Imagine sitting in a time machine and traveling back in time. Not a year. Not a thousand or a million years. I’m taking you 4.5 billion years back to witness the birth of this beautiful planet Earth we now call home. The journey is long, tiring, and arduous, but let’s use the time machine to breeze through the highlights.
While the formation of our planet was an exciting event, all we’ll see on our journey is fire and dust gradually settling to form the round ball of natural beauty. This predominantly red ball turns blue and builds its patches of land all over, without any major changes, for the next billion years.
A billion years later, something magical happens: organic life comes into being. The earth’s climate goes through its cycles, and species come in and out of existence. However, things are transforming so slowly that no noticeable changes occur over long periods in our time machine journey.
Perhaps the most significant event and arguably the most relevant to us occurs almost another 3.5 billion years later, around 300,000 years ago, through the evolution of modern-day humans (Greshko 2021). The human ancestors change the way the world looks through their superior intelligence. To understand how much they transform this planet, simply take away everything manmade from this world. That puts us back in the caveman’s world. While we have the time machine, let’s zoom in on this very journey that modern-day humans went through. We start from the hunting society, also called Society 1.0.
Society 1.0: The Hunting Society
Society 1.0 is a primitive society, with people hunting on demand to get their food. They hunt, they feed, and the process repeats. Parents provide for their children and feed them until they can hunt on their own. To save, be saved, and hunt were the daily chores. It’s been the same routine day after day for thousands of years.
Only after you’ve waited for a considerable period on fast-forwarding the journey, you’ll get some light, literally. The ancestors master the art of using fire. A major shift in climate, most probably caused by drought and starvation, drives them out of Africa. The concept of a shared society begins, meaning some people hunt and others focus on building houses, making hunting tools, and crafting pottery. They exchange goods and services for survival.
This standard of life persists for over 290,000 years without any noteworthy mention. Think about this for a minute. We are not talking about scores of years or hundreds, not even thousands. No noticeable change was observed in our ancestors’ lives for almost 3,000 centuries (Dorey 2021).
Society 2.0: The Farming Society
We start to notice a significant change in our lives starting at around the 290,000-year mark, roughly 10,000 years ago (National Geographic Society 2022), through the domestication of plants and animals. Part of it is due to the increasing demand, driven by an increased population and decreased supply because of overhunting. Our ancestors also become a bit smarter and overcome the fate given to them by nature and grow things instead of depending on what is available. This soil-fed society evolves civilizations around the agricultural land and are termed as farming society, or Society 2.0.
Our ancestors are no longer at the mercy of Mother Nature to feed them. They grow their own plants and rear animals. While the most necessities are taken care of, is that enough? Well, that is a small victory over nature; our ancestors in this society are still stuck in their little societies, isolated from everyone. They are still dependent on nature for other essential resources, such as water and light. Even though they grow smarter, they’re vulnerable to natural disasters, blood-thirsty animals, and the like. And then, there’re again 100 centuries of no prominent evolutionary changes. Sure, civilizations proliferate, languages will be come more complex, agriculture evolves, we figure out ways to use animals and birds as helpers, life expands into other parts of the world, and trading methods improve. If we move a human being from 10,000 years ago into a society from a few 100 years ago, she would have only a limited amount of catching up to do with societal changes.
Society 3.0: The Industrial Society
Suddenly, the quiet, serene world turns into a bustling, rumbling, and rattling cooking space of hot, molten, spinning, giant machine-made items never seen before. We find ourselves in 18th-century Great Britain at the outset of the great Industrial Revolution that later spread like wildfire to the rest of the world (ongoing even to date). This marks the turn toward the great Industrial Society, Society 3.0.
Mass production of the greatest of the inventions—locomotives and lightbulbs—garner the limelight. Things used to be handcrafted are now mass produced, which will eventually lead to shifting the manufacturing of everything from in-house and mom and pop shops to factories. Machines are created to replace hard manual labor. These machines not only make things easier, they do it faster, and at a scale only matched by a structured supply chain. Technology rapidly develops, creating more efficient factories. Growth in supply brings goods to everyone, raising the demand. Factories create millions of jobs around the world, growing the global economy.
A bulb pops up in the mind of the great American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, and the whole world lights up, conquering the night for the first time. The world starts to grow smaller through inventions in communication technologies. Telephones and telegrams bring people across the globe together. The mighty steam engines huff, followed by more powerful combustion engines, leading to the creation of automobiles, trains, and eventually airplanes. Further developments in science and technology help us further tackle nature’s difficulties, including advancements in medical science. We figure out ways to produce and distribute energy. We expand to parts of the world previously unknown. Brand-new industries evolve around specific products and services. And most importantly, the change occurs at such an extremely fast pace that changes in normal play speed look like a fast-forwarded tape.
Think about it. It takes our planet around 4.5 billion years to produce humans. It takes us, the humans, almost just 300,000 years to win over nature for our necessity: food. Compare that to the progress made in just two centuries since the Industrial Revolution.
Society 4.0: The Information Society
Our time machine is doing an excellent job of giving us a tour of our history, slowing down at the right spots and giving us the highlights of our spectacular 4.5-billion-year past. It detects another major change and slows in the 1970s to mark the beginning of yet another society, a society full of computers and information, also known as Society 4.0 (Encyclopedia of Communication and Information 2022). Experiments to create computers to process data finally succeed with the invention of circuit-based modern-day computers after multiple attempts through punched card, steam, and vacuum tube-based technologies, among others. The evolution of the Internet gives everyone the access to information, bringing people around the globe closer together.
Information technology percolates deep into the human psyche, their lifestyle, and their industries, thus increasing dependency across all domains. Humans turn to computers to solve complex problems and get the necessary information. Interpersonal communication improves significantly, allowing anyone across the globe to communicate instantly. Computers grow smaller and more powerful. Thanks to cloud computing, big chunks of data are no longer a human hassle.
The Industrial Revolution not only continues into this new information society, it goes to an all-new level. Information technology shapes businesses and drives their fate. Due to their access to information, businesses and individuals make better decisions. Businesses that embrace technology and take advantage of it prosper. The ones that don’t, risk annihilation. Big businesses, such as Blockbuster, Kodak, Circuit City, Sears, and numerous others, get demolished due to lack of innovation.
The good is this: the change picks up more speed, compared to the previous industrialized society. Modern techniques pervade faster across all industries. Tech companies become standalone businesses and rank among the top, completely disrupting almost every business in existence. Entirely new tech-focused subindustries emerge across every sector. For example, the fintech industry evolves through companies, such as PayPal, Square, Marcus, and so on, disrupts traditional financial services firms, and redefines banking. Social media firms such as Facebook disrupt traditional media. Entertainment-tech companies such as Netflix disrupt traditional entertainment companies. Auto-tech companies such as Tesla disrupt traditional automakers. Retail-tech companies such as Amazon disrupt traditional retailers. Hospitality-tech companies such as Airbnb disrupt traditional hospitality companies. Travel-tech companies such as Uber redefine traditional taxis and limousine businesses. Food-tech companies such as Doordash transform the food industry. The list goes on.
Finally, it’s time that we gave the time machine a much-wanted break to reflect upon what we witnessed. Back to the present day.
While a few societies are still in 3.0 or even 2.0—in some rare cases, in remote parts of the world—4.0 is where most of the world is now. From the automobile industry to warehousing, from small businesses to unicorns, and from Arctica to Antarctica, no business in any industry is immune to this information revolution. The only way forward for any business in any corner of the world is to add technology to the tail end, or risk going out of business.
It’s not just businesses. Information technology dominates everyone’s day-to-day lives. Need a ride? No more calling a taxi. Order an Uber. Need to go somewhere you don’t know? There’s a map at your fingertips. Even better, with the emergence of self-driving cars, you could simply tell the car your destination and do nothing. Want to talk to your mom across the ocean? Forget about the long lines outside a telephone booth. Use a messaging app for free. Need to send a message to your friend? Writing and posting letters is history. Simply post it on Facebook. More importantly, a trip to the store is no longer needed. Order things online. Smartphones replace landlines and even televisions. Slowly, any individual without basic technical knowledge becomes irrelevant. We don’t need to go very far into the past and bring someone along to see the change. A visit from a decade ago into the present would absolutely blow the minds of anyone, should something like that happen.
Society 5.0: The Next-Generation Society
We are currently going through another major change, one that will be way different from anything we have seen thus far. While computers have evolved greatly in our information society, we turn to one machine for one set of tasks and a different machine for another. Another way to look at it is that humans babysit machines. We are currently entering a brand-new society, Society 5.0—a futuristic society where machines communicate with each other without an intermediary to provide a coordinated end-to-end experience to their human masters. Machines learn over time and become smarter to serve their master the best. Humans are at the center of society, surrounded by these smart, connected machines that enrich life. Whether we like it or not, this is happening, and we must get ready, or else we will face disruption.
So, in this seemingly unpredictable world, can you envisage how the world is going to look like in the future, how we’re going to contribute to it, and how we can benefit from it? But first, we must analyze our past to learn from it. We must understand the currents ahead to successfully navigate through them. The purpose of this book is to do exactly that: to equip you with the information you need about the future while taking a glimpse at how we got to today so that you can exploit the future in your own way. This book will help you get a 360-degree view of the future so that you can make a choice—not just any choice but an informed choice—that is right for you in the ocean of future possibilities to make the best use of your skills in a world that waits for none.