Three years after Klaus Schwab named our historical moment as the ” Fourth Industrial Revolution “, other authors already mention Industry 5.0.
If the fourth industrial revolution or industry 4.0 corresponds to a new way of organizing the means of production through digitization , what will the fifth industrial revolution bring us, which we are already slowly entering? According to some, such as Erik Rasmussen, founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, sustainability . Others talk about IoT, connection, employment, etc.
Industrial revolutions seem to accelerate
Innovation calls innovation , and feeds back. Let us take for this the example of electricity. The Greek thinker Thales of Miletus (~600 BC) discovered the sparks that some objects gave off when rubbed. Charles François de Cisternay du Fay (1734 AD) discovered the different charges, and Benjamin Franklin called them positive and negative around 1782.
Alessandro Volta generated the first constant electrical flow in 1800. Edison’s light bulb (1880) and the General Motors rotor (1890) followed one another almost simultaneously. From there it is difficult to name all the electrical inventions due to their number.
The first industrial revolution spanned from 1760 to 1830, mechanizing production. The second, from 1860 to 1914, used other sources of energy and was characterized by the division of labor. The technical scientific revolution (1965 to 1990) includes the Internet. The fourth was named by Klaus Schwab in 2016, but it started around 2010. By 2025 we could enter the fifth.
Towards a revolution of the people
From some public organizations, such as COTEC , they focus on talking about “the era of people” understood as an era in which innate human talents begin to gain value . Until now our entire educational system was based on the memorization and storage of data.
During the fourth industrial revolution we have been realizing that we are not going to beat the machines with memory. See the show where Watson beats the humans at Jeopardy! . Neither in strategy. Lee Se-Dol, the only human who has ever been able to defeat Google’s AI at the Go game, has announced his retirement from it.
It is time to value those characteristics that make us more human, such as imagination, critical spirit, empathy or leadership . This means that we will work more with people, and that we will automate a large part of the production process. In other words: we will connect everything with everything else, according to the aforementioned futurologists and others.
When we work for a robot (if we work)
All the authors who try to unravel the future allude to a new social contract between work and remuneration. Some dare to mention the Universal Basic Income. Others speak of the end of work . The World Economic Forum says that millions of new jobs will be created. Who has the reason? Well, we don’t know. What we do know is that soon everything will be connected .
If now the world is advancing at a certain speed because each of us carries a connected device (telephone) and we have another at home (computer), in a few decades the IoT of current smart homes could be too small for us. Of course the television and the vacuum cleaner will be connected, but so will the walls and ceiling, the pots, each drawer and cutlery, etc.
A well-known soft drink brand has even brought out a version of its single-use bottles with OLED screens for a promotion. Hopefully it will be reusable and easy to recycle, because the seed of Industry 5.0 has already been sown . It is possible that this will lead us to work for algorithms. For example, writing offers for our digital twins to make decisions.
Skills in Industry 5.0
100 years ago the world of work rewarded manufacturing and manual skill . 50 years ago, memorization and reading comprehension ability . Today you need programmers with imagination . From what we know, in a few decades you could need everything from philosophers specialized in content curation for ethical deep learning , to programmers focused on the user experience of robots.
We know, or we think we can intuit, that Industry 5.0 is going to reward work with people. Also a good relationship with the machines, since these are going to be everywhere. Most of the interactions in the world will be machine-machine, freeing us in a certain way to be able to attend to people, although without ruling out having to talk to a machine .
An example to close and understand the possibilities. One day we are organizing a vacation and we ask our virtual assistant what we are looking for. This assistant, integrated into the whole that supposes a global IoT , will be in charge of talking and negotiating with thousands of virtual agents, and will come to us seconds later with a vacation proposal. This, disruptive today, could become the norm in years.