Reclaiming the Revolution

In this illuminating book, Stephen Barber redefines the Fourth Industrial Revolution for our politics, our societies and those who seek to lead. The book argues that this is a rare opportunity to reappraise how we organise our economy, how we make decisions and how our leaders behave. Told through a series of extraordinary adventures stretching from the past and reaching into our future, the book demonstrates that the most important determinant of what comes next is not so much digital change as human values and uniquely human skills. But it warns that our politics and our leadership are far from ready for the task ahead.

In Reclaiming the Revolution we meet the robot working in a care home and a champion debater who might have met his match. We discover the significance of a Teton horse in the 1990s to the state of political disruption today and what we can learn from the nineteenth century electronic telegraph about creativity and the hollowing out of the economy. The technological transformation ahead is not something that should simply be done to us. It has to mean more collaboration with humanity, more political deliberation and the injection of trust into leadership everywhere. We are at the inflection point of a fantastic revolution and it must be reclaimed.