Photo: A man ride a bicycle pass the hole in section of ruined Berlin Wall. By Tossapol Chaisamritpol

It isn’t starting with a bang, but don’t be deceived: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is underway, and companies and institutions that ignore it will be overwhelmed by it. Individuals will adapt to it as best we can, as we always have.

In short 4IR is the fusing of the digital, physical and biological spheres. It’s the interconnection of everything, bringing change in companies, jobs, schools and eventually government. Government won’t to be able to stand idly by when it sees traditional businesses upended and huge changes in how we work and study, and where.

As 4IR moves ahead one can reasonably contemplate a time when body parts will be printed, robots will prepare restaurant food and drone taxis will take us to the airport, where departures will be handled without human intervention — because you were verified through facial recognition when you bought your ticket on your smartphone, you won’t need to do anything but walk through security and onto a plane, which has a cabin crew to look after you but no pilots.

Behind and driving the revolution is artificial intelligence, commanding everything from farms, where tractors will start themselves and plow or reap without a human in sight, to street lights that turn off when nothing is moving and back on as needed, to manufacturing that will be dominated by 3D printing, better referred to as additive manufacturing.

The troubadour of 4IR is Klaus Schwab who created the World Economic Forum back in 1971, the world’s most important ideas mart known as Davos, after Davos-Klosters the Swiss resort where the forum meets every year. This year Davos kicks off on Jan. 22 and will be devoted to what Schwab, 80, a German economist and engineer, has called “Globalization 4.0”.

The first forum to look at 4IR was in 2016. Schwab has written two books on the subject — the “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution” — and has been ceaseless in promoting the future while warning of it. He told Gerard Baker, the former executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, in a TV interview that enumerating the challenges wasn’t enough, there need to be solutions as well.

A note: Don’t think you can join the 3,000 participants this year. It’s by invitation only. And if you get one, Davos hotel rooms — plain vanilla rooms – can cost $900 a night and suites can go for $5,000 a night. When I checked, there were few vacancies. The movers and shakers start early.

The three past industrial revolutions are listed by Schwab as the replacement of animal power by water and then steam power, the latter at the beginning of the 18^th century; the deployment of electricity, starting in the late 19^th century; and the digital revolution of the last part of the 20^th century.

The Davos meeting will examine the upheaval besetting the world with 4IR and how it’ll be managed. It’s what Schwab calls Globalization 4.0. “We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril,” he says.

Andre Kudelski, a Silicon Valley veteran, now head of the eponymous Swiss high-tech company that bears his name, says, “A skilled engineer can take control remotely of any connected ‘thing.’ Society has not yet realized the incredible scenarios this capability creates.”

Says Robert Shiller, a Yale University economics professor and 2013 Nobel Prize winner, “We cannot wait until there are massive dislocations in our society to prepare for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Others dream of a cleaner, safer and healthier world. Dileep George, an artificial intelligence and neuroscience researcher, quoted by the forum, says, “Imagine a robot capable of treating Ebola patients or cleaning up nuclear waste.”

Leon Trotsky, a veteran of the Russian Revolution, said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” He might well be paraphrased to say, “We may not be interested in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it is interested in us.”

On Jan. 22-25, 2019, in Davos-Klosters, a Swiss resort, the World Economic Forum meets. It is the glitteriest of conferences. The great and the good, the rich industrialists and the glamorous public intellectuals get together to sort out where humanity is headed.

Just to be invited is a kind of credential, a sort of honorary degree, a statement that you are world-class important.

There are politicians, CEOs, so-called thought leaders and the top non-governmental organizations, environmentalists and academics.

The world’s most important international conference it is, but does it work? At some level, yes. At others, no.

It stimulates thinking, but does it change anything? Reading the news coverage year after year you are inclined to think that a lot of the participants come to rehash things they have said before or ideas that have been with them for a long time. Others are stuck in ideological dogma and try to bend the facts to fit the dogma. Think socialist; think Republican.

Yet it has no competition. It is the place to float an idea. Probably no one floats more ideas than the man who founded the forum in 1971 and serves as its executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. He is a visionary German, who holds doctorates in economics and engineering from universities in Germany and Switzerland and a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

It was Schwab who, in 2016, launched the idea of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) by making it the subject of the forum that year and writing a book on it.

The 4IR is the concept that all of science and technology — from biology to nanotechnology, from quantum computing to artificial intelligence — are coming together with stunning and, at times, frightening visions of the future. A 3D printer may be making a body part while a robot is helping treat Ebola in Africa. New metals are being formulated for specific needs without human input, and farms are operating with few farmers.

In that way, with all science melding and communicating, 4IR may have consequences far beyond the previous three: first, mechanical power from water and steam; then electrical power for manufacturing; and followed by computing power and communications. Now, in the age of the Internet of Things, unity of things from artificial intelligence to advanced medicine.

Enter governments. Schwab sounds a note of warning: Will they grasp and facilitate, or will they frustrate what is happening? Will they regulate when regulation is needed? In short, will the global political class comprehend that it is in the throes of something big — bigger than it can imagine? Will it allow it to flourish while checking its Frankenstein tendencies (as with the social media companies), or will it try to subdue it or let it run to excess?

If the Davos forum has a structural weakness, it seems to me, it is that executives who are mostly middle-age and older are dealing with ideas that have been generated by young scientists, researchers and thinkers. The average age of the people in the control room for the first manned moon launch, Apollo 11, was 28. By the time NASA had become more grown-up, the average age of the control-room operators for the first space shuttle launch was 47.

Call it the sclerosis problem. I have often wondered, as civilian, large airframe design is dominated by two companies, Boeing and Airbus, whether a young engineer with a better idea would get a hearing.

It takes new companies to pursue new ideas. Those that do not grasp the speed of change fall by the way, or are just reduced in size. Half the companies of the Dow in 2000 are not there now.

The 4IR is underway here and now — it is not something in the out-years. A microcosm of 4IR is in the emergence of smart cities where telephones, computers, electricity and social welfare are fusing.

All of this raises the two great questions of our time: What is the future of work and can we save the environment in time? You will hear on these from Davos, no doubt.

A contradicting footnote to the idea that the young are the only big idea merchants: Klaus Schwab is 8o.

Photo: Visions for the South Caucasus and Central Asia. BAKU/AZERBAIJAN, 8APRIL13 – Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum. Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org)/Photo by Elmar Mustafayev. This photo is used under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

No New Year’s resolutions this year. Nary a one. Instead I am throwing myself, body and soul, into campaigns — campaigns designed to halt the slide in civilized life.

Here are my campaigns:

—Rescue the necktie: More and more men are going around naked about the throat but wearing a pocket square. Now I love pocket squares, very useful if you should meet one of those famous actresses who is always in tears. Whip it out, get it soaked and presto! It goes on eBay.

The thing is neckties are disappearing. Only businessmen on the perp walk and some politicians wear them. Even former President Barack Obama appears to have abandoned them almost entirely — a serious regression.

Ties are important. They conceal protruding Adam’s apples, turkey necks and dirty shirt fronts. Also, they are used to wipe eyeglasses and to twirl when listening to people who go on and on.

—I am pushing to get airline executives to ride “basic coach” on at least one 10-hour flight. They will learn that they are the agents of physical cruelty and weird perversity.

They have ordained travel without luggage because the fees for luggage on “basic” are so high you would be paying for another class of service if you take a suitcase.

The airline bosses should be squeezed into the amazing shrinking toilets (too small for grown-ups); they should have their knees in their faces and have to sit up as straight as a drill sergeant. They should then try to stand up after hours of contortion.

—I want a punitive tax for banks who will not speak to you but will put you through hours of automated telephone hell, in the hope that you will give up and leave them alone (with your money and their fees with which they steal that money).

—Hedge funds that shred the lives of workers and deny customer service in the name of “shareholder value” should be prosecuted for hate speech for those words. “Shareholder value” can be roughly translated as, “We’re going to screw you.” How about “customer value” or a little “social value”?

You have been on the line for hours and are begging the artificial-intelligence recording to let you hear a live human voice, even if it is originating from a faraway country and its owner is speaking English as a third language. The machine says, “Do you want to hear the main menu again?” You slide to the floor, defeated, crazed and suicidal.

I want it to be a federal crime to have a machine with a woman’s voice. They are cursed routinely with foul expletives that even a machine should not have to hear, let alone one that thinks it is a woman. #MeToo should get on this one and demand that the programmer gets the sack without pension.

—I will be working for honesty from automated systems. I do not want my computer to “welcome” me when I turn it on. I believe that it does not care, that it is not sincere and that it is, to this point in time, inanimate and has no feelings. Therefore, when machines say things like “Have a nice day,” even “thank you,” they are lying.

This will change as artificial intelligence is given artificial emotions and machines talk to us in ways so crafty we will not know whether it is a machine or a person. We may not even know if the damned thing has captured the affections of our loved ones. Some states still have an “alienation of affections” common law tort that allows the thwarted lover to sue for stolen love.

Already, you may have a good case for filing a lawsuit against Facebook for running off with your children. Albeit in plain sight.

Happy New Year.

AGRINIO, Greece — There is not a dark cloud hanging over Europe. There are a bunch of them. Taken together they account for a sense of foreboding, not quite despair, but a definite feeling that things are unraveling and, worse, that there is no leadership — second-raters at all the national helms. That was the near consensus at the annual Congress of the Association of European Journalists here in lovely western Greece.

In a class by itself in worries in Europe is Russia. It is creating trouble all over Europe, but especially in the countries that made up the former Soviet Union. It has a propaganda effort the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the Cold War — except modern technology and its social media manifestation have made it more deadly, surreptitious and deniable.

The problem is one that affects news organizations directly. Fake events vie with pernicious posting on social media and relentless cyber-undermining of systems and processes.

Disparaging democracy seems to be a primary Russian goal, making it appear unworkable.

When will Russia move from soft war to hard war? The current standoff over Crimea augers badly for vulnerable Russian neighbors, particularly the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. They are battling massive Russian undermining of truth and wonder whether they will fall again to the Russian bear.

Add to this fear a new dynamic: What will America do if Russia moves? The fear is it will do nothing. President Donald Trump’s haranguing of the NATO allies is not reassuring to them.

After the existential worries about Russia, comes Brexit. It is here and now. It is, in the eyes of continentals, a ghastly mistake that is going to cost all of Europe dearly. And what for? The vague shibboleth of “sovereignty.” Euros remain sadly hopeful that somehow there will be a second referendum in Britain and that everything will be as it was: Britain being a stabilizer among the 28 nations that make up the European Union.

Since Britain’s entry in 1973, it has been a fundamental side of an iron triangle of the three big economies: Germany, France and Britain. Britain has been an older sibling, the sensible one. Now the odds are that it will be gone, headed for an uncertain future leaving behind the wreckage of a broken marriage and squandered hope for what Tony Blair, the former Labor prime minister, used to call the “European Project.”

Hungary and the ultra-right policies of Viktor Orban are a very great worry in Europe. Similarly, Poland’s shift to the right and the success of right-wing, near fascist parties across Europe, including Austria (heretofore a center of cautious reasonableness), add to the sense of disintegration.

Two other worries are France and Italy. Along with Hungary and Poland, Italy, with an amalgamated government of the ultra-right and ultra-left, looks as determined as the other two to thumb its nose at the European Union and its rules, maybe to withdraw even. Hungary does it over press freedom and human rights, Italy over fiscal probity and open hostility to the EU.

France is a different story. Emmanuel Macron, the young president was, briefly, the great hope of Europe, but his popularity at home has slid and he has had to turn back his ambitious reforms after street demonstrations, violence and fatalities.

Add to all this shifting sand the uncertain future in Germany where Chancellor Angela Merkel is on her way out and, suddenly, she seems a more desirable leader than she was thought to be during her tenure.

Feeding the swing to the right and as far from resolution today as it was when it began, illegal immigration is an undermining pressure, un-addressed on the left and exploited on the right.

Meanwhile, across Europe press freedom is teetering: a big issue at this congress. As a Bulgarian delegate said to me, “When the press goes, so goes democracy.” Then she added, “We thought that, in some way, America would help, but not now. We are on our own.”

Europe will have a fine Christmas — it does Christmas so well. Next year though, some of the stresses may reach breaking point and the carols will have given way to uglier, discordant notes.

Photo: Germany: Bundestag building decorated on Christmas holidays.

I’d like to introduce you to the power of not believing. There is, as President Trump has pointed out, too much believing going on and it is time for a national re-evaluation.

Take, for example, all this erroneous believing about sea-level rise. Guru Trump doesn’t believe in that, so it’s not happening. Billions of dollars are being wasted in cities, from Boston to Miami, to harden against something that isn’t happening. All that’s needed is a little non-belief.

Some admirals in the U.S. Navy have failed to get the message and are alarming their commands about sea-level rise on the East Coast of the United States, endangering naval installations. Particularly they’re suggesting that Naval Station Norfolk, the huge base in Virginia, is in trouble. These admirals and their adherents in the ranks should be reassigned and given shore duty on mountains so they can see the sea level is actually down.

In some quarters, the doctrine of not believing is losing ground and believing is seeping in. Wall Street stands out. Something should be done, maybe another tax cut.

While it was bastion of the power of non-belief, Wall Street has been backsliding; heresy has shown its ugliness. Masters of the Universe, to use Tom Wolfe’s designation, applauded the tax cut, ran wild, overdosed on Chateau Haut-Brion, went crazy rebuilding their summer compounds in the Hamptons, winter cabins in Vail and pieds-a-terre in Paris. President Trump smiled, his chief economic adviser of the day — a temporary job — beamed, and first lady Melania bought a new wardrobe. Everyone upgraded their private jets and joined a Trump golf club. Life was good for non-believers and there were bigger apartments in the skies over Manhattan.

Now some of those same worthies, those who believed that their guru had pointed the way to eternal and growing wealth, are muttering about huge deficits, rising interest rates and unsupportable debt service. Ingrates. They should be taken, along with the traitor former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, to a place of re-education to learn again Trumpanomics and how to con the Arabs into buying condo glitz.

Just turn on the television and see the happy faces, the fulfillment, the sense of purpose, the smug certainty of the precious individuals who are wholly invested in non-believing. Take the happiest of all, Kellyanne Conway. What confidence, what assurance, what sense of inspired mission; how exquisitely she extinguishes facts, lays waste to data and bullies the truth. Or her colleague, the redoubtable Sarah Sanders, a devoted non-believer, who goes against an army of rude fact-pushers whenever she steps into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.

Non-belief defends Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. What a sweet, dear young man, famous in royal circles for his humanitarianism and his interest in cadaver surgery.

Or raise a glass to that leader of men, sower of harmony, supporter of due process and virtuous murder squads, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Non-believers can see the good in this man, so warmly embraced by Trump himself.

Non-belief gives you strength in all situations: defeat is victory, failure success and troubles melt away. Take North Korea: non-belief has wrought its masterpiece there. Where there was war and fear, now there is love, two great minds declaring their verisimilitude. A little more non-believing and the nuclear weapons will melt away like the trillion-dollar infrastructure project or the Mexican payment for the wall, which will restore our national dignity and save us from a deadly invasion of those begging to work.

The U.S. Border Patrol, the army and militias are doing a great job. But in the interest of non-believing, the president should dispatch his crack non-believers to the border: Rudolph Giuliani, lawyer on television; Peter Navarro, trade fantasist; and Kellyanne and Sarah.

Facts wilt before them.

Blockchain, the decentralized, open-ledger system which can record permanently multiple transactions, is about to come into its own as the world’s cities move towards digitalization. It portends the kind of urban revolution that cities haven’t seen since water-borne sewage enhanced city livability.

These “smart cities” of the future, big and small, will compete to be the most-wired, most-attractive places for high-tech talent and investment. From Orlando to San Antonio and from Boston to Seattle, the race is underway.

The big telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon want to wire cities for their 5G and universal WiFi, involving new “short towers.”

Smart cities are cities which are getting ready for the future. The infrastructure which needs to be developed and deployed includes:

• An electric grid that senses and manages demand instantly; that allows for two-way flows, as from a self-generator into the utility grid or a customer who wants green power only.
• 5G technology which will operate on any device and carry city communications to a new level, like knowing the location of every ambulance and which traffic lights must change to speed one through without hitting a firetruck barreling toward the same destination.
• Traffic lights that dim when there is no one on a street, or street lighting which dims when the moon is full or when there is no traffic.
• Monitors linked to computers which can identify potential failures in old water or sewer pipes.

Holding it all together — the sinew of smart cities — will be blockchain. It’ll be the recording system that will tell whether electricity is flowing from a community generating facility (like a solar farm) and how it’s blending with the utility company’s own generators to the amount of power flowing to street lights.

Blockchain is set to become the ledger of everything, from the billing for your local taxes to keeping track of parking tickets. It will also be a data treasure trove for future planning.

Blockchain is associated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That’s because it’s not only the system on which those cryptocurrencies were based, but it’s also a powerful tool with multiple uses far beyond them. The original developer of bitcoin, believed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, used blockchain to guarantee the integrity of the new money.

Some blockchain enthusiasts, including many in the big tech companies like IBM, believe and have often said that it can be a bigger disrupter than the internet. They’re passionate about the blockchain future, as are the big financial institutions where use will speed and verify transactions.

Others, working in the trenches of bringing about the blockchain revolution, are more cautious. Chris Peoples, founding and managing partner of the Baltimore-based innovation strategy firm PP&A, says that one must be wary of the hype. Blockchain, he says, “does promise to open new avenues of value for both organizations and the common good. However, with the technology still undergoing rapid development in the areas of speed, consensus and scalability, it will require the continued support from industry and government to reach its full potential.”

The smart city upside: Cities will become more livable, more manageable and the quality of life for all should improve. The downside: All the sensors and electronic surveillance could represent a new and very real threat to privacy.

There are also questions how much of the brave new urban world we want to have. Proponents of smart cities believe that a time will come when, with autonomous vehicles, the family car will disappear in favor of driverless, ride-sharing vehicles. An app on your phone will summon one and off you’ll go, probably reading your emails as you’re driven safely, thanks to artificial intelligence and blockchain, to your destination. Maybe. People haven’t abandoned their own cars for public transportation.

My view is people want their own stuff in a car — the old newspapers, the box of peppermints and the fury dice hanging from the mirror. A blockchain-enabled future of smart cities is dandy if we can keep our inefficient humanness.

We aren’t all yearning to be efficient in everything. We treasure a bit of muddle. I hope we can teach that to the computers and put it into immutable blockchain.

Photo: The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio, San Antonio, United States by Dan Gold on Unsplash