The Industrial Revolution, as it is generally accepted, was a series of innovations in production technology that began in the sixties of the eighteenth century and had an impact on a global scale.
The industrial revolution is generally divided into four stages, that is, the so-called four industrial revolutions, which are typically represented by steam engines, motors, computers and clean energy artificial intelligence.
Recently released, the large model SORA that uses text to generate ** has been dubbed by many as a typical symbol of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
It is also said that the trend of artificial intelligence replacing people is becoming widespread in China on a large scale, compared to SORA, which cannot be used in Japan and is more used in entertainment, which has a direct increase in productivity.
With regard to artificial intelligence, we can start by looking back at the history of the Industrial Revolution.
In the author's understanding, there are some deviations between the Industrial Revolution and the accepted narrative.
The first industrial revolution: the large-scale application of the steam engine, which solved the problem of power for production.
The second industrial revolution: although the motor is also an innovative existence, but it is only an improvement of the production power, the real revolution, when the assembly line launched by Ford.
The assembly line, which is commonplace in China, is the first time in human history that the industry has been divided in detail, which greatly improves production efficiency.
The Third Industrial Revolution: Compared with new things such as computers, biology, and aerospace, the quality management method represented by process control theory has successfully solved the poor quality problems encountered by human large-scale production.
A typical example of this is the improvement in the quality of parachutes. People with a certain amount of common sense should know that the parachute is 100% qualified, not by the boss of the parachute production enterprise to try it out personally, but by the industrial revolution represented by quality management (in fact, the parachute is not 100% qualified).
The Fourth Industrial Revolution: The quality system represented by ISO9001 is becoming more popular around the world, which may be a more representative industrial revolution.
This process control makes ultra-large-scale cheap production a reality. A range of commodities, including agricultural machinery, fertilizers, chips and mobile phones, have the greatest impact on them, without exception, the yield rate.
Only when goods are cheap enough can people not run for three meals a day, but instead spend their energy on more valuable areas that cannot be replaced by machines.
This is in line with China's macro-level "doing everything possible to increase residents' income", and it is also the general trend of development around the world, that is, the goal of production is not to produce, but to be cheap enough to be consumed.
Therefore, as long as it is cheap enough, there will always be a market, which I believe everyone will agree.
This is also evidenced by the change in the proportion of industrial added value in GDP.
The general trend is that the influence of industrial added value in the economy is getting lower and lower.
Generally speaking, the value created by screwing on the production line will be lower and lower than the value created by brushing ** on the mobile phone, that is, artificial intelligence represented by SORA, which is more valuable in terms of consumption rather than productivity.
It's hard for those who come from the assembly line to understand this.
But we should try to understand, because this is about the way we live in the future: consumption can create more value, and we can try to free ourselves from the shackles of the assembly line and go to the field of consumption to find a way to survive.