This week I want to introduce a series of posts on what has become known as the 4th industrial revolution.  Much of what I discuss on this website relates to personal change, goal setting, planning and futurology (the study of trying to understand and predict the future). This website and my books and courses look at how to set better goals and how to achieve goals and the psychological pitfalls to achieving goals such as the planning fallacy or motivated reasoning which was the subject of a recent post.  I also focus on how to use self-hypnosis to programme our minds for success.  All of this is future orientated at an individual level but what will our collective future look like?

The 4th Industrial Revolution

According to the World Economic Forum we are now at the beginning of a new age of industrialisation which has become known as the 4th industrial revolution.  This is the age of technologies such as mobile super-computing (yes that smartphone in your pocket is a super-computer ).  We now have intelligent robots, self-driving cars, flying cars,  neuro-technological brain enhancements and genetic editing to name a few.  The evidence of dramatic change in a whole range of technologies is all around us.  Technology is changing at exponential speed. Take for example computer processing power which has been doubling every 18 months or so.  This is because scientists are learning how to pack more and more transistors into a smaller space. This rapid doubling of computer processing power is called Moore’s Law after the famous co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore.  In fact our ever faster computers are based on a new branch of science called nanotechnology.  Nanotechnology operates at the nanoscale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometers (a nanometer is a hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair!).  The features of a semi-conductor chip today are 7nm (about 3 DNA strands stacked side by side).

The 4th Industrial Revolution and Change

The big question is what changes are rapidly advancing technologies bringing about in our individual lives and in society and how do we prepare for and deal with these changes?  What are the skills that we and our children will need for the jobs of tomorrow?  I recently attended my sons graduation from secondary school (high school) here in Ireland.  During the graduation speeches the audience were reminded that many of the students present will work at jobs and in industries that have not even been invented yet!  How do we therefore teach our children to prepare for a future that does not exist yet?  These are the questions and issues that I want to explore in coming posts.

In next weeks post I will begin looking at the type of skills we need to start preparing for the jobs of tomorrow even if we don’t know yet what those jobs will be.

Best wishes,

Tom