At the beginning of 2021, the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation published a document entitled ".Industry 5.0 - Towards a sustainable, people-centred and resilient European Industry"R&I Paper Series - Policy Brief.
For many readers it may come as a surprise that while the concepts and technological applications of so-called Industry 4.0 are still being digested, many are already sitting on their hands. the foundations of the next industrial revolution. There is no doubt that the innovation is a necessary activity for the sustainability and even the survival of human beings who, for thousands of years, have been adapting to all the changes that have been happening around them: initially mainly climatological, then social, military or economic and lately epidemiological, but is it really necessary to define a new paradigm when we are still immersed in the previous one, bearing in mind that between the last leaps of innovative version there have been (at least) several decades?
It is now introducing the qualitative need to strengthen a people-centred orientation as opposed to the application of all new technologies to obtain (and exploit) data.
This is the first thought that comes to mind when looking at the first page of the document, but, on the one hand, one has to take into account the forward-looking vision which, in my view, the national and supranational public bodies that society has built up to look after its interests should always have. The closer the public body is to the citizen, the more operationally oriented it is expected to be in solving everyday problems, but this must be complemented by a series of other measures. institutions in charge of reflecting on what is strategically going to happen (or we want it to happen...) the day after tomorrow, and this European publication fits in with that orientation.
Analysing the document, it begins to be understood that it is not talking about a radical revolution of any of the already established concepts but rather about add a number of humanist nuancesThe report is a report in the broadest sense of the word, focusing on certain aspects of I4.0. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to conceptually baptise the report as I4.1, but surely its media impact, motivational character and inspirational purpose would have gone unnoticed.
I4.0 has been defined from the outset as a drastic revolution from a technological point of view Much has been written about the new technical profiles that are necessary to carry out this revolution, about the jobs that will disappear due to the massive implementation of intelligent manufacturing and the advance of artificial intelligence in production processes, and even about the new jobs that we cannot even imagine will exist in the near future. Its impact on GDP has been quantified, rankings have been made on which countries are most prepared to face the changes and forecasts have been made on the educational changes that are necessary for our young people of today to be able to lead the challenges of tomorrow.
It is precisely as a complement to all these quantitative analyses that the I5.0 is framed, which introduces the qualitative need to strengthen people-centred guidance in the face of the application of all these new technologies. An extended humanistic orientation in the sense of extending the human being as an individual entity to his relations with the environmental surroundings where he lives and relates to his own and to the machines he is creating and perfecting.
To better illustrate the new concept, we start from the fundamental premise of the datocentrism as the fundamental pillar on which the I4.0 has been based, understood as the interest for the generation, capture, conditioning and intelligent processing of data. This premise can be easily verified today, because if you have the data, you have the capacity to generate income and, in fact, today the 5 largest companies in the world in terms of market capitalisation are dedicated precisely to this task (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook).
In recent times, the technological effort has focused on increasing transmission speed, achieving integrity assurance or extending the options for hybridisation of different data sources and not much time has been spent on analyse the social implications of their use in terms of privacy, digital memory or social stratification.. It is not that the need to deal with these social aspects has not been identified, which it has, what is happening is that we still do not know the future social impact of the data we are generating and storing today and, on the other hand, the advances made, such as the current legislation on the management of cookies in web browsers, are light years away from being transparent with the user and agile in their management.
Against this background, the I5.0 adds an additional layer on top of I4.0 technologies by bringing in the concepts of humanism, sustainability and resilience. by focusing on the development of technology for the ultimate good of the future inhabitant of planet Earth (taking into account not only his brain but also his heart), on efficiency in the management of available resources by applying a long-term vision, and on the flexibility, robustness and versatility of technology in the face of severe and rapid changes in boundary conditions.
For all these reasons, the Industry 5.0 document is more a catalyst aimed at generating reflection on the super-intelligent world we are creating than a procedural guide to apply a new technological dogma. A reflection whose necessity we all agree is even more necessary now than it was barely a year ago after the pandemic situation in which we find ourselves and of which we still do not know many of the consequences.
Link to the EU document: "Towards a sustainable, human-centric and resilient European industry" - [Click here] [Click here] [Click here] [Click here] [Click here] [Click here] [Click here
