Industry 4.0 illusion or nightmare?
For many specialists, the fourth industrial revolution is already a reality, a new stage in the modern development of humanity that follows the three previous ones, marked by the creation of steam-driven machinery; the discovery and use of electric power, and the automation of manufacturing processes.
Each of them caused drastic changes, not only in the mode of production, distribution and consumption, but also in social organization, in particular the deepening of the great inequalities that existed in the middle of the eighteenth century.
But the three industrial revolutions known so far not only changed people’s lives, but also the way they killed each other and nothing graphs this idea as well as the two world wars that occurred in the first half of the previous century.
Therefore, the certainty that we are on the threshold, or as some of us have already crossed it, of a different era should not be taken lightly.
Industry 4.0 is the name given to this new stage, which consists of applying digitization to production processes to process huge amounts of data, the massive interconnection of systems, inside and outside factories, and the constant and increasing use of artificial intelligence that will inexorably displace human labor.
At the theoretical level, it is a matter of achieving, by means of the use of the Internet and the so-called cutting-edge technologies, production chains that are increasingly communicated among themselves and between supply and demand markets.
To put it simply, we were caught up in the science fiction of Aldous Huxley’s “A Happy World” or Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”.
The point is whether this fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, will maintain the emphasis on profit at all costs or whether, on the contrary, it will be at the service of the population by contributing to the reduction of long and exhausting working hours and generate well-being for the people who will be able to enjoy the so-called “useful leisure”.
Unfortunately all indications point to the first option, which will be a nightmare for the population, relegated to the role of an anonymous mass less and less useful for large corporations, or of slave consumers of a system managed from a complex of computers.
UNESCO warned that it is urgent to reinvent educational systems to prepare society for a new labor market, where in a first stage 30 percent of current tasks will be in the hands of robots that will leave some 375 million employees without work in the world.
This is not a matter of rejecting new technologies, nor of destroying machines, like the Luddites during the first industrial revolution, but of reflecting on whether we are aware and prepared for the world that is coming upon us and where our children and grandchildren will live, if they live.
(Taken from RHC in Spanish)
Written by Radio Grito de Baire
