Bitcoin Forum

Found this gem of a lecture by Jeremy Rifkin, Professor at Wharton, Economist
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA
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Short Version

He argues that we are on the brink of a 3rd Industrial Revolution. But first, what makes an Industrial Revolution? According to him, they occur when 3 new technologies merge together. New Communications, New Power Source, New Transport logistics. When these merge, productivity increases and so does aggregate efficiency, this is what the industrial revolutions are

The 1st I.R. (Industrial Revolution) occured when the Telegram, a new power source called coal, and a new transport system (steam engine/Railroads) merged to forever change society as we know it.

The 2nd I.R. occured when the telephone/radio/TV, Oil, Cars/trucks/buses once again merged into a new platform of society.

The 3rd I.R. will occur once the Internet, renewable energy/smartgrids, new logistics (driverless cars, electric cars) all merge into the Internet of Things


my personal highlights (around 30 min in) :
"this third industrial revolution platform is designed to be distributed, not centralized. It works best when its collaborative and open and transparent, rather than closed and proprietary."

"How do we ensure privacy when everyone is connected?"

Lemme know your thoughts, whether you agree, disagree, I know it is a long watch, but I found it worth my time

Really interesting theory.
But I think, that next industrial revolution will be when more than 50% of work start made by robots.

It's true that we left the manufacturing sector behind a long time ago. The future seems to be pointing to the relevance of the information sector.

That words are just baseless. Many of the politicians will tell you that they are willing to create an uncorrupted and transarent country with a healthy econimy (including all economical contragents). And some of them are succeeding. For example scandinavian socialism works fine. Your highlights are nothing more then some socialistic thoughts about global wealth. Absolutely baseless.
If the video starts from the alarms about the global warming then everything is not so bad. You haven't wasted the X amount of your life watching it and you can just  close that page.

That will never happen. The american and european socialists are pretty far from the real privacy. I'm not even sure that they know what it is.

Renewable energy is still very expensive and we would need decades to adopt green energy technologies across the planet.
Do you see any driverless cars/electric cars on the streets?Electric cars are expensive and not so convenient.They don`t have any future at all.
The "internet of things" theory has many opponents.What if someone hacks that "internet of things" network?
We already are in the third industrial revolution,because we have the blockchain technology. ;D

the quotes I highlighted were just a couple things that I thought might be of interest to the crypto community...

socialistic thoughts about global wealth? not what I was thinking with that first quote. I was thinking of DLT (aka blockchain)

And yeah believe me i know how badly Europe and USA are watching everybody, digital age, big data... - again what I meant with that quote, is how do we protect (from hackers/thiefs not necessarily govts) all of the data that our homes, cars, cellphones, computers, will generate in the future?

that's a valid question whether it is existential or not is up to you, but I think it is worth discussing in a crypto forum.

20-30 years from now is not so far away - In the video the man explains that in the 1970s the cost of 1 solar watt was 78 dollars. now it is 50 cents per solar watt. Then he says that certain energy companies are negotiating future solar contracts as low as 4 cents per kilowatt hour. --> Moore's Law --- I know i'm doing a lot of regurgitating here - 30 years from now we're at 2050 (Germany plans to be 100% renewable by 2040 or so)

Driverless cars on the street? not yet. Electric cars on the street. yes I see one at least once a week. no future in Electric cars? lol considering they produce more torque, are more efficient, are faster, batteries are getting better and better with range. Believe me I do prefer a good old fashioned mechanical cars with an actual key you can turn and a stick shift. But unfortunately for me, when I get old, all the new cars will most likely be electric cars that get charged overnight via our residential solar smart grid that is being shared/traded with POWR tokens

Internet of Things is definitely not just a theory. It happening live in real time.

I think you missed the most important point, Blockchain is what will allow this 3rd Industrial Revolution to happen.

Thanks for the link, but I was pretty sure a lot of economists already think that we are well into the 3rd industrial revolution - we already see the vestiges of the 2nd crumbling all around us even from the 1990s. Remember that the internet was already built to distribute information, making it open access to all and centralized economies began tumbling after Soviet Union dissolved. What is happening right now is actually the fight back from states and corporations to retain control. We see it with how the internet is getting silo'd by people like Google and Facebook, and banks trying to take control back by regulating bitcoin and crypto.

We have a lots of social media accounts and they have millions of users and...still they ensure that privacy is always there ... Even this industrial revolution wont have a problem concerning privacy for sure.
But I do think that people are slowly moving towards a more subtle thing and that is " handicrafts " instead of industries handicrafts and all has been a very popular trend and I feel that would kind of add in all these things too.

So what exactly should be decentralized?
The problem of privacy can't be globaly solved by using blockchain. The data that you would be able to make more private is mostly useless while the government will never allow you to hide the other part. I remember someone from the top management of Google said that if you don't want anyone to know that you are doing sonething then you just shouldn't do it (that was the answer on the question about the question about privacy). Mainstream have no respect to your internet privacy and they will mobilize all power to reject those things.
The blockchain might be adopted in such places where it is possible to minimize the price of datastorage (like there was a project that kept medical data on blockchain) but this is not about privacy.

the electrical grid should and eventually will be decentralized. It might not even use DLT whatsoever (it could tho - POWR token), but lets assume that as the price of solar goes down, its adoptability goes up. Residential areas and Commercially zoned areas with solar panels can sell excess electricity to each other or back to the grid (i.e. the utility company). Right now utility companies have centralized power and they sell for X amount per kilowatt hour. Eventually their power sources will be a decentralized grid of smart houses/businesses that sell excess back to the Utility company or to other homes and businesses directly. ---> this sort of thing is already happening, just on a small scale

interesting read: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150204102637.htm

Government should be decentralized so that people can see the funds movement from it transparently without the need of media coverage(which is often filtered).
Blockchain can be adopted on places that needs faster sending of data and also faster and transparent recording of transactions via ledger(NASA, etc.) I think blockchain can also be adopted on industries that deals with money remittance and handling(such as banks and money remittance centers since people trust them more than cryptos).

We can say the world is ready for the third industrial revolution even though the combination of the technological developments put together might suggest that. There are still several breakthrough that the future beholds, we have impending flying cars, tele-porting that would change the way and time people move from one place to another, time travel machine that would make people go back in time to correct anomalies or the future to change it,  medical break through that would change the way we live such as cloning, 3D printing of organs etc. are we to say there would be several revolutions as this milestones are being met?

On ensuring privacy why everyone is connected, it means that with decentralisation, no one will have control over the other, unlike the way its being done that there is repository of data in the control of a body or agency with which with this power, control is certain to the extent that our whole existence is reliant on this.

the narrative has been beautiful, but the current ecosystem is 10 years away from these levels.

I think we are at the early stages of a 3rd industrial revolution but it
is a long way off yet as has been mentioned 20, 30 years.

While the 3 seperate sectors of Internet, energy and transport are in
motion [excuse the pun] there is still a very long way to travel [ ! ]
for the new transport sector to be properly linked to both internet
and energy.

When all 3 align i can see it being a massive revolution.

There's no real technological paradigm shift separating the "1st industrial revolution" from the "2nd industrial revolution".

The telephone is essentially identical to a telegram system, there isn't a quantum leap of difference separating the two. The telephone is telegram 2.0. Coal and oil are both hydrocarbon based forms of energy subject to many similar emissions and greenhouse gas issues. If steam engines and locomotives are version 1.0 then cars/trucks/buses are version 2.0. Again no major upgrade between the two technologies cars and trucks utilize essentially many of the same fundamental engine principles as a locomotive: pistons, gears, valves, etc.


I think renewable energy/smartgrids and the other things mentioned do represent a technological paradigm shift. This abstract should be labeled the 2nd industrial revolution and the one mentioned above should be tossed out.  :)

Of course, there isn't much if any demand for consistent standards in academia.

I think artificial intelligence will be the next industrial revolution!

The future of artificial intelligence will be synchronized with major social and economic changes, education revolution, ideological change and cultural change.

It is possible to be the beginning of a new great discovery, great change, great integration and great development of human society.

There might not have been a technological paradigm shift, but there definitely was a societal one. before the 2nd I.R. and cars, people had to get around in horse drawn carriages to get to the train station if they wanted to get out of town. Most farmers still had cattle or horses to pull carts. after the advent of cars and the combustion engine (different from steam) society changed A LOT. I think that is the paradigm shift, a shift in society caused by the technological advances

That would be quite something! I'll be old by then haha, maybe my progeny will be able to reap the rewards of the 3rd industrial revolution.

So what is someone will invent another super powerfull power source. Just like todays nuclear stations but safer, cleaner and more efficient. And everything becomes centralized again. Making a special comercial zones with solar  pannels imho seems like a waste of space, putting such pannels somewhere in residential areas also doesn't seem efficient, especially if you need to provide electricity to the whole city. Centralization of the power supply is not a problem. I haven't seen anyone arguing about it tbh.
The problem of hacking that was described in the article imho is taken from nowhere. Centralized power sources are working for many years and they hardly suffer from hack attacks. Meanwhile blockchain is barely tested in this field and may cause much more problems then we expect.

I agree that the blockchain technology is a part of 3rd industrial revolution. It also includes such things as sharing economy, but the main invention is only to come - 100% renewable energy.

I think a big part will be once we decentralize the internet (if that ever happens)

I was doing some basic research the other day and I stumbled upon this

https://nycmesh.net/ - NYC local mesh network

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x4y8a/net-neutrality-fcc-community-networks
https://www.coindesk.com/plan-b-ethereum-innovators-reviving-fight-net-neutrality/


If every local community started setting up their own MeshNetwork, we could essentially democratize and decentralize the internet - Doing this on a such a massive scale is the bigger problem, but if we start small and locally we could connect directly to IXPs for much cheaper than what ISPs charge for last mile customers (such as Open IX - who wants an open and free internet)

Renewable energy will not be a substitute for hydrocarbons until the source of energy storage appears reliable, cheap, efficient, durable.
https://www.siemens.com/customer-magazine/en/home/energy/renewable-energy/shaping-the-future.html
Example: not cheap, not effective.

That is a good point.  :)

I think there also may have been a massive population boom after the petrol revolution where oil was found to be useful in pesticides, fertilizer, fuel, lubricants and a host of widespread innovations which allowed a larger population to be sustainable(which also fuels concerns over peak oil et al). Said population boom could represent many changes which validate the distinction between 1st and 2nd industrial revolutions.

I wish academic lexicon, jargon and terminology were more intuitive. Rather than introducing paradigms which further isolate the average person from understanding many of the buzzwords and abstracts utilized within. Lowering the learning curve might not be such a bad thing? Also would not mind more emphasis on terminology which help the average person to put historical events into context in a way which helps the public to recognize real issues society faced in the past and lessons which could be derived from them.

I think more emphasis on centralized versus decentralized markets and related phenomena could be more valuable an abstract than distinctions between 1st, 2nd or 3rd industrial revolutions. But hey I'm a supporter of bitcoin and crypto posting on a crypto forum so maybe I am a bit biased there?

I think you misunderstood what I meant regarding commercial zones, Existing commercial zones (supermarkets, shopping malls, warehouses) can all have solar panels without it being a waste of space, it would in fact be and efficient use of space.
Creating a new zone just for solar, i agree, in most cases is not an effective way of using space/deploying solar panels

Especially in this new age of big data where everyone is bombarded with new information all the time, it is hard to take a step back and look at the big picture that the past has painted for us. I think we might be potentially at a fork in the road where either we as a society become more individualistic and centered around self gratification OR we become a sharing circular economy, where knowledge, electricity, logistics, is shared at a fraction of the cost that it was previously. I am a firm believer that it'll be the 2nd scenario. And I inclined to agree with you, I am biased as well, nonetheless I am a firm believer that the cryptocurrency distribution model/smart contracts/Ledger can have a huge impact on the finances of future generations (at least IMHO)