The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, argues that we on the brink of a technological revolution unlike anything humankind has experienced before, and describes how this revolution that is unfolding today will fundamentally alter how we live and work.

Ever-present, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us, and it's accelerating at exponential speed. This is what the fourth industrial revolution looks like, as dubbed by world renowned economist Klaus Schwab. And in its scale, scope, and complexity, says Schwab, the period of change we are living through today is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than any prior period of human history.
Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and governments and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.
In this book Schwab outlines the key technologies driving this revolution, discusses the major impacts on governments, businesses, civil society and individuals, and offers bold ideas for what can be done to harness it for the common good. Above all, this book aims to emphasize the way in which technology and society co-exist and take collective responsibility to ensure a better future for us all.

Professor Klaus Schwab is Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. In 1998, he created the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which seeks to identify, recognize and disseminate initiatives in social entrepreneurship that have significantly improved people's lives and have the potential to be replicated on a global scale. An engineer and economist by training, Professor Klaus Schwab holds doctorates in Economics (summa cum laude) from the University of Fribourg, in Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and a Masters of Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and has received numerous international and national honors.