of social and employment contracts that suit the changing workforce and the evolving nature of work.” Oh, right, got it.
A general opinion is finally expressed right at the end, and it is an admirably humane one, as far as it goes. We should remember, Schwab writes, that “all of these new technologies are first and foremost tools made by people for people”. Indeed, the book climaxes with a rather lovely plea for everyone to work together in a “new cultural renaissance” that apparently will depend on some kind of cosmic spirituality. The fourth industrial revolution might lead to a dehumanising dystopia, Schwab allows soberly. On the other hand, we could use it “to lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a shared sense of destiny”. That would certainly be nice.
Yet this uplifting message is arguably undermined by the implicit politics of the book’s vocabulary. The key term in all this is “adapt” – as in, the alleged necessity for everyone to adapt to the totally new world that technology will create around us. The idea that we all must adapt is seldom challenged, but it is really a veiled update of social Darwinism, according to which the people who survive the coming robot deluge will by definition have been the fittest all along.
The call to adapt, indeed, implies that the changing circumstances Schwab foresees are something like inexorable forces of nature. But of course they aren’t: they will be the results of decisions taken by legislators, regulators and others in power. An alternative idea would be for citizens to engage in and, if necessary, challenge such decisions, rather than meekly adapt to whatever their masters decide the world should be like. That would really be democracy in action, and might even deserve the name of revolution.
,[15] both of which were ghost written by WEF employee Nicholas Davis.
