Most accounts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution begin in January 2016, when Klaus Schwab published his book of the same name and the World Economic Forum made “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution” the theme of its Davos annual meeting. Or maybe a little before this, as the concept was discussed and socialized amongst select World Economic Forum communities.
It’s a clean origin story: a founder had a vision, put it in a book, and launched it from the stage of the most visible gathering of global leaders in the world. The concept took off from there — through the opening of the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in San Francisco in 2017, the expansion of that centre into a global network, and the now-routine appearance of “4IR” in national strategies, corporate plans, and academic curricula around the world.
But it’s also an incomplete story, as most origin stories are. And it’s one that I has a small scene-setting role in.
The concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution arrived on top of nearly eight years of sustained work inside WEF’s Global Agenda Councils on the governance of emerging technologies — work that produced proposals, white papers, and institutional experiments that have mostly been forgotten because they predated the branding. I was part of that work. With the current wave of attention to AI governance echoing many of the same questions we were grappling with in 2008, it seems worth putting some of this on the record.
Here, I should be clear that the intellectual heavy lifting on the concept itself was, carried out by Nick Davis and Tom Philbeck, working closely with Klaus Schwab in the months before the 2016 launch. And neither of them engaged with my council in the run-up to it. I didn’t actually meet Nick until after 4IR had already been announced — I was on the panel in Abu Dhabi where the concept was first publicly introduced — and my conversations with the team that shaped the book came later. So this isn’t a story about who wrote what. Rather, it’s a story about the institutional and intellectual ground that had been prepared over the preceding years, without which the 4IR framing would have had a rockier landing.
2008: The Global Agenda Councils, and a one-page idea
I joined what I believe was the inaugural cohort of the WEF Global Agenda Councils in 2008. The councils were established in 2007 as what WEF described at the time as the “intellectual locomotive” of its Global Redesign Initiative — a network of over 1,200 thought leaders spread across roughly 70 focus areas, charged with developing transformative approaches to complex global challenges. I was placed on the Global Agenda Council on Nanotechnology, which at our first in-person meeting — the 2008 Summit on the Global Agenda in Dubai, billed as “the biggest ever brainstorm on the global future” — successfully argued that we should really be the Council on Emerging Technologies. The change was made, and for the next several years we worked as a group on the increasingly complex landscape around transformative new technologies.
Emerging technologies weren’t yet front and centre of WEF’s agenda at the time. This was well before the Forum’s pivot toward a technology focus, and many of the institutions WEF engaged with didn’t treat transformative technologies as a strategic priority either. What the council kept coming back to was that this was a missed opportunity — that the governance gap between what new technologies could do and how societies were prepared to handle them was widening faster than anyone with institutional responsibility seemed to recognize.
At the Dubai summit, each council member was asked to propose a “breakthrough idea.” Mine was a one-page sketch titled Global Institute on Emerging Technology Policy. The core of the proposal was that the governance of emerging technologies needed a dedicated institutional home — a body that could support science-based, non-partisan decision-making about technologies that didn’t fit existing regulatory or policy frameworks. The one-pager is thin by any standard, but looking back I think the bottom line I wrote that day is the through-line of much that followed: “New and innovative policies are needed at the international, national, corporate and institutional level to foster and manage the effective and sustainable development of emerging technologies.”
That sentence could appear unchanged in almost any serious AI governance document being written today.
2010: The Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence
Over the following two years, the idea evolved through council conversations and — more substantively — through work I did with Tim Harper, who had joined the council and shared the concern that the existing institutional architecture for emerging-technology governance was missing a layer. Tim and I conceptualized and drafted what became the council’s formal proposal for a Global Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence — “CETI” for short — which was published in 2010 as part of WEF’s Everybody’s Business Global Redesign Initiative report.
The name change from 2008’s “Institute on Emerging Technology Policy” to 2010’s “Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence” says something about how the idea evolved inside the institution. “Policy” implied an organization that would prescribe. In contrast, “intelligence” implied an organization that would scan, analyze, and inform. The shift, I suspect, made the proposal more palatable to WEF’s convening model, in which the Forum itself rarely takes prescriptive positions. It also narrowed the original ambition in ways I still have mixed feelings about. But the core logic of the proposal — that decision-makers at the highest levels of government and industry needed access to independent, integrated, forward-looking analysis of emerging technologies, delivered by a body whose only mission was to provide it — survived the rewording intact.
It’s worth a side note on WEF authorship conventions here, because they are relevant to anyone trying to read the institutional history from the published record. WEF council reports of that era were published as collective council products with the council chair named at the top, regardless of who actually wrote the substance. The 2010 CETI proposal is bylined to the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies under the leadership of Chris Murray of the University of Pennsylvania. In practice, the conceptual work and drafting was done by Tim and myself with relatively little direct input from the rest of the council. This, of course, isn’t a gripe — the convention is the convention, and the council’s endorsement gave the proposal weight it wouldn’t have had as an individual publication. But it does mean that anyone trying to trace the intellectual origins of the document from the byline will end up with a slightly misleading picture.
CETI didn’t get built, despite Tim working hard on this for a number of years, and with various organizations. But the ideas didn’t go away.
2011–2015: Keeping the logic alive
In 2011 Tim and I co-authored a follow-on WEF white paper, Building a Sustainable Future: Rethinking the Role of Technology Innovation in an Increasingly Interdependent, Complex and Resource-constrained World, which tried to carry the CETI logic forward in a different form. Between 2010-2011 I chaired the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, which by that point had come to the view that the Forum’s emerging-technology work needed a more visible public vehicle.
That vehicle turned out to be the annual Top Ten Emerging Technologies list. The breakthrough idea for the list came from my colleague Javier Garcia-Martinez at a council meeting in Abu Dhabi in October 2011 — I’ve written about that moment elsewhere — and the first list was published in early 2012. The reception was remarkable; the WEF blog post announcing it was, I was told at the time, the most-read piece the Forum had ever posted, and coverage in the Washington Post gave the concept a public profile that surprised everyone involved. The list became an annual fixture, has now run for more than a decade, and remains in some ways the most visible institutional descendant of the original CETI vision — a sustained public-facing effort to put emerging technologies in front of decision-makers in a form they could actually engage with.
In December 2015 I published a short piece in Nature Nanotechnology on “Navigating the fourth industrial revolution”. The title came partly from the realization that the accelerating convergence of physical, digital, and biological technologies no longer fit comfortably inside any of the single-technology framings — nanotechnology, synthetic biology, AI, robotics — that had previously organized the field. Of course I was building on an existing framing: the language of the fourth industrial revolution had been percolating in various forms for a while, including in German manufacturing policy. But the Nature Nanotechnology piece was an attempt to pull the threads together for a scientific audience, and WEF cited my emerging ideas here ideas in its November 2015 framing piece on “five ways of understanding the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (based on the panel I was on in Abu Dhabi announcing the fourth Industrial Revolution framework) — roughly two months before Schwab’s book officially appeared.
2016 and after: The pivot and the missing middle
The 2016 Davos meeting made 4IR a global brand. Looking at the sequence of Davos annual themes, 2016 was the first year in which technology appeared as the primary framing of the meeting. Before that, the themes had cycled through economic, geopolitical, and social framings for more than a decade. After 2016, the economic framing never returned as a primary theme. Something had shifted, and the shift was durable.
It’s not possible to show a clean causal chain between the council work of 2008–2015 and the strategic pivot of 2016. Too many things were happening in parallel, including the intellectual work on the 4IR concept that Nick Davis and Tom Philbeck were doing with Klaus Schwab outside my council’s immediate orbit. What I am reasonably sure of though is that the council work helped create the conditions under which the pivot was possible — the years of white papers, lists, debates, and proposals established that transformative technologies were something WEF could credibly treat as a top-line strategic concern, and built relationships with the communities that would populate the 4IR conversation once it was launched.
Perhaps a clearer institutional descendant of the CETI logic came a few years later. In 2016 I was invited to join the Global Future Council on Agile Governance, which produced a 2018 report titled Agile Governance: Reimagining Policy-Making in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The opening frame of that report — “The complex, transformative and distributed nature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution demands a new type of governance…” — is recognizably continuous with the opening frame of the 2010 CETI proposal. The language had changed; the underlying diagnosis had not. And the set of institutional experiments that followed, including WEF’s network of Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and, more recently perhaps, the United Nations’ High-Level Advisory Body on AI, are recognizable as further iterations of the same basic problem: how do you build governance capacity for technologies whose pace and scope outrun the institutions responsible for them?
Why any of this matters
Like many academics and thought leaders, I’ve been connected with, and at least peripherally influential on, many initiatives over my career. And often these are too fuzzy and lacking a clean cut narrative to be captured and documented. But I also think that there’s a case to be made for making at least some of the messiness visible. And when it comes to the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the governance and oversight of emerging technologies, my small slice of institutional history might actually be useful to the field — particularly to people working on AI governance right now who are asking versions of the same questions we were asking in 2008,
With that, there are a few things worth taking from this prehistory that I don’t often see acknowledged in contemporary discussions of 4IR or of emerging-technology governance more broadly. These include:
Institutional experiments that fail are still formative. CETI didn’t get built, and for a while it looked like that meant the effort had been a dead end. In retrospect, the proposal, the council work around it, and the relationships that formed during the attempt, created an intellectual and institutional substrate that later efforts — including 4IR itself — drew on, whether or not the later efforts knew they were doing so. The lesson for anyone working on AI governance institutions today is that the work of proposing, drafting, and circulating serious institutional ideas has value even when the specific proposal doesn’t get implemented. The ideas keep working after you stop pushing them.
The gap between who writes a document and whose name is on it is sometimes substantial. I’ve already flagged the WEF authorship convention above, but it’s worth noting that anyone trying to reconstruct the intellectual history of WEF work in this period from the bylines of published reports will get systematically misleading answers. The actual intellectual labor was distributed differently than the institutional credit. This matters for anyone writing the history of 4IR because it means the published archive doesn’t tell you where the ideas came from.
The “conditions for possibility” are underrated as a form of contribution. Most accounts of idea genealogies focus on authorship — who wrote what, who said what first. But large-scale concepts like 4IR don’t emerge from individual authorship alone; they emerge from long periods of preparatory work that makes the concept thinkable at the scale it eventually reaches. That preparatory work is usually invisible in retrospective accounts because it doesn’t attach to a single document or a single name. I and my colleagues played a small part here in preparing the intellectual and operational groundwork, and of course there was much more complimentary preparation coming out of Germany’s Industry 4.0 initiative And here I think we’d understand the history of technology governance much better if we paid more attention to how conditions are prepared, and less to who gets to plant the flag.
I’m publishing this in part because I think the primary-source documents I’ve included — the 2008 one-pager and the 2010 CETI proposal — belong in the public record of this history, and partly because the questions we were working on in that period have become unavoidable again. If any of it is useful to people working on the governance of AI and other transformative technologies now, it will have earned its place.
The 2008 sketch is available here and the 2010 CETI proposal, as published in the WEF Global Redesign Initiative report Everybody’s Business, is available here. I wrote a related piece in December 2023 — ostensibly a review of the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI’s interim report, but with an autobiographical aside that covers some of the same ground — here. Readers interested in how WEF’s framing of technology risk evolved over the same period may find this January 2024 piece on the Global Risks Reports useful as complementary context.