The fourth industrial revolution reconsidered: on advancing cosmopolitan education

Abstract

Since Klaus Schwab’s (2016) phenomenal book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, commonly depicted as 4IR, the concept has significantly altered the multiple ways universities in (South) Africa look at or aim to address their institutional practices, most notably, teaching and learning encounters. Schwab’s (2016, 7) reference to a “new technology” revolution that would transform the way humans interact in the world today is inspired by “emerging technology breakthroughs, covering wide-ranging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, the internet of things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum computing”. In this leading article, we offer an argument in defence of prioritising what we refer to as the cosmopolitan human condition if any meaningful sense were to be made of what Schwab (2016, 7) refers to as the amplification of “fusion of technologies across the physical, digital and biological worlds”. In reference to our understandings of university teaching and learning, we give an account of how such encounters ought to be looked at in light of the new fusion of technology idea – that is, 4IR