Automation & Industry 4.0
If your business isn’t continually reviewing, up-dating and changing its processes, IT systems and improving the customer engagement then as a commercial operation it is destined to decline.
As the next wave of Covid-19 looms, organisations must rethink their strategy and tactics and apply automation of processes and thinking. This kind of strategic review should be concerned with disruption, hacking attacks and the economic survival of business operations, as we move into the 4th Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0, which is the automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology.
The 4.0 revolution is characterised by the fusion of the digital, biological, and physical worlds, as well as the growing use of new technologies. These include artificial intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, and advanced wireless technologies. And these technologies among others, have ushered in a new era of economic disruption.
The 4th Industrial Revolution is largely driven by four specific technological developments: high-speed mobile Internet, AI and automation, the use of big data analytics, and cloud technology. There have been several economic revolutions in the last three centuries. Arguably what is happening today has a greater power of alteration than anything that has gone before. But in many ways it is the old story retold. The story is the rise of the machines.
The first industrial revolution created a new machine manufacturing economy. The second saw the introduction of electricity, the creation of an economy-wide network which spread machines into every home. The computer era came next, the third revolution that eventually came to dominate the second half of the last century. For the first time machines began to encroach on human brain-work.
What we are seeing today is not a single technology and there is no single driving idea. The Industry 4.0 revolution is about creative convergence, where technologies begin to connect and is something comparable to the great evolutionary transition from single celled organisms to functioning organic networks.
- Industry 4.0 technology has already boosted employment in knowledge- intensive sectors such as medicine, accounting and professional services. This means that increasingly skilled workers will concentrate on skilled activities.
- Industry 4.0 challenges companies to be leaner, faster, and operate at a lower cost. It also furnishes the resources to meet those challenges.
- Industry 4.0 can be described as the advent of “cyber-physical systems” involving entirely new capabilities for people and machines.
While these capabilities are reliant on the technologies and infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution, the Fourth Industrial Revolution represents entirely new ways in which technology becomes embedded within societies and even our human bodies. Examples include genome editing, new forms of machine intelligence, breakthrough materials and approaches to governance that rely on cryptographic methods such as the blockchain. These new technologies makes it easier for companies to automate routine tasks and could disrupt the balance between job responsibilities completed by humans and those completed by machines and algorithms.
Perhaps the most discussed driver of inequality is the potential for the Fourth Industrial Revolution to increase unemployment. All industrial revolutions create and destroy jobs, but unfortunately there is evidence that new industries are creating relatively fewer positions than in the past.
The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution also offer expanded capabilities for waging war which are increasingly accessible to both state and non-state actors, such as drones, autonomous weapons, nano-materials, biological and biochemical weapons, wearable devices and distributed energy sources.
With smart technology becoming more mainstream, we need to consider the impact using this new technology will have on our society and workforce. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships.” according to Klaus Schwab, author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Verizon: Deloitte: WEF: Brookings Inst: Change Recruitment: Trailhead:
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