Historical concepts of digital transformation.

Four, three, two, one…What's all the hype?!

We overestimate what will happen in one year. And we underestimate what will happen in ten years. (B.Gates)

Table of contents

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Preliminary remarks

The Digital transformation grabs for three decades out of the scientific and military world into all areas of life – of both humans and the earth. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it underneath. To the horror of some. Fortunately for all.

The global military complex, The military, a scientific and economic promoter and beneficiary of digitisation attempts and completions, has played a significant role in the expansion, establishment and emotionalisation of digitisation. It was military projects that promoted autonomous driving (DARPA competition), developed the Internet and gave rise to fears of an Armageddon a’la Terminator.

In the meantime, the Markets the world as meetings of the most diverse groups of people, consumer, tourism and financial markets, public services as well as dark criminal services with full development power on the way to digitally controlling, expanding and networking the participants.

The Globalisation the worlds of business, labour, education and trainingt is sometimes the consequence, but above all the reason for global digitalisation efforts.

Impressive career paths – of both individuals and young companies („From start-up to world leader in ten years…“) – are visible to everyone: be it the career paths of scientists or a working elite that manages and leads, plans and organises worldwide or simply codes for others in the world and collects and processes what we humans with our 20th century attention skills are most likely to miss: Data collections and software.

What the digital transformation creates is not immediately physical, is not an impressive concrete jungle, railway networks and bridges, not dams, cities and road networks, not cars, radios and home televisions. What has emerged is not simply materialised progress, but is hidden „behind things“, is a tangle full of networks, shows itself in the Triumph of the smartphonewhich has spread around the world in just a few years like no other material product. And yet it is not the material product that makes it so valuable, but the expertise, power and intelligence that has come into our hands. Anyone who wants to create something in the world today, whether big or small, holds the starting point in their own hands in the form of their smartphone. But who understands that coming from the 20th century? I’m finding it more than difficult…

For individuals, the smartphone embodies the Data of the world. Data is known to be the „new oil of the 21st century“ (EU politician Meglena Kuneva, 2009). They are the The fuel of digitalisation and turn into information that changes the world. The Information society shows more than others before her that knowledge is power and in our Hyper society (Floridi) Labour power, the means of production and sometimes even capital are no longer the economic drivers. No, it is the data of people and the world.

And the data masters who Techies and nerdswhich Statistician and mathematician, take the career lifts and emerge from the chilled basements of companies where servers began to store, mirror and visualise the world – and displace the traditional „social engineers“, trained lawyers and economists; from there they conquer the top floors of the Internet giants and software groups, but also the company headquarters of the industrial and service world. The miners and miners' labourers, the assembly line workers and open-plan office typists of the 20th century never managed to do this. Not in any significant numbers. At best, and this belongs here, in the trade union confederations and (German) works councils or in the political labour parties that had to emerge from this injustice.

But the Digital transformation still seems difficult to grasp for the most part for the spirits of mechanics, the friends of the tangible and understandablewho would like to have tools and instruments. Give me your communication toolbox! They want to hold something in their hands here too, something to take away from communication seminars! And what do they get? A smartphone, a laptop and lots of software! Oh‘, wasn't direct communication great – back then?! As if there had never been the 1968 revolt against silence, the small, psychological revolutions of humanistic psychology, the rebellion of the young against the speechlessness of the old! It's unbelievable how digital gadgets have managed in just a few years to change the Family and office culture of the 20th century as the shelter of natural, connecting communication among true fellow human beings to appear. As if people used to talk to each other in the Berlin underground without smartphones and headphones! We silently cursed God and the government that the „Tagesspiegel“ was not invented in the format of the „Berliner Zeitung“! Today we can at least see the heads that hide, er bend, over the screens of the digital dailies. And what else can observers think of but shaking their own heads and sighing that it used to be quite nice, or at least certainly better: better speechlessness without smartphones for everyone than constantly fantasising that other people prefer to communicate digitally with other people than with me! Why is the real injustice always inside me?

Why were all the communication and team training sessions organised? To get even closer. Stop – we don't have time or space for polemics here! We have to move on!

The computer and its mathematical foundations are not tools with which the same world can be treated differently. No, they are not something that can be used to get a grip on the world. They are society-penetrating, -founding and -dominating architectures (Burckhardt) that will comprehensively revolutionise the world of the 20th century and all those before it and change it beyond recognition for the habits of the 20th century. They are mental bulldozers and cognitive wrecking balls. It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand the world of the 20th century and its people.

The 21st century will make the 20th look like the 19th made the 18th look!

Anyone who still owns a fully physical globe should take a look at the Spot Europe take a close look. Where is it? How big is it? What happened that this small extension of land developed the nation-state and industrialised model of life in the world? What happened before? And what is happening now and tomorrow? The digital transformation.

Does that sound very ambitious to you „? Take it up another two notches – and you will have an initial idea of what digital transformation means.

Anyone who thinks that the simple life is enough to be able to live simply is living in social isolation. But this does not necessarily mean individual unhappiness.

…FOUR – Industry 4.0

Industrial worlds – Can’t we think a little bigger?!

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The The term „Industry 4.0“ is a marketing label. In 2011, a research initiative launched by the German government at the Hanover trade fair in

has helped to introduce. In response to the technological changes of previous years, a mental framework for thinking and working was (pre)set that clearly expresses the fact that nothing so earth-shattering is happening, but that the existing three-stage development is being further developed. The economic race of nations is an industrial race in which the Germans are well represented and now, like everyone else, have to take the fourth step. Quite simply. Whole sectors of the economy were already in upheaval (computer and mobile phone manufacturing, music and mail order business), old worlds collapsed (journalism).

Industry 4.0 … builds on what already exists and prefers not to outline anything special, at least nothing scary like a revolution. An evolutiönschen is already more than sufficiently tolerable.

Well, Germany is not so fond of revolutions, even though the great turning points of the 20th century can be traced here like nowhere else, and even have their origins and places of action and decision-making: nation-state empire, soviet republic, fascism, communism, economic liberalism). Even the Peaceful Revolution, which brought down an entire state system in 1989 with almost no bloodshed, has been linguistically minimised as the „Wende“ and even today, little more than a few bratwurst stalls are set up in October and Helene Fischer sings louder than usual. Fortunate world upheavals could be celebrated in a more unifying way. So be it. The concept for Industry 4.0 reflects this fearful and shameless approach: the existing is to be developed further, but nothing completely new is included. The target group is established industrial companies, not start-ups. Who wants disruption when things have been going well so far?

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What brought us here yesterday,

doesn't have to take us there tomorrow,

where we want to go.

Why Industry 4.0?

The path of modern industrialisation is divided into four major stages, the fourth of which has now begun. This fourth stage describes the path that the fourth industrial revolution has to take and will be rewarded with the Internet of Things.

The reason for this is the lost consumer internet, in which Germany and Europe have barely had a say. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple – they decide, they collect, they develop. The same should not happen to the industrial world, which has one of its hotspots in the world in Germany.

Industry 1.0: Mechanisation

The first industrial revolution swept away the manual, largely guild- and chamber-organised manufacturing processes. It introduced mechanical production facilities that were able to utilise water and steam power to an unprecedented extent. Farm animals and beasts of burden became obsolete. The driving forces no longer come from muscles, but from machines. Physics beats biology.

Mechanical rather than manual production can be seen above all in the development of looms and steam engines (England 1784), which were used to compete with Indian fabric producers and were soon copied in Germany. Crimmitschau in Saxony was one of the centres of this development.

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Industry 2.0: Electrification

Electrification then made it possible to unimagined mass production. The source of power could be externalised. The physical structure of the organisation began to change. Organisations no longer had to be built around the power source (beast of burden, steam engine), but could give priority to other needs. Electricity was produced elsewhere. Initially, each company produced its own electricity, but it soon became clear what efficiency potential would be released if the production of electricity was left to other companies.

ParallelThe development of data storage is very similar today, initially taking place directly on the computer or on in-house servers – and increasingly shifting to clouds. At the time, it was also initially inconceivable that external energy sources would be used to keep the company's own production running. It also still seems „dangerous“ to leave data storage to others. The path to changing this seems short.

The assembly line also entered the production process after causing a worldwide sensation in the handling process of the Chicago slaughterhouses in Cincinnati (around 1870). Henry Ford established assembly line production for the growing car industry.

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Industry 3.0: Electronics

The use of electronics then contributed to further automation from around the end of the 1960s. Programmable logic controllers instead of connection-programmable control units such as Modicon 084 from 1969 were the first to enable digital-based, automatic control of various production units. In Germany, the companies that played a key role in this development process were Klatschka and Mushroom  (ca. 1979) should be mentioned.

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Industry 4.0: Smart Factory & Co.

Industry 4.0 wants to Use of cyber-physical systems promote. The goal is the smart factory, in which every screw and every sheet of metal will communicate with robots and forklift trucks. The intelligent, i.e. sensor-controlled machine coordinates its own work steps and carries out the production process progressively autonomously based on real-time data from the machines, production parts and customers.

ExampleIf the sensors in Adidas running shoes find out that the majority of runners overpronate, i.e. bend inwards when rolling, then this data is fed into the production process and leads to more such shoes being produced…

Encouraging „Industry 4.0“?

The „Industrie 4.0“-Kampagne is intended to encourage the established, but it is certainly a doubly dubious success.

On the one hand, the fear-blocking but also demotivating idea that we Germans have survived the first three developments quite well and are fairly successful, so that the fourth R-evolution will not be bad either. It's just another step in what is naturally a positive development for us at the front. Unfortunately, despite Siemens mobile phones and Mannesmann mobile telephony, many Germans lack the experience that laptops, desktops, mobile phones and the Internet could come from Germany if only we had been a little more consumer-oriented and service-minded. But perhaps it would have taken more than that. That's why others have divided up the consumer Internet market among themselves. This is not an encouraging experience for the start of the race for the industrial world, the networking of factories and workbenches that Industry 4.0 has in store. But the mantra that the race is not over yet can – as of today, February 2019 – still be heard everywhere. Is ’ it true?

On the other hand, the Emphasis on the industry The focus is primarily on the well-known, tried-and-tested industrial giants. Perhaps even the large medium-sized companies. But the innovations that new and lateral thinkers are responsible for are being left out of the spotlight. Industry 4.0 promotes change, not creation, change, not creation, reorientation instead of founding, development instead of building. However, it remains questionable whether the successful people of the old industrial world are the most suitable to lead Germany on digitally driven voyages of discovery in view of the saturated and established. The innovator’s dilemma sends its regards.

Central reading recommendation for the Industry 4.0 concept

  • Kollmann, Tobias/Schmidt, Holger: Deutschland 4.0, Wie die Digitale Transformation gelingt, Wiesbaden 2016.
  • Knop, Carsten/Becker, Thomas: Digitales Neuland. Why Germany's managers are now becoming revolutionaries, Wiesbaden 2015.
  • Cole, Tim: Digital transformation. Why the German economy is sleeping through the digital future and what needs to be done now! Impulses for the SME sector. Munich 2015.

Central blogs and websites on Industry 4.0

…THREE – The third human revolution

The three big human development steps

The history of our species, Homo sapiens, is characterised by three major stages of development which, in retrospect, appear revolutionary, although hardly any of those involved are guilty of revolutionary activity. The time spans are too long for individuals to be singled out as ringleaders. It may still be considered a mistake to have once come down from the trees, to have practised walking upright, to have submitted to wheat (cultivation), to have ultimately agreed on a single God and then ultimately to have killed him, all this may be mourned or celebrated in retrospect – but individual people have hardly been guilty of this. We are all children of our time at this altitude.

This historical concept embeds digitalisation not only in a modern economic context, but also in the overall humanistic history – and in this way shows the special nature and impact of digitalisation. It is not just about a digitalised economy. It is precisely this limitation that leaves out the special nature of economic activity in the course of the scientific revolution.

However, insofar as the Digitisation interpreted as the (latest) stage of the scientific revolution When it becomes a part of the human body, it shows its importance for the development of the entire social development of the human being.

To understand how this insignificant species called Homo Sapiens, originating from the steppes of Africa, has managed to literally beat all human and animal competitors out of the field, wipe out or subdue almost all animal co-inhabitants and is now in the process of digitally recording itself and the world and preparing it for further processing, it is only necessary to retrace three steps.

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The first step: The Cognitive Revolution (70,000 – 100,000 BC)

The first step was as long ago as it was long ago. But for much, much, much longer, the situation on earth was quite simple and quite different. There was a long food chain consisting of many individual links – and man as an ape, i.e. more „ape“ than „man“, was right in the middle of it. Nothing was special about the genus Homo (human). – And we, Homo Sapiens (wise humans) didn't even exist yet.

But Homo Sapiens evolved over thousands of years and began… - and some people can hardly believe it even today and are doing so at this very moment - .. to think. Homo sapiens developed the cognitive ability to think around 100,000 BC. What we perceive with our sensory organs is mentally moulded, developed into chains of thought and tested for its practical viability. In addition, there is the incredible ability to tell stories about oneself, freely invented things and things to come. Humans used their cognitive and linguistic abilities to talk about things that were not (yet!) real. And they continued to develop the cognitive ability to remember! They began to think in a more complex way and to communicate with each other in a more complex way, especially about imperceptible, unreal things as well as about the future and thus about things that were jointly assumed and imagined. This is (and has remained) unique. As far as we know, no other species has similar abilities. And other species, well, Homo Sapiens has left no room for them. All other human species are extinct or have been wiped out (by us): Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisova, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster and possibly others.

What are the special consequences of the uniqueness of Homo sapiens: They began to learn collectively, e.g. they not only used fire for hot meals, but also for more complex farming (fire-stick farming). Why, why, why – has no place here. The fact is, Homo Sapiens has changed like hardly any other living being before or since in an indescribably short period of time. If you want to study volatile phenomena, take a look at this turning point!

And we don't know what tipped the scales: In any case, it was not the opposition thumb alone, which makes us work uniquely, also not the upright gaitwhich gives us a free hand but causes problematic birth processes and fear of heights, and also not the fur-free skinwhich makes us unique endurance runners, but also leaves us shivering unprotected in the cold...and that Disproportionate brain…are largely unused. A lot of things just seem to have fallen into place.

Crucially, Homo sapiens is the only living being that has developed collective learning over generations and has learnt in a way that is cooperates on a large scale and flexibly like no other. This does not mean that there was peace on earth. The natural world was no paradise. And it is by no means an invention of modern times that mass co-operation also enables the mass killing of others. War has always required co-operation. Or to put it another way: co-operation is not a value in itself, but an instrument. And nobody masters this instrument better than man.

Bees can co-operate en masse, but they are completely inflexible. In Germany, for example, five very different forms of co-operation, i.e. constitutions, prevailed in the 20th century; empire, democracy, National Socialism, socialism, democratic constitutional state – unthinkable without flexible administrative officials and countless social adaptation processes!

On the other hand, animals can co-operate in a highly flexible way, but not en masse, but only limited to the pack or family. Mammals in particular, such as chimpanzees, are in no way inferior to humans in their ability to co-operate flexibly with their conspecifics, but they cannot perform this ability on any scale. We, on the other hand, can set up extremely flexible global financial markets, carry out road traffic without significant disruption, institutionalise sports Olympics and prisons: All co-operative events based on flexible cooperation.

And how do we do that? On the basis of collective imagination, by inventing a story that we believe in, that has rules and norms at the ready and that we orientate ourselves en masse. We do this so well that we cherish the idea that organisations even exist independently of individual people, that they develop a culture, for example, that persists even if we were to replace the individual participants one by one, much like our body cells gradually die and are replaced until a completely „ different “ biological being exists – to which the same personality is nevertheless attributed.

Worth seeing and hearing is Y.N. Harari in a TED Talk (English, German subtitles available):

other aspects of the cognitive revolution that enabled mass and flexible co-operation: 

  • Fire utilisation: hot meals, a more varied, healthier diet, increased nutritional values, shorter intestines, larger, more energy-guzzling brains,
  • Slash-and-burn, Eradications other human species (homo erectus, homo neandertales) and animal species (50% of all mammals over 50kg, as they were dangers)
  • Extremely flexible languagethat have a A third reality that goes beyond the perceptible inside and outside, enables
    • social gossip (peacekeeping)
    • unreal stories (fiction, collective belief! – e.g. in values, money, human rights, legal persons) are made possible
    • Future fantasies and fears (visions of the present)
    • Ideas for the future (hunting and survival plans)
  • Cultivating the social, art, embodiment of imagination

Key reading recommendations on the cognitive revolution

  • Christian, David: Origin Story. A Big History of Everything. GB 2018 (now also available in German)
  • Parzinger, Hermann: The Children of Prometheus. A history of mankind before the invention of writing, Munich 2014.
  • Wilson, Edward O.: The Social Conquest of the Earth. A Biological History of Man, 2nd edition, Munich 2016.
  • Harari, Yuval N.: A Brief History of Humanity, Munich 2014.

The second step: The Neolithic Revolution (10,000 BC)

Why people settled down has not been clarified in detail. It remains a great mystery, even if there are highly entertaining solutions: There is an idea from Bavaria that it was the beer that made people settle down. And there is indeed – much to suggest this!

Nevertheless, the matter remains puzzling: why did people give up a relatively carefree and in any case happier life in order to make the soil fertile by the sweat of their brow and to flake themselves off every day at dawn? Because the agricultural revolution was not primarily a domestication of animals by humans, but of humans – by wheat!

The life of a farmer is much more deprived and harder than that of a hunter-gatherer. Nevertheless, from around 10,000 BC to around 1500 AD, it became and remained the primary way of life for most people on this earth. And once „discovered“, mankind strode with seven-league boots towards the next great revolution: The initial Shock of the sedentarywho now made their bread by the sweat of their brow and lost all nomadic ease, became overcome: It only took them a few thousand years to develop from the first settlements Cities to become a reality, Empires and to form a network of Churches all of whom have found a global medium based on trust with the invention of money: Who else would seriously exchange food, tools, even land for money without trust? Nothing has created and utilised trust more than money, the great hate object of many who long for trust. Because money also has its dark side.

However, the peasant-based economic society had to save itself from starvation by its own bootstraps. Because typically „ peasant life produces “ too many offspring who want to be fed. And in Europe at the beginning of the modern era, something happens that had not happened for thousands of years: society explodes! Population figures „no longer regulate themselves“ (hunger, disease, death, emigration) and overall economic output no longer just grows linearly. Both (and much more) are growing exponentially. This is the most striking effect of humanity's third step.

This dawning scientific revolution, which consists of several smaller revolutions, demands a fundamental change of perspective on human and social life that we can barely grasp even today: People's lives are no longer an „endless, circular sequence of recurring events“ (times of day and seasons, death and life, according to which peasant life is organised), but appear as a sequence of advances that face the future and are strategically planned.

The scientific revolution will change the concept of life from a circle to an arrow.

other aspects of the Neolithic revolution:

  • Becoming a hunter-gatherer through the wheat Bauern domesticated,
  • Domesticity is created, for the first time a limited and artificial environment.
  • Possessions are accumulated, the Space humanly enclosed
  • Future experience and Time dilation, Planning for the future and worries about the future.
  • Domestication of farm animals (sheep, cow, chicken)
  • Stabilising and socially structuring orders are invented (Money, religion, cities and empires)

Key reading recommendations on the Neolithic Revolution

  • Parzinger, Hermann: The Children of Prometheus. A history of mankind before the invention of writing, Munich 2014.
  • Reichholf, Joseph H.: Why humans became sedentary. The greatest mystery of our history, 3rd edition, Frankfurt am Main 2012.
  • Harari, Yuval N.: A Brief History of Humanity, Munich 2014.

The third step: The Scientific Revolution (since 1500 AD)

The scientific revolution was just as disruptive as the cognitive and neolithic revolutions before it and was also largely unspectacular and barely perceptible to those experiencing it. The periods of change were too long. Only historical hindsight allows the lines of development to emerge more clearly. What distinguishes the scientific revolution from the others, however, is the fact that it has not yet been finalised.

The Catholic Church was the starting point for the scientification of the world, just as it was for its nationalisation. It was the great role model for research and curiosity, in which the collection, sorting and systematisation of knowledge developed. Its representatives researched both externally and internally in order to gain knowledge, but they were literally trapped within their framework of thought and order. Dispelling God as a central thought patternand the Putting people at its centre (humanism)was as unthinkable as it was actually disruptive.

The fixed point of this third great transformation is paradoxical: man's path to the centre of thought begins with his dwelling place being expelled from the centre. It is not the earth that is at the centre of the universe, but the inhospitable sun. However, as the Copernican world view banishes the earth from the centre, sweeping it from God's workbench, so to speak, on which the sun has no place, this realisation also shakes the church and religion as authoritative institutions. Remnants of authority are wiped out in the ensuing religious wars.

The Humanism is the disruptive development of scientific revolutionsthat will cost God his life.

With the death of God and the Pact between people, which combined politics with science and economics and led to prosperity, the third great revolution takes its course. And then things took off quite rapidly: Kepler and Galileo put the nail in the coffin of the old cosmic ideas of the Ptolemaic world view, Descartes began to think and Newton sorted out mechanics. Many things are now made possible and progress is invented as a pattern of thought, knowledge and economics. The eternal cycle of life begins to mould itself into an arrow that is shot towards the future. The future in general! It is discovered, moulded and used as a category of reflection for human action and thought in the first place. Today, we can no longer imagine how life was previously conceived and imagined!

The world-changing steps that were taken can be clearly seen in the Self-image of the human being The changes in a world that is conceived and experienced as shaped by human hands had to change.

  • After Copernicus (1473-1543) in De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium – On the circular motion of the world's bodies (1543)that the earth is not the centre of the universe, human thoughts also begin to revolve more comprehensively. And even if the Earth moved from the centrethe human being consequently takes this place in the following.
  •  Until Charles Darwin (1809-1882) returns from the HMS Beagle, feels land under his feet again and ☞ On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859): The idea that man was created by the hand of God turns out to be a mistake and the Man is not the crowning glory of creation. It has to fit in and is one of many living beings. Like all others, it descends from common ancestors and has evolved over the course of time. Evolution developed through natural selection. A deep blow to the religious and mental pit of the stomach. However, the full drama of Darwin's thinking is only becoming clear in our day: …because with the theory of evolution, concepts such as the soul, free will and similar non-material ideas become untenable, even though they are so close to postmodern man, who would like to call some metaphysics his own.
  • But what the hell, we may not be God's masterpiece, but we are our own masters. We don't crawl and can do whatever we want. This is roughly how the people who made friends with Darwin – and not with the Austrian doctor saved their self-image Sigmund Freud (1856-1936)calculated: We are not the masters in our biological homes! The psyche, our own physical psyche, plays tricks on people, makes things disappear mentally, tucks them away in corners of memory that people themselves are unable to track down. However, the psyche does not simply make lived lives disappear, but also allows people to invent and tell a plausible, seemingly real story. Human decision-making heuristics clearly show that there is no rationality, no reason that can make context-free decisions. We humans are conditioned, susceptible, unconscious beings. Whatever happened to the greatness of man in their imagination?
  • Well, up to the present day, man can still dream that he alone, even in his conditioned and limited state, is the only living being capable of dominating the world by virtue of his ideas and powers of realisation. But these days begin with Alan Turing (1912-1954) to be counted – from artificial intelligencesLife, not on a biological, but on a synthetic or other material basis.

We don't know where the scientific revolution(s) will lead,

but we know pretty well that they will not end.

Nothing speaks in favour of this.

In historical hindsight, it becomes clear how a cost-intensive science in combination with a aggressive imperial policy  in the name and for the benefit of a capitalist-organised, future-optimistic economic society Human power and influence across the entire environment has achieved: An indescribable conception of world domination and subjugation, which practically found its scientific starting point in the declaration of comprehensive ignorance – the beginning of insatiable research.

Revolution of ignorance

Further aspects of the scientific revolution (rudimentary selection)

  • Second agricultural revolution
  • Invention of the steam engine by Watt (1765)
  • Discovery of electricity and chemical elements (periodic table, 1869)
  • Discovery of radioactivity
  • Discovery of bacteria and viruses (penicillin, Fleming, 1928)
  • Urbanisation, schooling of the way of life
  • Fission of atomic nuclei (Otto Hahn, 1938, atomic bomb 1945)
  • Walking on the moon (1969)
  • Heart transplantation
  • Justification of synthetic biology (2000)
  • Decoding the human genome (2003)
  • Machines learn: AI system AlphaZero wins against the best chess calculator Stockfisch 8 (December 2017)
  • In progress: Total sequencing of life on earth (Earth BioGenome Project)

What does all this have to do with digitalisation? We have been the same bodies, brains and spirits for thousands of years, but now we are linking up biologically and technologically to form inseparable units.

Key reading recommendations on the scientific revolution

  • Cohen, Floris: The second creation of the world. How modern natural science came about, Frankfurt am Main 2010.
  • Roeck, Bernd: The morning of the world. History of the Renaissance. Munich 2017.
  • Osterhammel, Jürgen: The transformation of the world. History of the 19th century. Munich 2009.
  • Harari, Yuval N.: A brief history of humanity. Munich 2014.

…TWO – The second machine age

What machines will we build tomorrow?

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Machines in the second machine age

facilitate human thinking and enable

unimagined insights into and effects on the world.

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A third concept comes from the two Cambridge scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who in their book, the Digitalisation as the beginning of the second machine age describe. By equating the First Machine Age with industrialisation, they basically use the same boundary lines as the German concept of Industry 4.0: the First machine age is characterised by the invention, development and introduction of Machines that support human muscle powerreplace and potentiate. Machines make (working) life easier and free us from its hardships. In the second machine age, machines are now being invented, developed and introduced into (working) life to free people from the efforts and impossibilities of collecting, sorting and analysing data – or to make these things possible in these dimensions in the first place; in short: Machines in the second machine age facilitate human thinking and enable unimagined insights into and influences on the world.

The advantage of this concept is its simplicity. It illustrates the dramatic changes that we have achieved thanks to the technologisation of how we experience, capture and process the world. The revolutionary element is much clearer here than in the concept of Industry 4.0. The fourth step is simply a further step in a longer process; it is more evolution than revolution. This is reassuring, not irritating and allows us to wait for the fifth step. But the second machine age is already more startling, more alert, even if not yet the unbelievably new is conceptualised. That remains for the final concept … but not so fast: we'll get there in time, let's stick to looking at the machine ages.

Just as the first machine revolution completely changed people's lives, the second machine revolution will do the same.

What was the revolution of the First Machine Age?

Well, the two technology scientists refer to the British historian Ian Morris, who has been teaching in Chicago and Stanford for ages and has conducted research as an archaeologist all over the world. Throughout his life Why does the West obviously rule the world? What were the most momentous inventions and developments that had an impact here?

Morris takes an extremely elegant methodical approach. He creates a Diagram depicting the essential contours of world history. Because, according to his approach, the The ability of a society to mould and shape its material, economic, social and intellectual environments according to its own wishes and needs.

But how do you depict the contours of history in a diagram? Morris makes use of  four factorsthat describe the development of a society in the :

  • The first factor is biological: humans are animals that depend on energy that they extract from their environment or gain from it. This means counting the calories per person that are extracted from the environment, e.g. for food, shelter, trade, industry and agriculture as well as the transport of things). The Energy yield of humans is therefore the first factor.
  • The second factor is sociologically and geographically significant: humans are social animals (…author) and tend to live in cities (author, book). The Degree of urbanisation is the second key factor that indicates the stage of development.
  • The third factor is biological and sociological: humans have always exercised power over each other, waging war and peace. The nuclear standoff of the twentieth century showed that the Warfare capacity Everything and nothing are needed to survive as a society. This paradox of stalemate seems paradoxical, but it shows that the firepower and speed of weapons and their logistically sophisticated distribution were and probably still are decisive for war and peace.
  • Last but not least, energy yield, urbanisation and warfare are largely dependent on the ability of a society's social network to process data and information in a useful way. The State of information technology is the fourth factor that describes the development of a society.

If we look at world history on the basis of these four factors and translate them fairly into a mathematical system so as not to favour later societies that were able to build on other, earlier societies, the results are surprising. It becomes clear that it was not money, religion or military equipment alone that changed worlds, but ultimately a decisive invention that fundamentally transformed human societies.

Although mankind has been technically adept and had technological inventions from the very beginning, it was the Steam engine by James Watt (1775)which finally and comprehensively unhinged peasant society and gave rise to urban and service societies. Only the optimised steam engine allowed the majority of people to leave the fields and find sufficient food, shelter and ultimately (paid) work in cities. From the whole house to the city (flat) was the path taken by those who had lived on farms for thousands of years and now toiled at the machines.

Source: Brynjolfsson/McAfee, Second Machine Age, 2014; Morris, Who rules the world?, 2012.

Elements of the First Machine Age

  • Machines replace muscular activities of animals and humans
  • Machines enable unimagined physical powers to be released and utilised
  • Introduction of the steam engine by Watts, 1775
  • Enablers of the age: steel buildings, railways, skyscrapers, bridges, steel and motorised ships (steamers! The first great disruptive innovation, as Christensen called it in his classic „Innovator’s Dilemma“) etc.).
  • Rural farmers become urban industrial and thus wage labourers (share of farmers in the population – once approx. 90%, today 2% supported by the state).
  • Industrial life in step and on the assembly line: school, army, taxpayers -> working class, growing middle class and increasingly unemployed army.

The second machine age

The Second Machine Age is now producing machines that mirror, replace and surpass our cognitive abilities and enable us to see the world in a completely new way.

These machines gave us a view of the earth – from the moon; let us look deep into space, let us understand that we can practically look into the past in this way. They create works of art that we cannot distinguish from those we have revered for centuries, they show us amazing new strategies and ways to succeed in tasks that have been devised and honed by the cleverest people for centuries. Within four hours (4 hours!), they teach us how to play chess like no machine we have ever programmed and fed with games (Link to Google's AlphaZero). Artificial intelligences are not simply machines of the second machine age. They are well on the way to making us review our understanding of life. But that is the last of the concepts presented here.

Elements of the Second Machine Age

  • Machines replace our cognitive abilities and make our lives easier
  • They push our mental powers
  • Computers emerge, flights into space, global, condensed financial transactions, weather forecasts
  • Robots are replacing routine jobs, not just physical routine, but also routine cognitive tasks.
  • Today, around 20% in industrial jobs…most in service jobs and in services (knowledge and information companies)
  • Danger: Development of a useless class (Y.N. Harari), politically and economically powerless.

central reading recommendations:

  • Morris, Ian: Who rules the world? Why civilisations rule or are ruled, Frankfurt am Main/New York, 2012.
  • Brynjolfsson, Erik/ McAfee, Andrew: The Second Machine Age. How the next digital revolution will change all our lives, Kulmbach 2014.
  • Brynjolfsson, Erik/ McAfee, Andrew: Machine, Platform, Crowd. How to make the most of our digital future, Kulmbach 2018.

…ONE – The cosmic revolution.

The first real turning point

The real revolution came on 29 April 2000 with the name Alba.

The bunny named Alba was the humanist's nightmare made flesh. With the help of scientists, the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac had inserted a fluorescent protein molecule from a jellyfish species into a rabbit. The glow-in-the-dark rabbit was a cross between completely different creatures that could never have produced life together without human hands. The experiment goes far beyond what humans have called breeding for thousands of years. Life is directly designed here. This apparently living rabbit named Alba, which died in 2004 after a normal 4-year life cycle, was Life that for the first time was awakened solely by the powers of thought and action and not by sexual powers.

Not the biological lumbar and lap forces,

but forces of thought and action have given birth to life here,

that God and nature alone could not have achieved.

And yet this development is not outside of nature or cosmic developments, but is a further step.

Digital transformation is not simply the observation of life and its environments in mathematical language. It has a profound effect on biological life. The biotechnological revolution creates Synthetic life, just as the information technology revolution is creating artificial intelligence. This is why people will have to rethink their idea of humanism, because both developments call for a reassessment of human life: What is life? What role does the human being play in this performance?

Aspects of the cosmic revolution:

  • Info-Tech + Bio-Tech = Synthetic Life.
  • Genes that do not fit together are brought together in a suitable way.
  • Synthetic life = artificial life
  • Artificial intelligence + artificial life make us rethink LIFE:
    • Do we need to put people or life at the centre?
    • What got caught in the blind spot when we put people at the centre?

Synthetic biology – simply explained:

Artificial intelligence

  • Brockman, John: What should we know about artificial intelligence? The leading scientists of our time on intelligent machines, Berlin 2107.
  • Tegmark, Max: Life 3.0, Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Berlin 2017.
  • Max Tegmark at the TED conference on the evolution of life.

And how the biotechnological and information technology revolutions are to be categorised historically and how the digital transformation with its incredibly increased complexity is to be understood is explained to us by the new, young subject of BIG HISTORY. And no representative can do this with more verve and esprit than its founder: David Christian.

Big History is the story of the complexity of life.

central reading recommendations:

Thank you very much for reading! And if you liked the article, I'd be just as happy to receive your feedback as if you didn't like it. And in both cases, I'll be happy to discuss it with you in the comments. Have a good time!

PS: The graphics are from Liane „Raspberry woodpecker“ Hoder.