DEIKA ELMI
HOW TO EMBRACE THE COMING TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION by Deika Elmi, Security communicator and educator. Currently a Cybersecurity Risk Manager and Certified ISO27001 Lead Auditor.
THE “TECH COMPANY” POWDER KEG Every company wants to call itself a tech company.
THE “FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION”
DoorDash delivers food, but it calls itself a tech
The first industrial revolution used water and steam
company. Uber delivers passengers, but it calls itself
power. The second used electricity. The third used
a tech company. Why do companies do this? Because
electronics and information technology. The fourth is
software scales easier than physical infrastructure. A
a fusion of the physical and digital worlds. People are
company that makes and moves software can grow
already talking about the fifth industrial revolution as
faster than a company that relies on making and
being driven by synergy and collaboration between
moving stuff. Electrons move faster than croissants.
humans and intelligent machines.
This will remain true even if you get exceptionally good at delivering croissants.
The term “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (4IR) sounds like it involves hoverboards, lasers, and lots more
When these companies call themselves tech
chrome. But it’s not future technology. We’re in the
companies, they aren’t wrong! They do scale up far
4IR now.
faster than traditional competitors. They use software to coordinate widely dispersed work. The spread of distributed software, tightly tied to distributed work in the physical world, is set to trigger an explosive revolution.
Some definitions of the 4IR amount to shuffling Wikipedia’s List of emerging technologies and throwing these at the reader. But the 4IR isn’t just a list of things people are trying to make, for the same reason the digital revolution wasn’t just a list of chip designs and software paradigms.
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