Swinburne University and Amazon Web Services are collaborating to help understand, and anticipate, the societal impacts of Industry 4.0, aka Society 4.0.
Last week, at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Sydney, Swinburne deputy vice-chancellor (R&D), professor Aleksandar Subic and Vincent Quah, APAC regional head for education, research and not-for-profit, Worldwide Public Sector, at AWS, staged a press conference to launch the Data for Social Good Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC), supported on AWS.
Subic said that, with the CIC, Swinburne was “taking Industry 4.0 into the Society 4.0 domain.” Specifically, through the CIC, Swinburne “aspires to develop intelligent data-based digital health programs and mobile solutions for the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes,” that would “incorporate tailored, real-time advice and support to individuals around lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise, and provide guidance on medication.”
From Industry 4.0 to Society 4.0
The rationale behind the concept of Industry 4.0 is well known. It’s a logical segmentation of the development of industrial technology that identifies three distinct, prior, eras: the first industrial revolution that saw the harnessing of steam power and the emergence of factories; mass, assembly-line production as pioneered by Henry Ford; the introduction of programmable logic controlled machines and robots to factories.
For some, Society 4.0 appears to be a lateral shift from Industry 4.0, as suggested by Subic’s comments. Swinburne University is quite active in the area and in November 2018 hosted a Society 4.0 Forum. The promo for the event said Society 4.0 was “a term we can use to describe and interrogate life after [technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution]: automation, artificial intelligence, digital communications and high-powered data analytics.”
From Society 4.0 to Society 5.0
The Japanese Government meanwhile has gone one step further and is talking about Society 5.0, and clearly articulates the four prior stages. (There is also already talk of Industry 5.0).
It says Society 5.0 was proposed in the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan as a future society that Japan should aspire to, and follows the hunting society (Society 1.0), agricultural society (Society 2.0), industrial society (Society 3.0), and information society (Society 4.0).
It defines Society 5.0 as “A human-centred society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space.”
But, back to Swinburne and the CIC. Subic said it was important to apply the concept of the four stages of industry revolution to society. “Industrial revolutions evolve rapidly [and] technologically, creating new value, but also leaving many parts of the society behind, [and] this issue is bound to repeat again unless we learn from the past and implement intelligence and collaboration for the social good.”
The aim of the CIC, he said, was “about putting digitalisation in service of society across three strategic domains: health innovation; social innovation; smart cities, but underpinned by world class, evolving, leading capabilities in data science and cloud technologies.”
I asked Subic, in light of the well-publicised transformations touted for Industry 4.0, what sort of transformation he envisaged for the development of Society 4.0.
Pre-empting the impacts of Industry 4.0
What I took from his reply is that the focus is really on the nexus of Industry 4.0 and Society 4.0. Societies 2.0. and 3.0 came about largely as a consequence of the corresponding Industry X.0 and, certainly with the case of the industrial revolution (Industry 1.0), there were many adverse, and well-documented societal impacts.
The goal appears to pre-empt or at least ameliorate such consequences when the development of Industry 4.0 leads to Society 4.0. Otherwise, he said: “Things will happen to us as they always happen to society, in each industrial revolution, and then we play catch up.”
He said: “We’ve evolved our understanding and implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies, approaches, strategies across the manufacturing sector, and we are even starting across the financial sector, across the health sector, you start on the so on.
“But broadly, when you look at the societal issues in the public sector, as opposed to just the private sector, we’re looking at issues that are emerging that are becoming the defining issues for the whole industry for the nation.”
He then posed a series of questions around these issues, saying: “all these elements are grey, complex areas in our society, which are not that clearly articulated. They need attention. What is the workforce of the future? What are the jobs in the future that don’t even exist yet? How do we change enable different education and training paradigms? How do we transform health into precision wellbeing rather than just precision medicine?
To answer these questions, he said universities needed to work with technology leaders to work with governments, with non-profit organisations, community organisations, health organisations, etc. “So that we unfold that unknown and define more clearly, within the Industry 4.0 domain, how we can improve this, how we can empower, how our cities can be citizen-centric.”
Noble aims, but I suspect that, as with previous incarnations, Industry 4.0 will become a juggernaut the consequences of which society will struggle to adapt to rather than anticipate.
