Bangladesh at the advent of the fourth industrial revolution

Over the years human civilization has progressed through revolutionary changes. The first Industrial Revolution began in the middle of the 18th century with the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomer. Then comes the second Industrial Revolution, we witnessed a way to mass-produce electricity-based products. The third revolution bombarded us with a wave of digitalization and we encounter computer and knowledge based education. We are still experiencing the boons of this revolution. Now, it is time for fourth industrial revolution.

However, Bangladesh is now globally in the threshold of becoming a dynamic middle income country with promising productivity.  There are enormous promising signs of future wonder of the global order and Bangladesh is in the middle. We as educators, innovators and learners of the future vision with science and technology stand to ponder on the structure of our being in that emerging world. The preponderance of the looming future with its promises and uncertainties recalls what poet Byron rhymed: "In the shores of this wide world I stand and think; till love and fame to nothingness do sink".

Now the question is what would be desired for the emergent age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Indeed, it is obvious that science, technology and society all face us with daunting challenges. These are of awe and wonder in the universe of splendour and surprise, and yearning to acquire knowledge and sustainability. What then is that which we will be seeking in a reign of complexity even as we will be jolted up from a mix of the unshakeable old to the looming new?

What is that we will be seeking in such a surprising new age of wonder as we still cherish the unshakeable past? Yes mankind has made striding sacrifices during the First Great Industrial Revolution  of 1760-1840.This was when the Steam Engine and the use of iron and steel in production replaced agriculture by industry in Europe and cast its imitative shadows on the globe. Yet as we reflect on that duration of the acquisitive age, history tells of the material gains and the human losses by the rise of mercantilist capitalism and the deprivation of the masses. Such were the indelible marks of the European Industrial Revolution. Then there was the Eastern World as resource hinterland that fuelled such a contradictory social and scientific situation of scathing capitalist order of acquisitive ownership in the name of science and technology. The inner conscience of the First Industrial Revolution was fired bya scale of thought that legitimated deprivation in the name of Industrial Revolution. Tawney writes inscrutably about the dark spells of this age of Acquisitive Society.

The Second Industrial Revolution started around 1870. It was marked by a greater industrial and technological impetus given to economic growth by the advent of new sources of energy, electricity, gas and oil. Besides this, the advancement of means of communication such as the combustion engine triggered a heightened momentum to industrial growth. "All these inventions were made possible by centralizing research on capital structure around an economic and industrial model based on new 'large factories' and the organizational models of production as envisioned by Taylor and Ford."  Yet in the face of these transformations we find the developing world was treated as a resource hinterland for the economic growth and industrial advancement of England in particular and Europe in general. The political economy of energy capitalization as resource was the cause of a debilitating inequality and social backwardness of the Middle East. It marked the divide between the rulers and the ruled, between a traditional model of self-sufficiency and the intensification of Eurocentric world-system. Such was the politico-economiclegacy of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The Third Industrial revolution started around 1969. It was powered by mass communication via the electronic world media. The resulting emergence of microprocessors and commercialization of nuclear energy though contributing to the deepening growth and success of industry based on automation, was still in question regarding the western world-system of globalization. Trade, economic growth and the surge of wealth among innovators riveted. Globalization paved the way to a pace of globally unequal control, distribution and ownership of resources. Industrial degradation of the ecological future of an otherwise sustainable human planet resulted.  A social worldview of a new economy Beyond Globalization as Hazel Henderson writes on, and so much invoked in social consciousness, proved to be distanced by the dinning alarmof Robert Heilbroner's lament, 'Is there hope for man?'.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is now in its offing to engulf the scientific, technological, industrial and social future of a complex age. 4IR marks the present and emergent age of complexity born of an unsettling interrelationship between real time phenomena and its virtual representation. Thereby, Big Data Analytics will be based on the transmission of large systems of analytical features by way of soft-mechanisms and artificial analogues mapped into quantitative fields of knowledge. This transformation will bestow clean and fast technology in the absence of a competition by industry for physical resources as of energy. An example of such a media of scientific empowerment for the benefit of industry, commerce and technological innovation is the Cloud. On the other side of Big Data Analytics is the penetration of privacy by data invasion.

Most powerfully and surely the scientific historiography charted the evolution of the four industrial revolutions and will thus continue in our rapidly creative winds of change. In this regard the scientific and technological foundations of such creative change are necessarily marked by the evolutionary flowering of knowledge for disentangling the complexity of virtual existence in the human and physical world futures. This ensemble is a holistic one. So how are the underlying evolutionary epistemologies of the four industrial revolutions shaped, formed, and charted by the intrinsic causality between scientific thought and the industrial epochs? Indeed, Albert Einstein wrote to his friend Neils Bohr that, science without epistemology is muddle headed. Thereby, the extension of scientific thought by its evolutionary epistemology into technology and industrial revolution is inextricably embedded in the sustained momentum of thought, theory, practice, and sustainability.

Thomas Kuhn as historiographer of University of Chicago and architect of the Vienna Circle on Unity of the Sciences referred to such a socio-scientific evolutionary epistemic model as the Structure of Scientific Revolution.  Science, technology, industry and society thus evolve simultaneously within and through the following sequencing: From pre-normal science to normal science to paradigm shift, and finally into Scientific Revolution. This last category is a burst of non-cumulative experience by socio-scientific search and discovery of multidisciplinary methodology. It will mark the domain of socio-scientific worldview in 4IR and beyond.

What then is the worldview of such a way of embedding scientific episteme into the sustainability concept of meaningful industrial revolution? In this process of continuously generating and applying knowledge in the interfacing fields of transdisciplinarity, multidisciplinary methodology uniquely enlightens the common scientific, industrial, and social common contract for the sustainable wellbeing of the entire human ecological order. Sustainability is thus born out of the regenerative evolutionary learning dynamics of wellbeing based on the defining inter-causal variables that continuously interact, integrateand evolve in the consciously inspired transdisciplinarity caused by inter-systemic learning and unity of being and becoming as Martin Heidegger referred to it.

In conclusion, on the eve of fourth industrial revolution we reflect on the near future of Bangladesh in the framework of the multidisciplinary methodology.  This can be acquired by the national science and technology policy for total wellbeing. This quest ought to before a socio-scientific development model. It is substantively different from the separable and individualistic perception that treats each of the scientific, technological, industrial, social and economic sub-systems individually. Thus for example, the complementary methodological outlook of multidisciplinary holism in national science, technology, industrial, and development future for Bangladesh as a maturing developing and conscious nation, must not allow for competition between economic growth and wellbeing one against another.

Applications of multidisciplinary methodology across science, technology and society are legion. Yet a critical area of its impact emanating from national science and technology policy with human resource development in an ethical economic environment will be the development of microenterprises. The interdependent and complementary outlook of multidisciplinarity ought to orientate such a socio-scientific development policy towards the formation of a sharing economy. Such is the model of holistic development promoted by Chan and Mauborgne in their Blue Ocean Strategy. Such a strategy rivals the old competition model of the Red Ocean Strategy. It is the latter one now being taught to students of archaic economic theory as the dissociative science of social Darwinism.

Multidisciplinary methodology of Bangladesh national science, technology, social and economic development policy ought to establish and sustain itself by the interdependent multidisciplinary outlook of the total socio-scientific worldview. Such a vista of consciousness can indeed frame the maturing worldview of Bangladesh as a nation to enjoy the holistic benefits of 4IR within the multidisciplinary model of knowledge society and its sustainability in space and time.

The writer is a Professor and
Dean, Faculty of Business Administration, University of Science and Technology Chittagong