ConclusionThe Future of the Contemporary Technological System: Continuity or Disruption?
Is the major technological movement currently in place a new deployment of the contemporary technological system, or is it the beginning of a major technological disruption, and consequently, the end of the third technological system, in other words, a true technological revolution giving rise to a new system?
Theses of a technological revolution
The wave of technological change that intervened in this first decade of the 21st Century sparked a series of work on its characterization. Oddly enough, this movement has been defined by Jeremy Rifkin as the emergence of the third industrial revolution in a book of the same title [RIF 11]. This revolution would occur now, according to Rifkin, because the predominant use of fossil fuels, which is a characteristic of the second industrial system, has only recently been disputed and reduced. The other area characterizing the old technological system is the slow and centralized communication system which would have been only partially transformed. The stability of what the author calls the energy–communication system would have kept the world within the second industrial system, formed at the end of the 19th Century, which would have continued to the present day. At present, it is the emergence of a new system of energy–communication relationships characterized as the “junction of Internet communication and renewable energies which creates a third ...