Issue № 60. February 2017

Industry 4.0: Opportunities and Challenges

Graduate student, School of Public Administration, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: YudinaMA91@gmail.com

The article is devoted to the concept of the fourth industrial revolution and its place in sociological discussion about the modern society. The basics of “Industry 4.0” are: interoperability, virtualization, decentralization and real-time work. Cyber-physical systems, cloud computing and big data, the Internet of things becoming more and more popular in business, along with vertical and horizontal integration, virtualization and digitalization of the whole value chain production.

Many developed countries and the business leaders are active participants in the fourth industrial revolution: there are state programs, commercial enterprises and non-profit organizations, which have one main goal: the elimination of all barriers to the creation of “Industry 4.0”. But in its quest to maximize profits, to be the first on the market with the latest technological solutions, corporations as well as the governments tend to underestimate the possible negative social consequences of the new stage of technical progress. Displacement of humans by robots and programs in production process, inflation of diplomas, the general decline of human values and fundamental changes in the understanding of human nature itself — that is only an incomplete list of problems provoked by the coming fourth revolution. The paper shows the need to predict the social consequences of the introduction of new technologies for risk management, a competent expert response to modern challenges and for coordinated work of the society and the state for the benefit of man in the rapidly cyberneticizing world.

Keywords

Industry 4.0, the Fourth industrial revolution, information and communication technologies, biotechnology revolution, network, information society, social challenges, technological risks, anthropogenic risks, cyber-physical systems, artificial intelligence, virtualization, objectualization, objectionism.