Industry 4.0 (W01)

What is Industry 4.0?

We shall revisit our evolution path in terms of technology advancement. How do get here over time as the human race? We started with hunting to feed our stomachs since Day One competing with lions and tigers, evolved to growing food on the soil many thousand years ago, and decidedly made use of natural resources such as wind power some hundred years ago to augment our muscular power. We have gone a long way till we run everything with electricity and fuel-based transportation as of today which is known to be the Industrial Age. We have progressed to Industry 4.0 at present. One may say the following. Industry 1.0 is coal based. Industry 2.0 is electricity based. Industry 3.0 is electronics based. Industry 4.0 is data based – the special feature is data. Many may become uneasy at this point.

How does data drive our industries and societies?

This answer is not obvious unless we look deep. Let’s see the technologies being vigorously developed currently. The hottest topic should be electric vehicles which are the precursor to autonomous driving. The topic is hot because governments are sponsoring the introduction of electric vehicles as a contribution to reducing carbon emission into the atmosphere. Citizens are now buying electric vehicles with subsidies around the world. With the help of electronics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data (note this word), all cars in the near future will move on roads in safety giving total comfort to passengers.

Smart cities have been in the news for about 20 years with Madrid and Rio claiming the title when they hosted major international sport events such as the Olympics or Football World Cup. The host countries took the opportunities to modernize their cities by incorporating new technologies. In honesty, those efforts have not turned our cities into smart ones yet as of today (2022-08-13). The reason is that infrastructures are expensive to build. Once built, they are expensive to modernize. We need to be patient. We do see an opportunity to upgrade all lampposts to the smart version at a similar pace as autonomous driving vehicle introduction. Whilst electric cars can get geographic position information from GPS (Global Positioning Satellites), cars and pedestrians can get more localized data and information from lampposts. Park the car to get it recharged, find out what’s on locally and how to get there, or how soon mum on the bus will arrive. The involvements of data are understandable.

The pendulum of applications can swing from fast moving electric vehicles to static lampposts on the street, and to semi-static situations such as in a factory or warehouse where robots do the production and movement of goods around. How do robots relate to data? Old versions of robots are algorithm based. Modern robots are data based via artificial intelligence. Industry 4.0 is indeed defined as the connectivity of machinery to enable the real time use of data.

Is there a single word that underlies autonomous driving, smart lamppost, and modern factories? Do we accept that the word ‘data’ is well placed to describe the current era of evolution? What do we gain by accepting or declining to accept? It is all about clarity of our mind. We can effectively achieve a lot more if we have clarity of mind of current technology developments.