www.buildingsandcities.org/insights/commentaries/sixth-industrial-revolution.html

Why the next industrial revolution needs to be based on nature and not "technology"

Over the past 50 years the world has seen countless summits and agreements to reduce carbon emissions and prevent ecological overshoot. We have seen widespread adoption of the SDGs, a rapid shift to renewable energy, and numerous urban planning strategies to create biodiversity corridors, rewild rivers, and enable public and non-motorised transport options. However, appearances are deceiving. Chrisna du Plessis (University of Pretoria) considers the challenge of how to foster an ecological civilization in a world obsessed with technological innovation.

The United Nations (2024) warned that "that only 17% of the SDG [Sustainable Development Goals] targets are on track, nearly half are showing minimal or moderate progress, and progress on over one third has stalled or even regressed". The past 50 years saw a 73% decrease in the size of monitored wildlife populations (WWF 2024) and the world has already exceeded the safe operating space for six of the nine planetary boundaries (Richardson et al. 2023). Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to set new records year-on-year, with the 2023 record of 57.1 GtCO2e a 1.3% increase from 2022 levels (UNEP 2024). The world’s top climate scientists issued a harrowing report in 2024, warning that the world is on the brink of an “irreversible climate disaster” (Ripple et al. 2024). In an unprecedented move, they illustrated this article with not just graphs, but a series of photographs to illustrate the human suffering already unfolding as a result of climate change.

To understand why the needle is not shifting in the right direction, we need to look at other patterns in industry and the global economy, and specifically the explosive growth of the fourth, and more recently, fifth industrial revolutions and the social innovations they engender. Industrial revolutions are prompted by revolutionary technologies that change what is produced and the way things are produced, and this, in turn, changes ways of working and living (Groumpos 2021). The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) (Schwab 2016) introduced new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds to fundamentally change the way humans experience and interact with the world. These technologies range from robotics and artificial intelligence that allow marvels such as autonomous vehicles and additive manufacturing, to new haptic human-machine interfaces and virtual reality systems and the use of machine learning and large language models to drive innovation in everything from financial, health and communication systems to the transition to renewable energy. However, there are concerns that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not aligned with the goals of sustainability or the psychological needs of humans, and there have been several attempts to define the next step; a Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) (European Commission 2021). While it is difficult to draw clear boundaries between 4IR and 5IR, as the one builds so closely on the other, there is growing consensus that 5IR technologies should be human-centred and focus on human-machine interactions for greater human, and hopefully, planetary well-being through innovations such as collaborative robotics, the merging of cyberspace and physical space through virtual reality, and the integration of digital technology and biotechnology (Noble et al. 2022).

Exciting as this may be, the unfortunate fact is that these 4IR and 5IR technologies and their basis in a largely extractive manufacturing and economic paradigm is supercharging the very social and environmental ills the world hoped to overcome through the SDGs and the various biodiversity and climate treaties. While traditionally energy-intensive industries such as transportation and the built environment have taken great strides in reducing energy demand, this reduction has become meaningless as the digital world, and the lifestyles it encourages, gobbles up energy and resources thus cancelling out many of the gains made in other sectors. Data centres are responsible for 2% of total GHG emissions, with predictions that by 2040, digital data storage will contribute up to 14% of the world's carbon emissions (Thangam et al. 2024). This excludes energy consumption and emissions as part of the lifecycle of IT hardware manufacturing and software development and end-user energy consumption. It also excludes other associated ecological impacts such as water consumption and the mining of rare earth minerals. The truly terrifying part is that a large share of this impact is driven by the attention economy (Davenport & Beck 2001), especially social media and its influencer culture built on conspicuous overconsumption

It is not possible to put the genie back in the bottle, so our only option is to push through to a Sixth Industrial Revolution (6IR) that offers an alternative pathway that may just allow Homo sapiens to survive its own folly. Right now, we are at a crossroads. We can continue our cyberpunk journey towards transhumanism, pursuing the development of technologies that combine information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and cognitive science such as molecular engineering and natural organic artificial intelligence systems (Chourasia et al. 2022; Ruiz Estrada 2024). However, this is not a path that will help us to navigate and survive ecological overshoot and the coming climate calamity, let alone regenerate the dying social-ecological systems on which we depend.

Instead, the next industrial revolution should be based on the sciences and goals of life. This ecological 6IR flips the script on what defines an industrial revolution by prompting a shift towards an industrial model based on how nature works. It shifts the technology focus away from digital innovation to bio-based and biotechnical innovation and from extractive to regenerative modes of production. The challenge for future research then lies in defining and developing three core aspects of the 6IR:

• The way things are produced:
  Benyus (2002) proposed that in a biomimetic world we would manufacture, farm and develop the way animals, plants and ecosystems do, with technology and manufacturing processes that are life-friendly (i.e. at low temperature and low pressure conditions) and abide by the laws of nature, such as running on sunlight, circularity, and symbiotic cooperation. Manufacturing can include a spectrum of practices from growing biodegradable and organic self-healing materials for additive manufacturing to bio-hybrid construction and swarm robotics. The goal is to create construction processes and structures that mimic natural systems and enhance ecological harmony.
• What is produced:
  The 6IR should produce technologies and materials that work in partnership with nature, using organic materials and ecosystemic intelligence. Examples include organic electronics, algae batteries and 3^rd generation bio-based materials such as biopolymers using swarm robotics to construct structures. At a larger scale it produces living buildings constructed from biobased materials, and even living biomass, to create adaptive, biophilic and more-than-human living environments using approaches such as interspecies design, design for biodiversity and regenerative design.
• Ways of living and working:
  The biggest challenge to creating built environments that would support an ecological way of living is not technological, but to find ways for buildings and cities that create connections with body, nature and community, both physically and psychologically, to replace the attention economy’s hold on our collective psyche and for humans learning to live consciously in the world, drawing on both ancestral wisdom and neuroscience.

The threads of this new, nature-based and nature-embracing industrial revolution are already being spun in many different places and only need to be woven together into the fabric for a radically different, live-affirming future in which all our descendants can thrive, not just survive.

References

Benyus, J.M. (2002). Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: HarperCollins Perennial (3^rd ed.).

Chourasia, S., Tyagi, A., Pandey, S.M., Walia, R.S. & Murtaza, Q. (2022). Sustainability of industry 6.0 in global perspective: benefits and challenges. MAPAN (Journal of Metrology Society of India) 37, 443–452. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12647-022-00541-w

Davenport, T. & Beck, J. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge: MA: Harvard Business School Press.

European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Renda, A., Schwaag Serger, S., Tataj, D., Morlet, A. et al. (2021). Industry 5.0, a transformative vision for Europe: Governing systemic transformations towards a sustainable industry. Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/17322

Groumpos, P.P. (2021). A critical historical and scientific overview of all industrial revolutions, IFAC-Papers Online, 54(13), pp 464-471. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.10.492

Noble, S.M., Mende, M., Grewal, D & Parasuraman, A. (2022). The fifth industrial revolution: how harmonious human–machine collaboration is triggering a retail and service [r]evolution, Journal of Retailing, 98 (2), 199-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2022.04.003

Ripple, W.J., Wolf, C.,  Gregg, J.W.,  Rockström, J., Mann, M.E., Oreskes, N., Lenton,T .M., Rahmstorf, S., Newsome, T.M.,  Chi Xu, Svenning, J., Cardoso Pereira, C., Law, B.E. & Crowther, T.W. (2024). The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth. BioScience, biae087, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087  

Richardson, K., Steffen, W., Lucht, W., Bendsten, J., Cornell, S.E., Donges, J.F., Drüke, M., Fetzer, I., Govindasamay, B. & Röckstrom, J. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances.9(37). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

Ruiz Estrada, M.A. (2024). The seventh industrial revolution (IR 7.0). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4720983 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4720983

Schwab, K. (2016). The Fourth Industrial Revolution. New York: Crown Publishing Group

Thangam, D., Muniraju, H., Ramesh, R., Narasimhaiah, R., Muddasir Ahamed Khan, N., Booshan, S., Booshan, B., Manickam, T. & Sankar Ganesh, R. (2024). Impact of data centers on power consumption, climate change, and sustainability. Dinesh Kumar, K., et al (eds.) Computational Intelligence for Green Cloud Computing and Digital Waste Management. New York: IGI Global Scientific Publishing. Pp. 60-83. https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-1552-1.ch004

United Nations. (2024). The Sustainable Development Goals Report. New York: United Nations Publications.

UNEP. (2024). Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please! Nairobi: United National Environment Progreamme. https://wedocs.unep.org/20.500.11822/46404

WWF. (2024). Living Planet Report 2024 – A System in Peril. Gland, Switzerland: WWF

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