What are the ingredients
for an industrial revolution?
Take some new energy sources,
add a dash of cutting-edge
communications technology,
and top it all off with an
emerging mode of transportation!
When our society goes through an industrial
revolution, we spur economic growth,
and completely change the world we live in.
We've seen the effects of two already,
This is WHAT IF,
and here's what would happen if
there was a third industrial revolution.
According to economist Jeremy Rifkin, 
we are already on the cusp of
a third industrial revolution:
a convergence of the Internet,
renewable energy,
and automated transportation.
If we embrace this transformation, it could
de-centralize nearly every industry on Earth,
giving more power to the people.
How would this be an important
weapon against climate change?
How long can a civilization exist surviving
on a finite resource like fossil fuels?
Well, we might find out sooner than we'd like.
According to Rifkin, our current
economic system, and our planet
will eventually expire if we don't move
away from a carbon-based world.
So how do we do that?
Well, it's already started,
and it was all triggered by our
embrace of the World Wide Web.
Before the Internet,
the cost to spread your knowledge and 
information was pretty expensive.
For example, let's say you wanted to
share your ideas through a newspaper. 
Not only would you have to worry
about the initial cost of setting up shop,
but you'd also have to spend money on
every single copy you made and distributed.
Nowadays, after the initial
cost of accessing the Internet,
you can produce unlimited
copies of your ideas,
and get them out to millions of people, 
without any further spending.
This phenomenon is known as 
"zero marginal cost,"
and it could be the foundation of
the third industrial revolution.
With the Internet, hundreds of millions of 
people are producing and sharing music, 
videos, news blogs, and
e-books essentially for free,
bypassing the capitalist market altogether
We don't have to rely on a couple of giant
corporations to feed us all our information.
And now that phenomenon is
expanding from the virtual world
to the physical world of
goods and services.
For instance, let's say that
you and a bunch of neighbors
want to start your own power grid,
based on renewable energy.
Well with today's technology,
you could do that;
and then you could even use that grid
to power driverless cars to
run a local rideshare program. 
You'd be creating a sustainable
economic system
that would essentially cost
you nothing after the initial set-up.
If society embraces the
possibilities of using the Internet,
renewable energy,
and automatic transportation together,
it could re-structure our economy.
Traditional corporations would be disrupted,
and the power would be
returned to the local communities.
We'll also be able to collect a lot more
information about the world around us,
allowing our economy to
operate at top efficiency.
As we continue to place
sensors on just about everything,
we'll be able to track things like the flows of
natural resources, traffic, and shipments. 
All this available data will allow
us to increase productivity,
and decrease waste and our
ecological footprints dramatically.
So maybe our future's not so bleak after all, 
or maybe all this global connectivity will
just open us up to a whole new type of threat,
but that's a topic for another WHAT IF. 
