Technological revolution

A technological revolution is a period in which one or more technologies is replaced by another technology in a short amount of time. It is an era of accelerated technological progress characterized by new innovations whose rapid application and diffusion cause an abrupt change in society.What distinguishes a technological revolution from a random collection of technology systems and justifies conceptualizing it as a revolution are two basic features: A technological revolution is a period in which one or more technologies is replaced by another technology in a short amount of time. It is an era of accelerated technological progress characterized by new innovations whose rapid application and diffusion cause an abrupt change in society. A technological revolution increases productivity and efficiency. It may involve material or ideological changes caused by the introduction of a device or system. Some examples of its potential impact are business management, education, social interactions, finance and research methodology; it is not limited strictly to technical aspects. Technological revolution rewrites the material conditions of human existence and can reshape culture. It can play a role of a trigger of a chain of various and unpredictable changes: The consequences of a technological revolution are not necessarily positive. For example, innovations, such as the use of coal as an energy source, can have negative environmental impact and cause technological unemployment. The concept of technological revolution is based on the idea that technological progress is not linear but undulatory. Technological revolution can be: The concept of universal technological revolutions is a key factor in the Neo-Schumpeterian theory of long economic waves/cycles (Carlota Perez, Tessaleno Devezas, Daniel Šmihula and others). The most known example of technological revolution was the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the scientific-technical revolution about 1950–1960, the Neolithic revolution, the Digital Revolution and so on. The notion of 'technological revolution' is frequently overused, therefore it is not easy to define which technological revolutions having occurred during world history were really crucial and influenced not only one segment of human activity, but had a universal impact. One universal technological revolution should be composed from several sectoral technological revolutions (in science, industry, transport and the like). We can identify several universal technological revolutions which occurred during the modern era in Western culture: Attempts to find comparable periods of well defined technological revolutions in the pre-modern era are highly speculative. Probably one of the most systematic attempts to suggest a timeline of technological revolutions in pre-modern Europe was done by Daniel Šmihula: After 2000 there became popular the idea that a sequence of technological revolutions is not over and in the forthcoming future we will witness the dawn of a new universal technological revolution. The main innovations should develop in the fields of nanotechnologies, alternative fuel and energy systems, biotechnologies, genetic engineering, new materials technologies and so on . The Second Machine Age is the term adopted in a 2014 book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The industrial development plan of Germany began promoting the term Industry 4.0. In 2019, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Japan promoted another round of advancements called Society 5.0.