Fourth Technological Revolution

The world has experienced three industrial revolutions, the first began with the invention of the steam engine and forever changed the way we relate to meet our needs. A new source of energy, different from human labor, allowed the shift from manual to industrial production, leading to profound transformations not only inside factories but also in the social fabric that was beginning to organize around production. This period is still referred to in history books as The Industrial Revolution.

But the truth is that what began in 1784 is ONE industrial revolution, the first, and we cannot attribute the singular pronoun to it, as it was followed by two more, and today, more than two centuries later, we are experiencing the beginning and consolidation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Three key areas for the Fourth Technological Revolution.

While the first revolution used the steam engine to mechanize processes, the second leveraged Henry Ford’s assembly line to mass-produce, and the third relied on the widespread use of the internet and electronics to automate production. Industry 4.0, another term used for the transformations brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, builds on the progress made in digitalization but, in addition, aims to combine technologies and blur the boundaries between the physical, biological, and digital worlds.

CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS

Digital twins, meaning, 1:1 virtual representations of a physical machine in which an intervention in the virtual model generates an identical reaction in the physical model and vice versa, is perhaps the simplest example of what is essentially a Factory 4.0: intelligent combinations of components, objects, and systems equipped with storage and analytics capabilities, connected through enabling technologies of Industry 4.0, such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Data Science.

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