Viva lá Revolution 4.0 !
The world is stepping into a new era of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). The 4IR, as it’s called at World Economic Forum (WEF), is challenging and completely different from the Industrial revolution 3.0, because it has the potential to distract our perception of what it means to be a human being.
A famous Italian film director once said that “Life should be lived in all directions at once!”. The 4IR is bringing changes everywhere and change is accelerating. Actually, not just accelerating, but they are hyper speeding in different industries and economics all at once.
The Industrial Revolution 4.0 will have a major impact and positive changes to the quality of life, lifestyle, work ethics and people relationships by means of the acceptations of the cyber-physical system, IoT and the Internet. Through the implementation of smart technology in workplaces, industry and economy, connected “machines” will interact, visualize the entire production or the process chain, generating more values and helping us make better decisions.
This is the era of artificial intelligence, genome editing, biometrics, renewable energy, 3D printing, autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things. In essence, it can be seen as a doubling down on revolutions one to three. Instead of technology being a thing we use, it will now be truly embedded into our lives to affect a great change.
The Industry 4.0 will interact among and influence all disciplines, industries and economies. This means that, due to its hyper speed, spatiality, sustainability and its impact on the system, it will disrupt almost all industries around the world, which will create vast changes in a non-linear manner.
One of the greatest promises of the Industry 4.0 Revolution is the potential to improve the quality of life of people around the world, and to increase the level of earnings. This is something that Professor Schwab described in his book “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, saying that “the changes are so deep that, from the perspective of human history, there was never a permanent time of major promises or major dangers”. His statement clearly shows concerns of powerful people or “shadow” governments we can easily say that those who are cocooned in traditional thinking and don’t understand new era concept or fear positive changes among people could do everything to block or ignore innovation and revolution potentials that are shaping our World. Innovations and technologies from Industry 4.0 can even help us prepare for large natural disasters, resolve civil conflicts, positively impact socio-economic environment in undeveloped areas or countries and potentially overrule some of the harmful things inherited from theprevious industrial revolution.
But there is a catch. As a results of socio-economic changes brought by Industry 4.0, social tensions could rise if world governments don’t prepare action plans and measures and facilitate new capabilities to ensure safety of people. The changes influenced by Industry 4.0 could develop so quickly that even those environments which have advantage in know-how will not be able to withstand the effects of change and follow the pace of innovations.
People are the key to Industry 4.0 and unless people are proactive together to overcame gaps between them, cooperate and put pressure on World leaders to create a future that works for everyone by empowering people in the first place, then all new technologies emerged from Industry 4.0 will primarily just be tools made by people for people.
Startups and SMEs should invest in their technical infrastructure and develop the ability to analyze information. That said, all businesses should take steps to transform themselves into smart and affiliated organizations, or soon lose competitiveness.
As a society, we should develop leaders with skills to guide organizations through these unprecedented changes. As professionals, we need to accept changes, and understand that what our business implies today can drastically change in the near future. Our education and training systems need to be adapted to prepare people better and help them develop flexibility and the ability to think critically they will need for the future.
Viva lá Revolution 4.0 !
