The Fourth Industrial Revolution has the potential to empower individuals and communities, as it creates new opportunities for economic, social, and personal development. But it also could lead to the marginalization of some groups, exacerbate inequality, create new security risks, and undermine human relationships.

If we are to seize the opportunities, and avoid the pitfalls, of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we must consider carefully the questions that it raises. We must rethink our ideas about economic and social development, value creation, privacy and ownership, and even individual identity. We must address, individually and collectively, moral and ethical issues raised by cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which will enable significant life extension, designer babies, and memory extraction. And we must adapt to new approaches to meeting people and nurturing relationships.

Consider the impact that mobile technology has already made on our lives and relationships. As the novelty of wearable tech gives way to necessity – and, later, as wearable tech becomes embedded tech – will we be deprived of the chance to pause, reflect, and engage in meaningful, substantive conversations? How will our inner lives and ties to those around us change? These are weighty questions, about which debate will probably intensify in the coming years.

Technology as a revolutionizing force for good Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 to ‘improve the state of the world.’ World Economic Forum, CC BY-NC-SA

In his new book The Fourth Industrial Revolution – published to coincide with the WEF annual meeting in Davos – Schwab argues that we are at the beginning of a technological revolution that “is fundamentally changing the way we live, work, and relate to one another.”

At the heart of Schwab’s revolution is an accelerating convergence between our increasingly powerful technological capabilities. Autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, gene editing, robotics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things – these and many more emerging trends, he suggests, are arising from an unparalleled melding of physical, biological and digital worlds

There seems to be some confusion on the part of Mr. Paul Punturieri (letter to the editor, Dec. 24), when he referred to "Marxist leftists" and "fascist rightists." He seems to associate conservatives with fascism and progressives with Marxism. He is only half right, because progressivism is just a relabeling of Marxism, but conservatism is diametrically opposed to both.

Folks who have taken the time to actually read the letters from conservatives should have learned that conservatives favor small, less-intrusive government and individual rights for all the people, as our Constitution allows. In spite of progressives (actually "Fabian progressives," if you care to look it up) continue to try to label conservatives and Tea Party types as fascists. There is no truth to that, but what is new about that?

Seems to me that the elections next year will determine how the next century of history will play out for the world. Sliding deeper into the trap of government of gi'me more and take away our rights will lead to more lawless violence, war and revolutions. Only by force of arms will a Marxist or fascist government be able to hold power in this country because there are still many who will resist in kind to that kind of attempted control. That will be bad for everyone not only in America but world wide.

Friends of the democracy, inclusive societies, and free speech can be forgiven for remembering the 1980s with fondness. Reagan and Thatcher and John Paul II ruled the day, brought communism to its knees, and asserted the excellence of the West. Yet that decade also witnessed the continuing ascendancy of a radical form of Marxism on university campuses in America and Great Britain. Although Allan Bloom’s 1987 Closing of the American Mind acted as a flag around which to rally in the culture war over higher education, it was not enough to stop, or even really slow a campus takeover that today enjoys great political influence.

At the same time, a group of thinkers, most of whom were graduates of Harvard Law School who had participated in the 1982 effort to force Harvard to hire more minority faculty, set out to develop critical race theory, which holds that racism is built into the very grammar, institutions, and customs we employ and participate in. Those who continue to follow the customs of the society in which they live will continue their racist ways. Racism will be abolished when those customs, laws, and institutions are abolished or remade.

While MacKinnon’s Marxist analysis of the sexes was percolating in the minds of American academics and Harvard graduates were hardening the iron of critical race theory, Roger Scruton sat across the Atlantic, at the time as a professor at Birkbeck College in London, watching the destruction of his academic career. Scruton had been vilified throughout the 1980s for writing substantial, intellectually serious books on conservatism, as well as critical portraits of leftist thinkers in his volume Thinkers of the New Left, published in 1985 and reissued this month by Bloomsbury Press as Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands

Few can imagine how unlikely this is. From the Fifties to the Seventies, there was serious debate on how imminent the Communist Revolution was in India. The future was red. Now of course no one takes Communists or even Communism seriously. The Soviet Union collapsed without anyone firing a shot. Leninism proved to be a delusion which could not survive the 20th century.

Why did Communism fail so abysmally? Marx had a fascination with Capitalism and admired its immense productive potential. He and Engels advertised the advent of globalisation in their youthful Communist Manifesto. His ideal of Socialism was timed for well after the maturity of Capitalism.

Communism’s luck continued and Capitalism suffered the Great Depression. It looked like the Revolution was imminent. Lenin had conflated Imperialism and Capitalism. This enhanced the appeal of Communism for the colonies. Stalin consigned millions to concentration camps but the idea that the Soviet Union was the hope of the world remained strong. Victory in the Second World War and then taking over Eastern European countries enhanced the reputation of the Soviet Union. China had its own Revolution which confirmed Lenin’s wisdom that the Communist revolution would start in the backward countries, not developed ones as Marx may have thought. India was supposed to be the next ripe fruit to fall. The CPI had blotted its copybook by supporting the British rulers during the war, as for them the fight was for defence of the Soviet Union. They denounced independence as illusory and launched a premature Revolution in Telangana. Stal

Speaking to the New York-based broadcaster New Tang Dynasty (NTD), two European politicians expressed hopes that Chinese leader Xi Jinping bring genuine political reform by giving up the regime’s Marxist ideology

“When you decide one day, that all the media will be free, then the communist system will fall apart, because the communist system is a lie in itself,” said Malosse, who has interest in Eastern Europe and learned the German, Polish, and Russian languages as a youth.

Batten, a member of the UK Independence Party, spoke positively of Xi’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign. But he believes that greater political reform is being held back by entrenched vested interests in the Communist Party.

Spectres are haunting Earth—the spectres of anti-communism. From Wahhabism to neoliberalism, overproduction to debt, the disastrous “war on terror” to the genocide of the welfare state, and from cold war game theory to cybernetics’ networked offspring, the internet—these are all anti-communist projects that came back to haunt us. In this apocalyptic climate, where CO2, ISIS and HFT (High Frequency Trading) stand for the self-annihilation of this civilization on a cultural, economic, political and biological level, we propose The Kids Want Communism. This ongoing clandestine and public series of events marks ninety-nine years to the October Revolution.

“Communism” might sound like an irrelevant term for many people today, but more than any other word in our political vocabulary, communism is the radical negation of the current regime which celebrates exploitation and inequality. It is a cosmos that was devoured by the black hole that is 1989–91. This cosmos includes many communisms; an epic reestablishment of property-free communities, communal indigenous societies, real-existing socialism with its achievements and crimes, the long history of anti-Fascist resistance, egalitarian mysticism, the dialectic abolition of capitalism through its internal dynamics, the uncharted, un-exploitable pockets of resistance that cannot be appropriated by capitalism, the already present humane solidarity and camaraderie shared by people everywhere and the political proposal of the emotion called “love.”

This brings us to the final and starkest example of Western socialism: the delivery of water. What people tend to forget in the age of electricity and automobiles is that the West is mostly a huge desert, some of it harsh in the extreme. Private and even state-level efforts to develop water resources sufficient to support Western agriculture and mass settlement repeatedly failed all throughout the Gilded Age, leading to the passage of the Reclamation Act in 1902. It would end with the government building, owning, and operating key economic institutions throughout the West.

Government water projects through the 1920s were largely a mess, as inexperienced bureaucrats ran headlong into the difficult realities of Western country. But the Great Depression marked a turning point. The West found in the New Deal a political movement ambitious enough to attempt the most promising water projects, which were truly massive, and momentum was further stoked by World War II's vast appetite for electricity to smelt aluminum. Practically overnight the Bureau of Reclamation was building some of the biggest structures ever attempted — Hoover, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Bonneville dams, plus a slew of smaller

projects — at the same time. These projects were generally completed under budget and ahead of schedule, and made reasonable policy sense. To this day Grand Coulee is the largest single electricity source in the entire country.

The Clinton political method appears to be a dominant gene, because Chelsea started the onslaught. Mr. Sanders “wants to dismantle” Medicare, ObamaCare and the state children’s health insurance program, she said. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era—before we had the Affordable Care Act—that would strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”

The former first lady was confronted with Chelsea’s cheap shot on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Wednesday. “You know, I adore my daughter and I know what she was saying,” she replied, going on to argue that her daughter was technically right that Mr. Sanders would “dismantle” entitlements in their current form

The difference between Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton is political character. He’s a sincere socialist who follows his principles, however unrealistic or calamitous, to their logical conclusions. Mrs. Clinton will conceal her true ambitions if that’s what it takes to win, and she’ll drop on her opponents any political anvils that happen to be handy.

As Bernie Sanders edges closer to Hillary Clinton in the Iowa polls, one thing is becoming clear: Instead of being a liability, his socialist platform may be his strongest asset.

The new Selzer & Co. Iowa poll found that 43 percent of likely voters in the Feb. 1 Democratic Iowa caucuses would use the word “socialist” to describe themselves

Interestingly enough, “capitalist” also proved to be a partisan label. While a considerable portion of Democratic Iowa caucus-goers were eager to label themselves socialists, fewer would described themselves as capitalist – only 38 percent.

Talk of a fourth, technology-driven industrial revolution may seem like something a million miles from the minds of developing countries like Guinea. Surely we have more fundamental problems, like poverty, lack of energy or infrastructure to get to grips with. Our country has after all just come out of the world’s worst Ebola epidemic.

The reality, however, is that this often bewildering new world offers huge opportunities to countries like our own. The speed of change in innovation offers the prospect of confronting some of our biggest problems more quickly and efficiently than we would ever have done before.

Learning from the past and adopting some of the world’s best practices, some of our biggest challenges can become unique opportunities. Guinea is a resource-rich country with huge potential, but it has suffered from decades of inertia and bad governance which has condemned generations to live into poverty. Today, we have a chance to turn our unexploited agriculture and mineral wealth into truly sustainable development.

A new study suggests that human activity may have staved off an ice age in the 1800s, and is likely to delay the next one for tens of thousands of years.

The extra carbon dioxide emissions that happened at the start of the Industrial Revolution may have, according to the researchers, prevented an ice age in the mid-1800s. They explain in their abstract:

The scientists predict that without greenhouse gas emissions, we’d likely be about 50,000 years away from another ice age. But thanks to global warming, we’re probably closer to 100,000 years away. Lead author Andrey Ganopolski said in a statement, “Our study also shows that relatively moderate additional anthropogenic CO2-emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are already sufficient to postpone the next ice age for another 50.000 years.” Ganopolski add

In a Sunday post, Chait categorized “American conservatism” and Marxism as “rigid dogma,” whereas liberalism, he argued, focuses on “data.”

Conservative economic thought is structurally different from liberal thought. Liberal support for expanded government is based entirely in practical expectation that new programs can deliver concrete results — cleaner air, healthier children, higher wages for low-income workers, and so on. Conservative antipathy to expanded government is based ultimately on philosophical opposition. For that reason, data can change liberal economic thinking in a way it can’t change conservative economic thinking

It is also certainly possible that global willpower to reduce emissions will weaken, or collapse entirely. Future events cannot be proven. Only rigid dogma like American conservatism (or, for that matter, Marxism) gives its adherents a mortal certainty about the fate of government policy that a liberal cannot match, and should not want to.

One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.

The dirtiest word in the marxist vocabulary is “neoliberal,” which stands for an economy based on capitalist principles and processes. Students have learned that “neoliberal” is equivalent to evil. Two students, independently, recently said to me that “we need to replace capitalism,” although they had no suggestions about what to replace it with. That half the world tried to replace capitalism in the 20th century, with disastrous results, they apparently had no idea. That capitalism has brought unparalleled prosperity, if not peace and happiness, is unknown to students. They have been taught that the only products of capitalism are exploitation and oppression. Globalization is taught as the expansion of exploitation and oppression worldwide. The great economic developments in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and the economic progress in Africa, is terra incognita to students, taught only problems but no successes.