James Ashton: Perhaps Davos can deliver a fourth industrial revolution

So often the discussion topics at the World Economic Forum in Davos are overtaken by events.

Last year, banking heavyweights from Banco Santander and Goldman Sachs settled down for a session to consider how major markets would respond to the end of quantitative easing, with reference to Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen’s challenge of returning the US economy back to normal.

They did so safe in the knowledge that European Central Bank president Mario Draghi was preparing to unleash his own bout of money printing to boost the flagging eurozone that very afternoon. Maybe it was just the beginning of the end?

The global elite reconvene in Davos this week as the plunging oil price and slowdown in China look like harbingers of a new global downturn.

On the face of it, an agenda focused on the fourth industrial revolution might appear to miss the point.

What might be more apposite would be to chew over how world leaders appear to have got it so wrong in the eight short years since Lehman Brothers collapsed.

Bears fear that history is repeating itself. Certainly, the UK economy is showing familiar signs, with growth powered by a bubbling property market and consumer spending egged on by cheap oil and artificially low interest rates.

No one should get carried away because the EY Item Club has nudged up British growth forecasts for this year from 2.4% to 2.6%.

What would be useful is discovering how to break this cycle of decline and insubstantial recovery. That is where the fourth industrial revolution — the first three were steam, electricity and basic computing — might come in handy.

As an umbrella term for the Internet of Things, computerised manufacturing and data analytics, it marks the moment, essentially, when the machines take over.

But harnessed properly, it could actually be when productivity picks itself up from the floor.

Technology has promised much and delivered little to industrial productivity thus far. Remember all those promises that BlackBerrys meant we would only have to work a few hours a day?

The internet was meant to flatten the globe but a World Bank report only last week pointed out the “information inequality” suffered by developing nations who are falling further behind the rest of the world because of poor web access.