What is Industry 5.0?

4 min readSep 12, 2018

Most companies are still trying to get into the definition and realization of Industry 4.0, but there is already talk about the next industrial revolution: Industry 5.0.

What does Industry 5.0 mean?

The unprecedented and simultaneous advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, wearables, additive manufacturing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, energy storage and quantum computing are blurring traditional boundaries and creating new business models, Uber, Tesla, Airbnb, Alibaba, Google are only the a very small number of multi-billion Dollar businesses created in the last 12 years.

This cyber-physical systems revolution is summarized as the Fourth Industrial Revolutionand is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another. The start of the industrial revolution waves goes back to 1850 with water and steam power, evolved to electric power to electronics:

Business leaders can no longer focus on developments and trends in their own sectors alone, but need to understand potential transformations and disruptions in the entire world of suppliers, customers and global markets.

The rapid pace of change is challenging the entire workforce, governments, legislators and regulators to an unprecedented degree. The world of the work-life merge, the term coined by Facebook executive Emily White in 2012 describes a life in which work and free time are no longer neatly compartmentalized, but seamlessly jumbled up together.

At the same time, there is a risk, that parts of society might feel left out due to the perception that jobs are being taken away by automation and immigration, or because they lack the skills required for the newly created jobs.

Industry 5.0 is the future and already an emerging trend: the interaction and collaboration between man and machine

The handshake between a human being and a robot symbolized of the new reality, even by knowing that it will not be the reality in the future, as most automation, machine intelligence and even robots are working in the background, supporting the workforce or taking on large portions of work, like in production and manufacturing. Investment banking systems are already in use since more than a decade to negotiate and define the share price and sell- / buy-decisions within Nano-seconds independent form any human interaction.

The next wave of industrial revolution needs to define, how we collaborate and how we define the rules between human and machine interaction. When artificial intelligence is taking decisions, like we could see in an impressive example during Google I/O 2018 presented by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, where a voice assistant called to make an appointment and the woman answering the call didn’t have a chance to recognize, that she was speaking to a robot.

The most recent disruptive trends in technology and the questions related to their autonomous decision making algorithm, like self-driving cars and the decision to be taken in an unfortunate case that an accident is unavoidable. The range is wide, when voice enabled shopping devices will suggest you what to order or even order fully automatically supplies, food or household goods — and other providers might not be part of a marketplace or don’t get access at all.

We are at the beginning of the next wave of the industrial revolution and “Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity” as Andrew Ng, former Chief Scientist and Standard Adjunct Professor defined.

Outlook on what’s next

Governments around the world and the leading high-tech companies need to define a framework to define the rules for machine intelligence. Humans and machines will closer and closer interact and collaborate in the future. Lights out business processes, highly automated manufacturing, self-managed supply chains will become reality very soon. Now is the time to think about the future and how to best prepare for the upcoming questions, which will be game-changing for the human race, even more than the four industrial revolutions before. Humans might no longer be capable to fully understand the algorithms defined, but as long as it can be defined when and how to pull the plug the rules are mastered by us humans.

Thoughts?

What is Industry 5.0?

Written by Dr. Marcell Vollmer