How The Fourth Industrial Revolution will Challenge our Conventional View of Identity, Privacy and Society.

Are we on the brink of a revolution that will fundamentally change society and the way we live and work?

The Identiverse is a big and scary place, and according to Professor Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum it will get bigger and scarier. He calls this brave new world The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). In Germany it is known as Industry 4.0 and in Japan they are considering the world beyond, and they call it Society 5.0.

In this new world emerging technologies will fuse the physical, digital and biological worlds to create a cyber-physical world driven by information. It will impact all disciplines, economies and industries, and it will even challenge our ideas about what it means to be human.

We will discuss this new world and explore the tensions between:

• centralised and distributed.
• single and multiple identities
• spontaneous and specified identities
• anonymity and verinymity
• regulated and unregulated
• digital and analogue
• freedom and control
• inclusion and exclusion
• Permissioned and unpermissioned
• Consistent and inconsistent
• Known and unknown
• Utopia and dystopia
• Western and Eastern
• Technical and Social
• Democratic and some other -cratic system