Industry 4.0: Future Technologies & its Impact A.B.M. Kalim Ullah ACS

INDUSTRY 4.0: FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES & ITS IMPACT

A.B.M. Kalim Ullah

ACS

I

ntroduction

The fourth industrial revolution (4IR), that has been taking shape since the late of the twentieth century, builds upon the third revolution and the digital innovation. 4IR commonly known as Industry 4.0, appears to be changing the way businesses function and, by extension, the stakes by which they are forced to compete. Organizations must decide how and where to invest in these new technologies and identify which ones might best meet their needs. Without a full understanding of the changes and opportunities Industry 4.0 brings, companies risk losing ground. For business leaders accustomed to traditional linear data and communications, the shift to real-time access to data and intelligence enabled by Industry 4.0 would fundamentally transform the way they conduct business. Artificial intelligence, genome editing, augmented reality, robotics, Internet of things, and 3-D printing are the features of the fourth industrial revolution.

Technologies and Trend of the fourth Industrial Revolution

Industry 4.0 can transform organizations’ processes and operations. In today’s world, one can place orders, pay bills, listen to music, get a ride, get directions, and monitor his/her own health through smartphone. Mobile advancements have changed the way people live and work. But did you ever think about the technologies behind your phone? There are wireless technologies, allowing you to connect to the Internet without a physical cable. There are mobile-friendly apps and websites, specifically designed to work on your phone. It’s the same thing with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Just like the technologies powering your phone, there are 10 emerging technologies Changing the Physical World.

Biotechnology: Biotechnology already has had an enormous impact in medicine, agriculture, biofuel production, and the mitigation of environmental pollution. In biotechnology laboratories around the world, researchers have successfully edited defective genes that cause inherited diseases; reengineered the genomes of pigs with the goal of growing organs suitable for human transplantation; given people prosthetic limbs that can feel; helped blind people regain functional eyesight. The combination of biotechnology with robotics, computer interfaces, and new materials is leading to future innovations. It’s true that advances in biotechnology invite many ethical questions about genetically modified plants and animals, about changes to the human genome, and the unknown environmental consequences. These questions are just as important as the advances themselves.

Robotics: Rapid advancements in robotics are leading to big changes. Robots can do all of these: harvest crops; build cars; move warehouse inventory; assist in surgery and vacuum your floor. With advances in technology, robots are becoming more intelligent, adaptive, and flexible. Researchers are developing prosthetics and improved cybernetic enhancements that merge more deeply with the human body to restore physical capabilities a person lost or even provide new capabilities.

As with biotechnology advances, robotics innovations raise ethical and practical concerns, particularly around augmenting the human body and the worry that robots replace workers, resulting in lost jobs.

3D printing: Medical professionals use 3D bioprinting to treat patients, bioprinting is a process to print a transplantable organ. 3D-printer technology creates a physical object by printing layer upon layer from a digital 3D drawing or model. This technology can produce everything from body parts to engine parts. 3D-printer can print shoes, cars, houses, and more. And while 3D printing started with simple materials like plastic, advancements in materials are coming. Imagine 3D printing with aluminum, stainless steel, ceramic, or even biological tissue. Potentially, manufacturers can use these printers to create products in a far more cost-effective and customizable way than they can now.

New materials: Graphene is neither a tiny graph and nor a graphite pencil. Graphene is: 200 times stronger than steel, 1 million times thinner than a human hair and an efficient conductor of heat and electricity. Graphene is just one example of what’s called new materials. These are designed materials that are lighter, stronger, more readily recyclable, and more adaptive than materials we’re familiar with now. Some new materials are being developed with smart attributes, like the ability to self-clean or self-heal. Imagine a metal that has a memory and can revert to its original shape, or ceramics and crystals that convert pressure into electric energy.

Internet of things (IoT): IoT-based systems are under development to manage manufacturing supply chains, remotely monitor a person’s health, safely drive autonomous vehicles, and measure soil properties to yield better crops. New, higher-bandwidth infrastructure can possibly make sensor data available at almost any time and in almost any place around the world. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the vast digital infrastructure has the potential to let new technologies penetrate nearly every aspect of our lives by layering these capabilities into the physical world around us.

Energy capture, storage, and transmission: Every industrial revolution to date has involved changes to energy production and use, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution is no different. The availability of clean, economical energy is important for the future of the planet and its citizens. Technological advances in renewable energy, fuel efficiency, and energy storage are already helping mitigate climate change and move us to a more carbon-free future. Of all the changes in technologies, energy technologies are possibly the most important for the world. While the first three industrial revolutions made us more dependent on fossil fuels, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has the opportunity to help transition to clean and sustainable energy.

Artificial intelligence (AI): In the future, AI is going to be even more pervasive, helping make every company and every employee smarter, faster, and more productive. Each of us can have our own AI-powered digital personal assistant that’s constantly listening and gathering relevant data to anticipate our needs and perhaps even take action on our behalf. But don’t fret about a robot revolution just yet. Intelligent machines can surpass human computational power and analytical speed, but it’s still human beings who are defining the capabilities of these machines. Today, AI is empowering human ingenuity not replacing it. Blockchain applications: Blockchain is the new big data. Everyone is talking about it, and no one seems to really know what it is. Let’s start there. Blockchain is just a way of recording and sharing data in such a way that the same data is visible to everyone. Further, blockchain ensures that the data cannot be changed without everyone knowing exactly who did what. Blockchain technology fosters trust between two parties, even if those people are anonymous. To say it more technically, blockchain is a shared, programmable, decentralized, cryptographically secure ledger for storing digital objects and transactions. No single user or institution controls blockchain applications. Anyone can scrutinize them. For example, Bitcoin is an example of a blockchain application. Bitcoin is a digital currency, with a public ledger for all transactions. In addition to digital currency, blockchain technology can handle any transaction that is expressible as computer code.

New computational technologies: Our computers are getting smarter and faster, thanks to breakthroughs in material science and physics. New forms of computing, such as quantum computing, offer the possibility of creating computing systems millions of times more powerful than current ones. Today’s computers store information as 1s and 0s. Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, to encode information as 0s, 1s, or both at the same time. This enables quantum computers to represent multiple values simultaneously, performing calculations millions of times faster than conventional computers. Quantum systems have the potential to supercharge AI, speed the discovery of new pharmaceuticals and materials, and model highly complex data models in seconds.

Virtual and augmented reality: VR offers immersive digital experiences that simulate the real world. Today, VR requires a bulky, expensive headset to enter the virtual world, but that is changing quickly. Over time, we can expect the technology to get smaller and less costly. So how is VR different than augmented reality (AR)? Well, VR allows you to explore a virtual reality, while AR merges the digital and physical worlds. With an AR-enabled device, you can walk down the street and see useful information pop up in your field of vision relevant to your location.

Impacts of Industry 4.0

One of the main effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is increased human productivity. These Days, Customers Expect More. Customers today expect to get an answer anytime; on any channel they choose. The new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are reshaping the economy:

Transportation: In today’s times, do you need to own a car? Or can you simply share one?

Car-sharing services work across multiple industries—transportation, technology, insurance, finance—to provide a seamless customer experience from request to payment. In the process, they are disrupting the notion of car ownership.

What if you just need a ride? Services like Uber and Lyft have disrupted the transportation industry.

Advances in artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, clean energy, and other technologies can improve safety for drivers and pedestrians and potentially lead to greater use of public transportation and car-sharing services. This shift can result in reduced congestion and pollution, faster and cheaper commutes, and improved health.

Retail: In retail, personalization is changing everything. The lines between sales, service, and marketing are blurring as experiences become more one-to-one, powered by artificial intelligence. Virtual customer service agents can perform day-to-day transactions and make smart recommendations to customers. Machine learning algorithms can analyze billions of signals to route customer service calls to the most appropriate agent. Using augmented reality devices, such as smart glasses or other wearables, shoppers can look at a product in a store and see relevant data pop up into their field of vision.

Finance: Financial institutions use artificial intelligence to detect fraud and research equities. They are even using insights from machine learning to manage client relationships. For example, artificial intelligence helps financial advisors predict which prospects are most valuable in the sales cycle, decide next-best actions, and create highly personalized customer journeys based on the financial goals, life events, and other variables specific to each customer. The banking industry is going through major change. Branches are disappearing, new competition is entering the industry at a rapid pace.

Insurance: The insurance industry is looking at using data from wearable devices that monitor health, and sensors that track driving habits to determine pricing and encourage safer habits for policyholders. People with better health or driving records pay less for their policies. Sensors in cars can instantly alert drivers to any potential faults with their vehicles and insurance companies to collision damage, allowing them to instantly contact the driver to begin the claims process. Agriculture: AI-powered machine vision systems can measure crop populations and detect weeds or plant pests, and use robotic sprayers to precisely apply herbicides. Bioengineered plants are leading to greater crop yields and new medicines, such as antimalarial drugs produced from genetically modified tobacco plants.

Healthcare: Precision medicine helps doctors analyze a patient’s genome sequence, medical history, and lifestyle. That information, coupled with demographic data from groups of people with similar conditions, as well as the latest research, helps doctors create treatments and prevention therapies unique to an individual.

What should you do next?

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing how we live, work, and communicate. It’s reshaping government, education, healthcare, and commerce -almost every aspect of life.

In the future, it can also change the things we value and the way we value them. It can change our relationships, our opportunities, and our identities as it changes the physical and virtual worlds. There is little doubt that penetration of Industry 4.0 concepts in companies’ processes and operations will grow. Information flow, advanced technologies, and materials in other words, the digital and physical technologies that comprise Industry 4.0 make it possible to access real-time information and insights throughout an organization to drive actionable insights. As you consider your approach to Industry 4.0, you can take the following actions:

Redesign work for technology and learning: To take effective advantage of technology, organizations will likely need to redesign work itself, moving beyond process optimization to find ways to enhance machine-human collaboration, drawing out the best of both and expanding across alternative workforces. Organizational leaders should ensure that technology possibilities are connected to both customer and employee needs during work redesign.

Rethink your workforce strategy: More attention must be given to workforce strategy, collectively owned by the C-suite. A clear determination must be drawn between the business strategy and the workforce needed to execute it. Organizational leaders will benefit from using cognitive technology to identify the best ways to obtain the workforce capability they need.

Get immersed in innovation: Explore the art of the possible to push the organization to understand the application of various technologies and their potential impacts on the business. Understand what drives your need to differentiate and start to think about how to get there.

Build an ecosystem: Assess the organization’s digital maturity to understand what might be feasible, and what steps should be taken to build the necessary technological capabilities with the resources you already have in place, versus what new resources you might need to acquire to get there. Beyond the technologies themselves, consider the expert resources you may want to cultivate, either externally or internally, as part of your Industry 4.0 network.

Scale at the edges: At times, it makes sense to start with smaller stakes, where strategies can be tested and refined with relatively fewer consequences. Selecting projects at the “edges” of the organization can provide greater latitude for building out Industry 4.0 at a broader scale, and can also help individuals feel less afraid to fail, which could ultimately lead to greater innovation.

Start with one or two transformations to prove it works: Prioritize areas that can unlock several waves of potential value, and consider then building on those successes for exponential growth. Initial successes can serve as proof points, leading to a greater willingness to take a chance on more substantive investments.

Don’t wait for perfect, and keep iterating: Industry 4.0 technologies seem to be rapidly evolving, and there is typically room to iterate. Learning from previous experiences can inform the next set of initiatives and help home in on the next list of priorities.

Conclusion

The innovations in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, and other emerging technologies are going to redefine what it means to be human and how we engage with one another and the planet. Our capabilities, our identities, and our potential will all evolve along with the technologies we create. In the coming decades, we must establish guardrails that keep the advances of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on a track to benefit all of humanity. We must recognize and manage the potential negative impacts they can have, especially in the areas of equality, employment, privacy, and trust. We have to consciously build positive values into the technologies we create, think about how they are to be used, and design them with ethical application in mind and in support of collaborative ways of preserving what’s important to us. Governments, business leaders, the scientific community, and citizens need to work together to define the paths and direct the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in ways that minimize risks and improve the human condition for all. Change can be both exciting and scary. It’s understandable to feel uncertain about some or all of this.

References:

• Deloitte Insights has published detailed analyses on a number of these technologies; see www.dupress.deloitte.com

• René Waslo, Tyler Lewis, Ramsey Hajj, and Robert

Carton, Industry 4.0 and cybersecurity: Managing risk in an age of connected production, Deloitte

University Press, March 21, 2017.

• Laaper et al., The digital supply network meets the future of work.

• Hood et al., Industry 4.0 engages customers.

• Joe Mariani, Brenna Sniderman, and Cary Harr,

“More real than reality: Transforming work through augmented reality,” Deloitte Review 21, July 31, 2017.

» About the Author

Associate Member of the Institute