Digitalisation is a product of industrial
revolution. In fact, prior to the commencement of industrial revolution, human
civilisation was at its agrarian age. The commencement of industrial revolution
marks the dawn of a new era in human history.
Interestingly, the industrial revolution has not
been static; new discoveries keep coming up and they are rapidly changing the
way we live. Cryptocurrency is one of these newest discoveries; it is the
product of the present industrial revolution, which is actually the 4th.
To grasp the picture, the following is a brief
discussion of the four industrial revolutions and the birth of the Digital Age
that brought cryptocurrency into existence.
As the Renaissance Age, which is the Middle Age,
with its agrarian industries that swept across some parts of Africa, Europe,
and the New World (American continents) was waning off, a new age began to
emerge from mid seventeenth century AD.
When Thomas Savery in 1698 patented a machine that
could effectively draw water from flooded mines using steam pressure,
which was later improved upon and commercialized by Thomas Newcomen and James
Watt, the First Industrial Revolution was finally born.
The First
Industrial Revolution was the Age of Mechanization characterized by the use of
machines to power everything from agriculture to textile manufacturing. This
made factory work much easier than it was the agrarian age.
Unskilled factory laborers became very cheap and
plentiful. The factory laborers worked long hours, often in unsafe conditions.
Due to the sudden new lease of life, families even allowed their children to
work in factories, putting in 14-hour shifts alongside adults.
Besides the birth of mechanized factories, the
First Industrial Revolution also marked the rise of urbanization.
In 1802, Richard Trevithick patented a
"high pressure engine" and created the first
steam-powered locomotive engine on rails. By 1814, George Stephenson
and his son, Robert, improved upon Trevithick’s work to build the first practical
steam locomotive to haul coal at the mines. As such, many people trooped into
big towns and cities in search of jobs and better life.
This first wave of Industrial Revolution (IR)
continued into the 19th century.
As the industrial revolution swept on, advancements
in science soon started to spread beyond the confines of the laboratory into
new territories. New forms of industries began to emerge.
Antonio Meucci invented the first analog phone in
1849 in Italy, Charles Bourseul devised another analog phone in 1854 in France
while Alexander Graham Bell won the first USA patent for analog phone in 1876.
About three years after Alexander Bell patented his
telephone, on New Year’s Eve of 1879, Thomas Edison hanged his electric lamp at
his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, USA, heralding the birth of
commercial electricity in the world.
Few hours after Thomas Edison hanged his electric
bulb in New Jersey, in faraway across the Atlantic Ocean, Carl Benz drove his
Benz motorcar (now called Mercedez Benz), the world’s first gasoline engine
production, down the street of Mannheim town of Germany, marking the dawn
of automobile industry in the world.
Thus, the First Industrial Revolution was rapidly
dwindling, giving way to the emerging of an analog world, the Second Industrial
Revolution.
In 1903, yet
another analog technology was born when Wilbur and Orville Wright flew their
first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA.
About five years later (1908), Henry Ford’s company
was mass producing the ground-breaking Ford Model T, a car with a gasoline
engine built on an assembly line in his factories.
At this early 20th century, John D. Rockefeller had
started a modernised version of petroleum oil exploration and marketing in an
industrial scale via his company Standard Oil, which was the parent of today’s
companies like Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, ARCO, Conoco, and Sohio.
Soon many other analog technological works were
emerging such as chemical fertilisers for agriculture (developed by Fritz
Haber in 1913) and television (invented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth in
1927).
One remarkable aspect of this Second Industrial
Revolution, which is the Age of Analog, was the rise of specialised skills such
as doctors, scientists, and industrialists. These specialised skills reaped
massive financial gains as big industries were built around them.
This was in contrast to the abundant unskilled
factory workforce of the First Industrial Age. Meaning that the huge
remuneration enjoyed by the unskilled workers of the First IR was gradually
being overtaken by the specialized workforce of the 2nd IR.
As these changes were sweeping across the world,
people were thinking of faster ways to communicate and travel. Research works
in these areas became more fervent. By 1956, William Shockley, John Bardeen and
Walter Brattain were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for their researches on
semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.
Semiconductors were employed in the
manufacture of various kinds of electronic devices, including diodes,
transistors, and integrated circuits. Such devices have found wide
application because of their compactness, reliability, power efficiency, and
low cost.
From late
1950’s, using transistor effect of semiconductors, International Business Machines
(IBM), an international company founded in 1911, began to manufacture and
market several large computer models, the main frame computers.
As the
knowledge of computing science grew, the idea of making one computer to “talk”
with another computer became prominent.
In July 1961,
Leonard Kleinrock at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published
the first paper on how to network two computers. Leonard convinced another
MIT researcher, Lawrence G. Roberts, to test the idea.
To explore
this, in 1965 working with Thomas Merrill, Roberts connected the TX-2 computer
in Massachusets to the Q-32 in California with a low speed dial-up telephone
line, thus, creating the first wide-area computer network ever built.
The following year, 1966, Roberts developed the
computer network concept further and quickly put together a plan for Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), publishing it in 1967. ARPANET
received funding from the US Defense Department. The goal was to assist in
sharing data among the US army and also for the university campuses.
The formation of ARPANET is what developed into our
modern internet.
Once computers began to talk to each other over
networks, however, the problem became a little more complex – there was a need
to be able to put a message in a digital envelope and address it to a specific
recipient.
By 1971, Ray Tomlinson, who worked for Bolt Beranek
and Newman as an ARPANET contractor, invented the electronic mail (e-mail, for
short), picking the @ sign as the symbol to store, send and receive the digital
message. By 1972, Ray perfected the act of sending, receiving and storing
digital messages.
Thus, not only the internet was born but an email
was discovered to be able to run on the internet. This is the Third Industrial
Revolution, the dawn of the Digital Age.
By 1975, Henry Kieffer from the Swiss PTT
suggested the idea of digital cellular voice telecommunications among European
countries.
Over the next few years, universities, industrial
institutions and laboratories were all drawn into this exciting new opportunity
– to digitalise Europe’s mobile networks. The result was the birth of Global
System for Mobile Communications (GSM) by which European nations quickly
rallied round and signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Copenhagen in 1987 to
promote GSM.
The birth of internet, email, and GSM completely
transformed industrial activities. With just a personal computer or a GSM
phone, an individual could reach millions of people with his product.
In 1975, Bill Gates seized upon this digital
development to found Microsoft, a company that produces window software for
computers. By 1976, Steve Jobs and his friends, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne,
founded the Apple company to produce digital phones.
In 1989, Tim
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (www) and developed “hypertext
documents” to be viewed by “browsers” using a client-server architecture. This
www invention was integrated to the internet to form what we now have as
browsers, websites (dot com), and internet service provider (ISP).
These activities sparked the enthusiasm of business
owners around the world to take their businesses to the internet’s world wide
web for greater exposure to customers.
This internet boom saw the rise of dot-com
millionaires.
For example, in 1994 Jeff Bezos founded Amazon for
e-commercial activities in which you can shop online. That same year (1994),
Jerry Yang and David Filo founded Yahoo while Larry Page and Sergey Brin
founded Google in 1998 as internet search engines.
These were individuals that took advantage of the
emerging Digital Age to reap huge financial profits. Never again will things
remain the same.
The digital revolution marks the shift from analog
technology to digital technology. It is the digital revolution that has
brought into existence the Digital Age, and it began in full swing with the
birth of the internet.
However, the question still remained: “Is there a
way to utilize the internet in day-to-day activities?” From the beginning of
the 21st century, connecting the internet to things to increase efficiency and
effectiveness started to become popular.
In 1999, Kevin Ashton coined the term Internet
of Things (IoT), initially to promote Radio-frequency identification
(RFID) technology, to describe the connectivity of internet to daily
activities. The popularity of the term IoT did not accelerate until
2010/2011 and reached mass market in early 2014.
This means most of the activities being carried out
can actually be done without humans acting as the central control. Indeed, a
new day has dawn, ushering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Age of
Information.
While IoT was sweeping across the world in the
first decade of the 21st century, another technology was also becoming popular.
It was all about the building of machines (robots) to actually perform the jobs
being done by humans. This technology leveraged on the ideas of Alan Turing,
the creator of the Turing Test, who published Computing Machinery and
Intelligence in 1950.
By the first decade of 21st century, machines were
successfully built to perform intelligent works and solve many real life
problems in academia and industry. This field is now known as Artificial
Intelligence (AI).
The goal of IoT and AI is to produce more efficient
and effective results at a much faster speed. Building on previous works of men
like Albert Einstein, David Deutsch invented quantum computing in 2007 with the
goal of increasing data processing at a superlative speed. Thus, what will take
a thousand years to perform, quantum computers can perform same tasks in split
of seconds.
Quantum computing would greatly
contribute to advance the fields of finance, military affairs, drug design and
discovery, aerospace designing, utilities (nuclear fusion), polymer design,
artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, etcetera.
One aspect of the 4th IR that is becoming quite
prominent is Nucleic Engineering in which the deoxyribonucleic
(DNA) of cells will be genetically re-engineered to produce a super breed. This
technology is set to disrupt medical practice in a dimension unimaginable.
For example, CRISPR (which is an acronym for
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology, used to
detect, modify and even destroy DNA that codes for some diseases such as
thalassemia.
In 2020, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines
were produced and commercialized for the first time to fight against Covid-19
disease. Vaccines that usually took about 5 to 10 years of research to produce
and commercialize, only took about 3 months in the case of mRNA vaccine.
Such rapid speed is the hallmark of the 4th IR. It
is the Age of Information, characterized by five fundamental elements:
• Blockchain Technology
• Internet of Things
• Artificial Intelligence
• Quantum Computing, and
• Genetic Engineering.
Those who understand these transformational changes
do take advantage to reap financial success. For example, Ellon Musk, in 2003,
founded Tesla company to produce new kinds of automobile – the driverless
electric cars. In other words, you really don’t need to go to any driving
school to learn driving as the car does all of that for you.
In 2004, Facebook was founded, heralding the birth
of social media with faster speed of communication. In 2006, Jack Dorsey and
his friends founded Twitter; WhatsApp was launched in February 2009 by two
former employees of Yahoo, Brian Acton and Jan Koum. Kevin Systrom, who worked
for Facebook, founded Instagram in 2010 while the two brothers, Pavel and
Nikolai Durov, founded messaging app Telegram in August 2013.
In the same vein, no longer do we need government
and banks to print and control money! Money is going back to the hands of the
people.
Sadly, not many people quickly appreciate the
changing times and season. For you to benefit from these sweeping changes, you
must understand that money is changing with these changing times and
season.
Table 1: The Four Industrial Revolutions | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st IR | 2nd IR | 3rd IR | 4th IR | |
Definition | Age of Mechanization | Age of Analog | Age of Digitalization | Age of Information |
| Onset Time | 1700 | 1850 | 1950 | 2000 |
| Inventions | Steam engines (e.g. Locomotive engines), textile manufacturing | Gasoline engines, airplanes, chemical fertilizer, television | Semiconductors, mainframe computers, personal computers, internet | Blockchain, robots, DNA sequencing and coding |
| Impact | Rise of Urbanization and Factories | Rise of Mass production of analog electronics | Rise of digital electronics and e-commerce | Rise of Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Quantum Computing |
| Job | Change from Agrarian to Mechanical production with abundantly cheap unskilled factory laborers. | Rise of specialized skills, e.g. doctors, scientists, industrialists. | Change from analog to digital technologies. | Disruptive technology |
| Key Players | George and Robert Stephenson. | Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Wright brothers, J. D. Rockefeller. | Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. | Satoshi Nakamoto, Jeff Bezos, Ellon Musk. |
| Money Type | Metal money | Paper money | Electronic Money | Digital Currency |