Society 4.1: What's coming after the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
An initial reflection on Society 5.0 Ethics: A Festival of Ideas, a two-day speculative event hosted at RMIT University.
This week I attended Society 5.0 Ethics: A Festival of Ideas, a two-day event hosted by RMIT University and Utrecht University. It first caught my eye because I’ve just started to read and hear about “Industry 5.0”, a vision of technological change proposed to displace the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (often 4IR).
The idea: a fifth wave of change in the way human society is organised. We went from steam powered mechanisation, to mass production via electricity, then to information technology and the emergence of the internet. The fourth wave made ubiquitous digital connectivity and the vast exchange of digital data.
And now, so the proposal goes, a fifth wave looms over our society, one which will both rise forward and curl back around to remind us that technology is a partner, not a successor, to humanity. “Industry 5.0” is therefore a model of human-centrism in technological progress, embedding ethics and purpose.
The conference focused not on industry but on society in this fifth wave. Although “Society 5.0” uses a different progress counter (from hunter-gathering, rather than from mechanisation) it draws on the same essential notion of waves of technological progress, implying that the fifth wave is the one now rolling in.
Version controlling the future
In her keynote speech, Laureate Professor Sarah Pink of Monash University characterised “Society 5.0” as a representational device, suggesting that it can be viewed as a sort of commodity: a labelled and quantified unit describing a particular model of the future. While each of the preceding revolutions or ages were designated reflectively (given in the present to describe the past), 5.0 now attempts to look forward into what age we are entering.
Pink explained that because speculating on futures is so inevitably uncertain, the formalisation of models and definitions (like Society 5.0, or as she also suggested, like Net Zero 2050) offers the appearance of control over this uncertainty — over which future is coming.
It was in this moment during her presentation that I began mentally computing the implications of how this concept had been quantified: as 5.0, an integer. This number implies that society has undergone a specific number of sufficiently culture-altering megachanges in the past, and that another is coming. It also implies that the periods between each one are discrete and clearly distinct from one another. It suggests a linear view of time in which years accumulate and progress goes only forward. (The “curling back around” image I used earlier to describe a “fifth wave” doesn’t fit this model.)
And, of course, 5.0 suggests a major new version.
What would precipitate a major new version? In document control, this might be a full revision due to a legislative change. In technology it might denote the release of a different model whose functions and features are changed. Does Society 5.0, as we hear it described, present a sufficiently different model to what has been characterised as 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Leaving aside the problems with different rates of progression, disparate values across different societies, and the simultaneity of ways of living (agriculture and mechanisation continue to co-exist with big data analytics), the trouble with 5.0 discourse is that none of it represents a meaningful step change from 4.0. It still resides in a world of cloud computing, big data and automation. There has been no AI revolution: we are still using big data to perform the same small tasks.
Perhaps, then, if we wish to define a meaningful future commodity — a 5.0 we can get behind and move toward — we need both radical intentionality and a willingness to work incrementally, acknowledging that not every step will be a “giant leap”. It’s not possible to pull the society we have out by the roots and plant a new one.
To talk about 5.0, then, do we need to first talk about 4.1?
And what edits might we make to initiate that next working draft?
It struck me, in the event’s discussions about “representing futures”, that before we are able to represent any version of a future we first need to agree upon how to represent the present. What materials do we have to work with? And how, in the face of climate-driven crises, will those materials fare in the near future if we hope to use them?
I wasn’t able to attend every session, but some of the materials played with during the event were:
Money
Professor Chris Speed invited us to contemplate the possibility of re-inscribing money (the quintessential signifier of values-free value) with qualitative values in a world where money is represented not by physical pieces of metal, paper or plastic, but by strings of digital data. This presentation was the one I personally treasured most, not least because of the powerful links to my own questions about expressing value through narrative accounting. Speed also facilitated a dinosaur swap, which was, inevitably, delightful.
Ethics
The message I found most salient from Professor Annette Markham was the importance not only of ethics, but of which ethics are modeled in future societies. She elegantly critiqued the responsibility-ceding qualities of the classic trolley problem, showing how it presents technological harms (oncoming trolleys) as an inevitability, and decision-makers as impartial bystanders whose decisions are rational calculations based on direct input and output. I am determined to engage further with the potential of a feminist ethics of care, as Markham proposes, to offer a richer and more human direction for relational decision making amidst technological supercomplexity.
Digital tools
A panel led by Professor Nicola Henry discussed the ways in which online tools and spaces can be used as weapons to facilitate myriad forms of abuse, particularly against women and young people. The panel explored issues of legality (Dr Nicole Shackleton), e-safety structures (Dr Laura McVey) and the role of technology leaders (Dr Dana McKay) in how these dynamics do and might play out. My own major takeaway was that digital tools afford a type of power that is extremely poorly understood and which interacts in slippery, governance-eluding ways with the socio-material world.
Transdisciplinary practice
In her closing keynote, Professor Lisa Given highlighted the need and the profound challenge of crossing, blurring and erasing disciplinary boundaries to engage in research that seeks not just the face of a problem, but its multiple dimensions and extrusions. I am only now discovering how astoundingly difficult it can be to work across disciplines in academia, but Given reinforced my determination to pursue this, underlining how critical these efforts are now and will be in emerging times of disciplinary disruption and evolution.
What do human-centred futures look like?
I hope to spend more time unpacking the ideas now germinating in my own head after these sessions. They are some, but not all, of the keys to desired future/s. I dearly want 5.0 — that is, if 5.0 represents a recentring of purpose and human collective responsibility in the emerging era of technology hyperacceleration.
The “human-centred” model has been roundly and rightly critiqued in recent years, being an approach that elevates human desires without conscious regard for their impacts on the wider ecosystems in which they exist. While a return to focus on humanity is essential to the preservation of human rights, it is also a reminder to face our human obligations. So what are they?
A session I missed (with apologies to Dr Jonathan Kolieb) invited attendees to produce a new version of the now-76-year-old Universal Declaration on Human Rights. I’m sorry I missed it but my own contribution, I think, might have been to propose the introduction of Human Responsibilities. What might these look like in an emergent time of climate catastrophe, unstoppable capitalism, professional liquidity, unregulatable weapons, and proliferating, oft-conflicting rights movements?
If 4.1 is our first draft towards an intentional future, how might a radical relationality alter the course of this narrative?
Enormous thanks to the event hosts, organisers and speakers for creating this space.