Colombia. Technology cuts across every aspect of modern life for socially integrated human beings. It doesn't matter if we work in the fields, if we teach in a school, if we drive a taxi or if we are employees of a supermarket. Likewise, whether to inform ourselves, to communicate, to socialize or to pay taxes, we all at some point deliver and receive information in the network of networks.
Hence, there are those who claim that we are going through the fifth industrial revolution and argue that human empowerment that leaves repetitive tasks to robots, collaborative robotization, speed and quality or personalized manufacturing are some of its characteristics. However, it is enough to ask whether there is behind the aforementioned features a new disruptive technology or simply a particular version of the disruptions of the fourth industrial revolution (robotization, digitalization and incorporation of artificial intelligence into research, processes and products).
In my opinion, without new disruptive technology, there is no "new" revolution and I am convinced that the fifth industrial revolution has two serious prospects that go much further: The brain internet interface on the one hand and quantum computing on the other.
The first will occur when humanity solves the fundamental problem of the brain-internet interface: the speed of loading information.
Today, our network of human brains communicates with the internet with a set of huge multimedia channels that allow the "download" and interpretation of large volumes of information, mainly through sight and hearing. However, the flow of information from the brain to the Internet is still carried out with a poor speed: that of the computer keyboard, of both thumbs on the cell phone screen, or by the spoken text (speech recognition).
The fifth industrial revolution may come then, when the brain-machine interface has been solved. When (either by implantation of devices, or by external connectivity technologies such as helmets, microelectrodes, or "wearable" devices (wearables) we manage to make requirements, queries and commands to the web.
It is enough to imagine all the people capable of accessing the internet with thought, to see a disruption that will change everything, even work to such an extent, that history will agree to coin it as the fifth industrial revolution.
The same goes for quantum computing. Today there are still processes in the data sciences and artificial intelligence that find the limitation in the processing power of digital computers. The enormous power of the calculation clusters behaves however as a technological limitation when it comes to solving problems in real time.
Quantum computing, on the other hand, achieves processing capabilities that are superior by an order of magnitude than would be achieved if it were possible to integrate the full sum of all the current microprocessors on the planet.
Quantum computing, together with artificial intelligence is then the second disruption that appears on the horizon as a prospect of the fifth industrial revolution.
We don't know for sure yet what disruptive technology will be seen in the future as the one that gave birth to a new industrial revolution. Today, quantum computing and the brain-internet interface are presented as emerging. Perhaps it is another that does not yet appear on the horizon. What we do know is that what we are experiencing are simple technological consequences of the fourth industrial revolution that is shown in different versions and improvements, all arising from the same disruption that sustains it.
Analysis by José Luis Córica, PhD.
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