The 4th Industrial Revolution, the 5G Networks and the Technological War

The 4^th Industrial Revolution is at the gates of the societies of developed countries. The 5^th generation mobile networks or 5g will cause giant jumps of progress in wireless technology and will change people’s lives fundamentally. The battle between the US and China through the trade war and the blockade of Huawei-the Chinese telecom giant-from the American market is part of this technological-geopolitical war that has erupted for the control of the 5^th generation cellular telephony networks.

Although this new technological Cold War continues these geopolitical conflicts will have a huge impact on the governments and companies of the developed world.

by Thanos S. Chonthrogiannis-https://www.liberalglobe.com

The 4^th Industrial Revolution and how it will change people’s lives

The 4^th Industrial Revolution will fundamentally change everything in people’s lives. Computers will cease to be of digital type and will now be of quantum type.

In agricultural production the farmers together with seeds will be placed and microchips in order to control the entire cultivation process by defining and when will be the appropriate time for each work in the process of agricultural production.

Factories, houses, household appliances, autonomous cars, ships, drones, and arsenals of each type can be remotely controlled by giving each time the necessary orders per case.

In addition, there will be no permanence at work, but the work will be auctioned on the internet and projects will be undertaken by all those who have the necessary skills, skills and specifications for each project.

The transactions will cease to have mediators of any kind for the execution of either the banking sector or any government agencies. All these technological leaps mean a loss of a huge number of jobs due to changes in the way we knew the nature of work to date.

People and, in general, the citizen of the 4^th Industrial Revolution will live simultaneously in three different but interrelated and dependent levels of reality. He will live in physical reality, in virtual reality and in digital reality.

He will be able to work, live, communicate through whatever reality he chooses, living through these realities that he will have chosen to make, and he will be the one who chooses when and how he will come out from these realities in order to perform his daily biological living needs.

Perhaps we can reach levels where the citizen cannot distinguish virtual and digital reality from physical reality, because technology and real life will be interrelated.

He’s going to walk down the street and with the special glasses he’ll be looking at all the information he needs to know in front of his eyes. Either the data and information that he needs to know relate to people who walk around him or they concern a monument, a company building, or he watches a game of basketball on the field.

All this assumes that all this information and data are found on the internet and in the new type of virtual social networks and that the user will be connected to them.

All these digital entities-the new types of networks-are made up of both people and computer systems that use artificial intelligence. The result will be the different identities that a digital entity can have that will annihilate any existing social barriers, sensations, ideas that have always been mediated between people’s sociality.

The 4^th Industrial Revolution is based on eight major new technologies. That is, blockchain, drones, internet, robotics, artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, maximized intelligence, 3d printing, altering and fundamentally changing the ways of human thought.

In short, the 4^th Industrial Revolution is called the combination of cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Systems.

The moral dilemma that emerges is whether man and the citizen in general ensure that all this multitude of information that concerns him as an individual and personality, whether in digital or virtual and physical reality will not be used unknowingly and against him to discriminate and exclusions of any type against him.

If until today social networks are used to express their users all kinds of emotions (joy, anger, rage, sadness, etc.) anonymously and hidden behind a digital name and always to people who have never met them in own, then these three new interrelated manifestations of reality (digital, virtual, real) will launch to an exponential extent these expressed emotions creating polarization situations and extremes.

Human expression of all kinds will have the seeds of an extreme behavior and violence when conditions allow.

The 4^th Industrial Revolution will make the world borderless, since communication will be the basis of this world and not the morals, customs and language that characterizes the citizens of a country.

The communication technology of the 4^th Industrial Revolution will “flatten” the embankment of language that until fifteen years ago was the main obstacle to a world without frontiers.

This ability to communicate and change the nature of work globally will release the centrifugal forces of concentration of masses in centers, giving the possibility of decentralization to a significant percentage of populations, since it will not matter where someone lives and works.

That is, if he works in Metropolis, town, village etc. Because he will be able to work from his own space, where he lives, without certain hours, using his time as he pleases.

The work will be asked to be attributed each time to different project stages, where each stage of the project will be auctioned into an increasingly global competitive environment.

Those who possess the capacities and the appropriate specifications, committing to deliver the work they will undertake in the shortest delivery time combined with the most advantageous price will undertake and the auctioned each time work.

Essentially, the 4^th Industrial Revolution will change the content and way of work, production, goodwill because the work will be transformed from collective type that was until yesterday in individual-centric type, with work-whether intellectual, digital or manual-to remain on the worker’s property.

Direct consequences of this finding are the fact that trade union movements and as we have known so far will cease to exist. All kinds of employee collectives will now have to do with the defense of individual rights in these new digital, virtual and real worlds.

Another consequence is the drastic cutting of jobs in industries such as industry, agriculture, banking, social services, public services and more.

Quantum computers will perform calculations at terrifying speeds while considering many expressions of probability to give the best possible result. These speeds in calculations will provide the necessary solutions that today’s computers fail to offer. This means even greater job losses at global level.

The challenges of the changes brought about by the 4^th Industrial Revolution

The challenges of the changes brought about by the 4^th Industrial Revolution are not just for citizens at an individual level and how they will adapt to these new upcoming changes. The same and more serious challenges are being faced by the Governments of the countries themselves and by companies.

Certainly, for governments and more generally for the political systems the greatest challenge will be how they manage to re-educate and adapt the millions of workers who will lose their jobs in all sectors of the economy (Failure in this sector translates into enormous political costs).

There will certainly be a need for a combination of solutions for the better retraining of all these people-workers which should take into account the potential sciences, the needs of the market, the social and employment adjustment, the best possible psychology for reintegration, having primarily taken into account all of the personal life and work experience of all those people who will lose their jobs.

An equally important challenge for governments and companies is how they will manage to organize, control and run the new world created by the communication technology that will bring the 4^th Industrial Revolution. A world without frontiers, a world where developments will be taken away from the will of government and corporate decision-making centers.

The technological war for the control of the 4^th Industrial Revolution

At this point, the battle for the control of the 5^th generation mobile telephony networks will be introduced, through which the control of all these changes will be brought about by the 4^th Industrial Revolution.

The battle for the control of the 5G, is the new Cold War between the US and China, who apart from the commercial war between them and the blockade of Huawei by the American telecom market, is the new global geopolitical issue and we are still at the beginning of this war.  It has preceded strict censorship from China to Google, Amazon, Facebook, while US security agencies used to spy on Huawei.

The next episodes of this “war” will depend on the position and actions that the potential “players”-block on this geopolitical chessboard will take. The “players”-blocks on this chessboard are the US and their allies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan) and on the other hand are China and Russia. The EU has not yet taken a stand on this dispute, although the whole issue is its own telecoms market which in the best-case scenario, this EU market is worth more than €200billion. 

If, for example, US President Donald Trump acts on his threat to complete the veto against Huawei, It also imposes the remaining aforementioned duties, i.e. 25% and the remaining Chinese imports worth $300 billion, then China will likely to react, with a high probability of making its threat to imposing an embargo on exports of rare earths which are extremely necessary in all these technologies.

The reader who wants to know what rare earths mean and how China can use its global positioning strategy to influence the global market and development should read our analysis entitled “Global Recession, Trade War and Rare Earths” posted on 13/06/2019, category: economics in liberalglobe.com.

In such a case of upgrading the tension:

1. The EU and the West in general should look for alternatives to mining and processing rare earths but also to avoid the sanctions from Huawei’s access to the EU 5G market.

2. If the EU follows the US and excludes Huawei-a technological pioneer in the 5G networks-it will delay the growth of 5G in the EU at least two years.

3. The US in response to China’s embargo on rare earth exports that will result in drastically increasing the prices of products with a total commercial value of $6-$7 trillion and causing a global recession, are likely to lead to decisions-extremes. To demand and enforce the total exclusion of Chinese products into western markets.

Our proposal is that things should never reach this point. There should be cooperation on both sides-blocks, taking each side into account the security concerns that will likely be expressed by proposing and solutions that are mutually acceptable to both sides accompanied by tangible guarantees which will reassure the ‘wants’ of each side. Through sincere cooperation on both sides they must find a mutually acceptable solution that will give way to the impasse.

Thanos S. Chonthrogiannis

The law of intellectual property is prohibited in any way unlawful use/appropriation of this article, with heavy civil and criminal penalties for the infringer. e