Today’s Need

Preparation  for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

by   India’s Technological Colleges

1.0 The Fourth Industrial Revolution and our needs: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, through convergence of the physical and the digital world, will revolutionize, yet again, the ways in which we live, work and spend our leisure time. The premonitions of the Revolution are already apparent in the developed economies through automation, through increased use of robots in manufacturing etc. It has created fears of loss of regular jobs and stagnant wages in the West and of a slow-down in the growth rates in East Asia.
Within the next five years,  housing and offices, new machineries and factories, hospitals and hotels, communication and transport systems will all start using innovative products, each of which would use a range of different technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), nanotechnology, genetic engineering, biotechnology and bio-engineering. Robotics will be used not only in factories but also in offices, banks and at homes. Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) named the forthcoming era as the period of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“Factors Of Production:   capital, labour and AI” , says Accenture, wrt the 4th Industrial Revolution
  
The world’s GDP increased during the first two industrial revolutions of (i) replacing animal power with mechanical power and of (ii) using new ways of generating and using electric power along with systems of mass production. However since India was a British colony, it could not participate in the two Industrial Revolutions and by the middle of the twentieth century, India had become one of the poorest countries of the world. When during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the third industrial revolution of digital systems and modern systems of communication took place, India was able to take advantage of the low-hanging fruit in software technologies and establish a modern software industry. However India was not a participant in the full spectrum of the 3rd Industrial Revolution and it did not contribute to  research and development of new technologies due to weaknesses, created during centuries of colonialism.
India became independent in 1947 and a communist regime was established in China in 1948. Both the countries had not been able to take advantage of the first and the second industrial revolutions.  However China was able to manage its human development much better and it was able to participate in the third industrial revolution over a much wider front. The result was that whereas in 1960, China’s per capita GDP was 1.01 times that of India, by 2016, China’s per capita GDP became 4.75 times that of India, according to the data from the World Bank.
To be able to cope up with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, China1 has started investing in new technologies in a big way while India is yet to begin making concerted efforts to generate competences in a wide front of technologies and to develop indigenous products and services by using the new technologies.
2.0 Large number of New Job Opportunities: During the 21st century, the educational administrators in India and China started facilitating the establishment of a large number of institutions of higher education so that the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) for tertiary education could rise to the levels in the developed world. According to UNESCO database, out of 100,000 inhabitants, enrolment in tertiary education in China and India increased to 2,502.1 and 2202 in 2013 from 579.9 and 892.7 persons in 2000 respectively. Unlike China, where about 90% of students study in universities, in our country, this expansion of higher education was done largely through Self Financed Institutions (SFI). By 2014, India had the largest system of technical education in the world, with SFIs constituting the largest component of the system.
“The Fourth Industrial Revolution, unlike the previous industrial revolutions, is unfolding at an exponential rather than a linear pace.” - K V Kamath, President of NDB, China

The unfolding of the 4th Industrial Revolution will need engineers, well-trained in design of products, using new materials, new production methodologies and sustainable sources of energy. If the Revolution is to transform the world,  it would require hundreds of thousands of technologists, sociologists and business-men. Since the 4th Revolution is expected to build up at a fast pace,  India must ramp up the quality of technical education, without any delay, so that it may be able to become an equal partner in this Revolution.

TECHNOLOGICAL COLLEGES: PREPARING FOR THE OPPORTUNITY: Each industrial revolution had built on the earlier revolution and each was much bigger than the one in the previous era. If our technological institutions grab the opportunity, the 4th Industrial Revolution has the potential of transforming the nation by steeply increasing its GDP.
Besides learning about the technological developments at the frontiers of technology in their own field, technologists in all disciplines will have to learn tools of data science, data visualization, cloud analytics, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and cyber security.

Design thinking and study of needs of the whole of the world’s  markets will have to be embedded into the entire curriculum of technological institutions. Development of new products for niche markets will have to be included as a part of the studies. Thus students may take examples of intelligent homes, high speed transportation, smart cities etc and develop products. It is not required for a student to design a complete intelligent home (like that of Bill Gates) or a complete intelligent office (like the Spaceship Campus of Apple Park) or a bullet train or a smart city. Naturally a student’s design project would be on a small product, which might be  a part of any of these big projects and which may be usable in other applications also. Every year students of every affiliating-type university should have hundreds, if not a thousand products into the market. Therefore Design and entrepreneurship or start-up training are essential components at a technological university.  New SMEs, set up by students for the new products, year after year, will create the environment and set the stage for India to participate effectively in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.   

While the rest of the higher education sector had been suffering from unemployment of its graduates since before independence, the problem of unemployment has hit engineering graduates in a big way during the last few years. This happened because our Colleges remained mired in mediocrity and did not strive for excellence in any field of their interest. As the Colleges start preparing for the 4th Revolution, the fire for excellence will be ignited in the system and unemployment will disappear.

DIGITAL COLONIZATION: “Unless they want to plunge their people into poverty, they (most of the countries) will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their A.I. software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country’s economic dependent..” – Extract from ‘The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence’ by Kai-Fu Lee, Chairman & CEO, Sinovation Ventures and President, AI Institute, published in NYTimes, June 24, 2017

3.0 Research and Early Harvest of Products: To be able to have a measure of the pace of development, let us look at a few examples of research and new products, including one from India:
·   The then CEO of Infosys, Mr Vishal Sikka was chauffeured to work in a driverless, autonomous golf cart on Friday, 14th July 2017. The autonomous cart was built by the company’s Mysore-based engineers.  “Who says we can’t build transformative technologies?” Sikka tweeted.
In the book "Future Ride ", its author Peter Wayner has visualized how self-driving autonomous vehicles will change the architecture of the cities, its suburbs and their inter-connections. As we develop new technologies, our technologists, sociologists and philosophers  shall also  have to think about ways to modulate our societal organization so that we retain and build upon our age-old cohesive society and we are able to bring back love and care for those, who require it in our society.
  • ·       Elon Musk is developing an all electric car in California and plans to have it manufactured in China. China is taking a leadership position in battery technologies and the Guangdong province is developing a large network of electric vehicle charging stations along the bridge, which joins the province with Hong Kong and Macao.
  • ·       Intelligent/ Precision Farming is being tried in California and Israel. Scientific American in its issue of 26th June 2017 reported Precision Farming, which by combining sensors and imaging of every plant with real-time data analytics, improves farm outputs and reduces waste. While many American companies are working in the area, our prime-Minister has begun popularising the idea of Soil Health Card. We shall have to adopt it in millions of our small farms to make them viable and to be able to serve the whole of the world.
  • ·       Experiments in new, sustainable, faster and more efficient ways of travel are being made by many groups around the world. Thus five MIT graduates, based in Woburn, MA have developed a flying car, called Terrafugia (Latin for ‘Escape the earth’) Transition. Geely, the Chinese company, which owns the German car maker Volvo, has invested in Terrafugia in a big way. New high speed travel technologies and protocols are being developed in France, Japan, Spain and China. A Dutch firm PAL-V (Personal Air and Land Vehicle), based in Raamsdonksveer in the Netherlands, is aiming to deliver its first flying car to its first customer by the end of 2018. Toyota has invested in a startup, called ‘Cartivator Resource Management’ to work on "Sky Drive", a tiny ‘flying’ car, to be used in the 2020 Tokyo games. Flying cars are also being developed in Czech Republic, Slovakia, China and the United States.
  • Recently Gujarat Technological University’s  Team, consisting of students from more than 15 Colleges, GT Motorsports
  • won an Overall Victory at Supra SAEINDIA 2017. Universities will have to sponsor such projects in a big way to fuel the interest of students and the Faculty Members towards products, at the frontiers of technology.
  • ·       An around the world experiment of a solar aeroplane was conducted by Swiss engineers of the Solar Impulse foundation. 
  • ·        China has assumed leadership in research in long-distance quantum teleportation (instantaneous transfer of information), through successful establishment of the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet. The research team said, “Besides the promising developments of quantum cryptography (the first provably secure way to send secret messages), we have only recently succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of quantum dense coding, a way to quantum mechanically enhance data compression.” This technological feat is based on EPR (Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen) paradox, which was called by Albert Einstein as a ‘spooky action at a distance’.

·   In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, invented bitcoins, the most well-known of the electronic currencies, or cryptocurrencies.
The electronic currencies may be collectively worth $80 billion and the the Australian Stock Exchange ( in 2016) and the  Wall Street (in 2017) have announced that Bitcoin transactions would be an acceptable mode.
But the Fourth Industrial Revolution is likely to use software technologies like Bitcoin’s blockchain technology for maintaining records of world-wide transactions among entities, big and small. The Blockchain technology creates a ledger of every relevant transaction which can be  maintained without the need for a centralized control and which is nearly impossible to tamper. Honduras is trying to maintain a record of property rights by using the blockchain technology. Georgia in USA is using it to digitise its records.

4.0 The Conclusion: By 2014, we had built the world’s largest system of technological education, albeit of indifferent quality. We have an army of well-qualified but under-challenged Faculty Members and young students. We have the  capability and we have the opportunity to become ready for the 4th Industrial Revolution.

As we start preparing for it, as our students start solving our problems by using new technologies, as new start-ups sprout, poverty in India will start vanishing and the environment in our educational institutions will start approaching that of the best of the academic institutions of the world.

 Akshai Aggarwal

1The Chinese target is to have 150 robots for every 10,000 industrial workers by 2020.
The number of contributors from China to research in Artificial Intelligence (more particularly in the areas of Machine Learning including Deep Learning) has become so large that the Annual  Conference of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, scheduled for end of January, 2017 at New Orleans  in USA had to be re-scheduled to Feb 4-9, 2017 to San Francisco due to the clash with the 7 days of the Chinese New Year (, which were from Jan 27, 2017 to Feb 2, 2017 during this year) be cancelled. (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/china-artificial-intelligence/516615/)  


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