There is no Malaysian 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'

Updated 6 years ago · Published on 26 Mar 2018 9:00AM · 7 Comments

READING from notes last December at the Umno-sponsored Women in Politics Summit, Wanita Umno head Shahrizat Jalil’s 32-year-old daughter, Izzana Salleh, announced breathlessly: “We are on the brink of a technological revolution, one that I think will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and interact with each other.”

It is clear that Barisan Nasional’s general election campaign is going to depend heavily on a vague promise to usher in a so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, or “4IR” of “holograms”, “robots”, “artificial intelligence”, and other emerging technologies to the rakyat.

However, there is no evidence that BN can manage to bring such an industrial revolution to Malaysians at all.

For one thing, distinguished economists like Jeremy Rifkin and Klaus Schwab still disagree on whether even a third industrial revolution has occurred anywhere on Earth. In contrast, MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson prefer to call a different set of emerging technologies “the Second Machine Age”. Former AOL executive Steve Case calls other emerging technologies “the Third Wave”. And the researcher Elizabeth Garbee was even more direct: “This is not the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

(As far as Shahrizat’s daughter sees, industrial revolutions coincidentally only appear around general election time.)

Even if an industrial revolution belatedly arrives on Malaysia’s shores, BN is still unprepared to lead Malaysians through one. Not a single “4IR” law or regulation has been written by Parliament. BN politicians have been making some concerned noises about a so-called 4IR “blueprint”, but without a stronger education system in Malaysia, it’s hard to see how this campaign promise will be kept. The future generation’s skills are just not there.  

Worse, both the United Nations International Labour Organisation and Khazanah estimate that “more than half of jobs in Malaysia face a high risk of being lost to automation over the next two decades.” This month, a World Economic Forum readiness report identified Malaysia as one of the world’s least-prepared countries, in terms of technology and innovation, to handle an industrial revolution. (The report also described a high rate of corruption in Malaysia.)

Cyberjaya is internationally regarded as a tech failure, and every year Kuala Lumpur fails to rank into the world’s top tech-startup entrepreneurship cities.

Malaysians should carefully evaluate BN’s exaggerated promises about ushering in a Malaysian “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. As many have correctly pointed out, poverty doesn’t need technology. In fact, a BN-led industrial revolution may only worsen Malaysia’s high inequality, corruption, and elite capture.

In other words, somebody in Malaysia could get even richer from a future industrial revolution. But it isn’t likely to be you or me.

* Athena Angel reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.

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Comments

  • I agree with you. BN will find a way to screw up benefiting from IR4, in the same way that BN screws up every bloody thing in the world. Look how they said 'we are going to take advantage of green technology' - stupid and useless these UMNO fellas. They are literally brainless and don't know anything about policy making.

    Posted 6 years ago by Tommy richard · Reply

  • IR4 is a must if Malaysia is not to fall behind in world rankings..

    Posted 6 years ago by MELVILLE JAYATHISSA · Reply

  • Ir4?ha ha ha this country is having amongst the slowest 4g data connections in the world ha ha ha

    Posted 6 years ago by Leslie Chan · Reply

  • “We are on the brink of a technological revolution, one that I think will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and interact with each other.”

    Sounds like the same old worn, cliched statements I've heard from government, IT industry speakers and Internet industry boosters and cyber-utopians since back in the mid 1990s when the Multimedia Super Corridor was (MSC Malaysia) was being conceived and how Malaysia would become a developed, nation with a high-tech, knowledge-rich economy by 2020, by which time, according to the Economic Transformation Programme, Malaysia would be a "high-income economy" with a gross national income per capita or RM48,000 perannum (RM4,000 per month).

    An industrial economy requires home-grown inventions, innovations, research and development facilities, design facilities and so forth but what passes a manufacturing industry in Malaysia, mostly are assembly plants assembling products for foreign manufacturers or at best Malaysian products based upon imported technologies and designs.

    So if Malaysia has not even met the basic requirements for a first industrial revolution, what more a fourth industrial revolution.

    Sure, factories based upon intelligent production machines and robots all intelligently working, communicating and coordinating production with each other based upon imported technologies but such production facilities will require much fewer workers and those employed will require above average skills, so what happens to those workers who are unable to acquire such skills?

    Experience in the west has shown that most of them have had to opt for low-wage, low-skilled jobs in the services sector and even these are gradually being eliminated by automation and robotics.

    Re-training to "move up the skills and value chain"?? Great in theory but how many workers have the capability to benefit from such retraining and even if all can, how many higher skilled jobs will there be higher up that skills and value chain?

    The experience in the west shows that it does not work out nicely for workers like the above in reality and this is one of the reasons why right-populists like Trump won.

    Quite frankly, Malaysian decision makers should stop blindly embracing all these "flavour-of-the-day" buzzwords and think things through realistically.

    BTW. I wouldn't mind having robots serve me in those 24-hour eateries where the quality of service by overworked, underpaid and understaffed waiters suck.

    Posted 6 years ago by IT Scheiss · Reply

  • This article ironically, is the proof of its contention that no industrial or intellectual or intelligent revolution will take place in Malaysia. It has no original idea of its own. All it says is that this westerner said that or that westerner said this, and it doesn’t do that in a convincing manner. If the writer was convinced by the westerners she heard of something , she sure failed to relay her conviction to everybody else .

    Let’s be honest - Malaysians are followers - we don’t know what to do ourselves, so
    we just follow what westerners or what countries like Japan do, becuase we think they know what they are doing .

    We might have spent billions on education , but the fact that we are still a follower nation has not changed . As a matter of fact , we were better followers in the past before we spent billions than we are at present .

    In the past at least , we followed so well, that we came very close to the leaders, so much so that we al looked like leader ourselves .

    After spending billions , not only have we turned into a leading nation that knows what to do without following others, we don’t even follow that well these days.

    No revolution is going to occur here . The way we are going , not only will no change occur here, we might even miss the change that occurs somewhere else , because we are not even that good following any more .

    All the billions we spent have done it seems , is make us proud for no reason. At least in the past we were humble enough to know we sucked when we sucked , now we still have suck , but we are no longer humble anymore .

    Posted 6 years ago by Nehru Sathiamoorthy · Reply

  • Since back in the 1990s, decision makers in the Malaysian government, business consultants, some academics, some economists, many journalists and others have bought into the notion that Malaysia's economy will prosper, as well as higher incomes and higher standards of living of Malaysians willcome about if Malaysia increasingly moves towards becoming an "high-tech, information and services based, knowledge-based economy", and now over 20 years later, they are talking about Industrial revolution 4.0 being necessary for Malaysia to achieve the same thing.

    I just came across this article in Zero Anthropology which refutes such claims with regards the U.S.

    Will the “Knowledge Economy” Save Us?

    "Evidence suggests that jobs lost in manufacturing are not replaced by jobs of equal or greater skill, but rather a general move towards “unskilled” service work and rising unemployment."

    https://zeroanthropology.net/2013/11/11/will-the-knowledge-economy-save-us/

    Please note that behind all this hype, hoo-hah, BS and ballyhoo are opportunist businesses, CON-sultants and seminar circuit speakers salivating at the opportunities for them to make money of the gullibility and vanity of suckers.

    Posted 6 years ago by IT Scheiss · Reply

  • The article mentioned in the news above, 'World Economic Forum Readiness Report' reports Malaysia as one of the leading countries in 'manufacturing today that are also well positioned for the future of production'. The article reports that the leading countries (includes Malaysia) is 'positioned to facilitate global cooperation to usher in the next production paradigm (page 24 and 26 of the report). What a contrast to the information given in the news article above. What a crappy news!! Stop giving opinions and back up news with actual FACTS!!

    Posted 5 years ago by Rac G · Reply