First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
The rights of Jean-Claude André to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939015
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-482-7
Abstract
The diffusion of digital technologies opens up extraordinary fields of application and will profoundly modify professions and jobs, labor relationships, the notion of work itself, the modes of action and the expectations of users who may at the same time be producers. By providing new ways of doing things digitally, all sectors will be affected: engineering, food, health, mobility and objects and services as a whole. A rapid evolution toward a digital world is taking place without it being possible to control the nature of this disturbance, as its speed is unprecedented. This dazzling success is the result of a combination of a techno-scientific revolution, reversed processes of human–machine cooperation and a transition to a more agile and responsive economy. But it is, more broadly, the whole system of political decision making and regulation of companies, communities and States (and their nature) that is being questioned with an obligation to escape the processes of individualization and social misanthropy that are currently taking place (following the example of Fab-Labs). “Not all will die but all will be affected”, to paraphrase La Fontaine – but all can be monitored.
However, exponential developments in the possibilities of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, robotics and additive manufacturing suggest that traditional production activities (from ores and their processing, agriculture, materials and their shaping and assembly/disassembly, etc.) will disappear economically for their benefit. This is highlighted by the concept of Industry 4.0, where we seek to combine the classic aspects with the immense potential of digital technology. It is, and will have been understood as, an essentially incremental approach aimed at further optimizing the economic system without seeking to disrupt it in principle (but with employment issues subordinate to it). In the digital system, the “masters of algorithms” have already largely disrupted the world of production and services and this trend should continue as long as we have the electrical energy and materials to allow Industry 4.0 to continue to develop. Beyond data control and exploitation, a power struggle will continue on many links in the value chain: intermediation, specific expertise, control of resources, control of human and physical networks, partner loyalty, creativity and the political system as a whole.
But today, however, there is a lack of effective management with regard to technical choices, the difficulty for politicians to set the conditions for a sustainable dialogue on options (e.g. failure of the debates on nanotechnologies, nuclear power, synthetic biology, etc., but a social agreement for renewable energies) and the “bitter” polarization of certain stakeholders who know how to make themselves heard. It is increasingly up to the market (meeting the solvent needs of consumers and the supply capacities of producers) to guide economic change and bring about social change. Policies are in an uncomfortable situation of adapting public policies to the increasingly globalized socioeconomic reality, mainly targeting employment and GDP. What can we do about it?
At the same time, elements (even modest ones) of foresight reveal real concerns such as access to reserves (minerals, fossil fuels, and food), global warming, fundamentalism, inequalities of all kinds, etc. Partial adjustment solutions are generally proposed by National or European policies: recycling, circular economy, various material and energy savings, renewable energies and their use, etc. But more generally, how can we satisfy a planet whose population is growing with a purchasing power that must be growing as well? How can we accept that digital technology is, for the time being, the third largest power in terms of world energy consumption and perhaps the first in 2040? How can we manage the environment, various fundamentalisms and material well-being, not to mention social empathy in a (still) peaceful world in the West? How can we remain free in these settings?
Another issue to be taken into account is that of creativity and radical innovations… For some, it is necessary to go beyond the current increments, which are important agitators (because they occur faster than most citizens can accept, or the boiling frog fable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog). The answers to these questions are based on divergent minds (poorly supported in the national academic world) and on the development of largely interdisciplinary forms of action that hypothesize possible failures, reorientations, agility and flexibility, trust on the part of hierarchy, made essential to explore the complexity of the world hidden behind the Industry 4.0 integrating label. If not seriously considered in France, for example, new production and governance models are likely to emerge from other countries, reinforcing the disorder induced by the current digital world alone. How can we act?
Today, with the intrusion of digital technology into our daily lives, citizens see these changes and worry about them, rightly or wrongly. The same is generally true in service or production companies. But if the debate is open, nothing is definitively settled, even if it seems unlikely to remain on the side of the road of this adventure with potentially considerable effects or to engage in a timid and irresponsible way. There is therefore a need for a serious examination not only of technology, but also of the relationship with research and training, with citizenship and therefore with politics. This is a new situation involving relationships of competence and authority (not necessarily autocratic power) that must be the subject of reflection on the part of scientists, politicians and finally the whole social body, which needs to be educated on choices. Rather than being subjected to them, would not it be better to anticipate them successfully?
Foreword
No one will stop the digitization of the world! It is so much easier and very often safer to put everything in the form of zeros and ones and let the machines do billions of operations to design, produce, drive, wage war and decide for us.
Yes, but the human of flesh and blood cannot be digitized. What will become of them? How can we avoid sinking into the digital ocean? This is the main question that Jean-Claude André addresses by following the common thread of production and economic change. The industry of tomorrow is already here: it is Industry 4.0.
What will we produce tomorrow? How? With robots, no doubt, as it is estimated that 50% of jobs will be impacted by AI by 2050. For example, how are supermarket cashiers earning or will they earn a living when most stores will be automatic? On another level, how will we design the objects of the future? Engineers are concerned as well as unqualified people. This is only a very small sample of the questions that are asked of Industry 4.0 and that André approaches with extraordinary curiosity and scholarship.
With a great pedagogical talent, André explains the role of AI, the Internet of Things, 3D printing and beyond “bio-printing”. He also discusses how and why each of these new technologies brings about colossal changes in industry and work organization. Human devastations are already very significant and many are still to come. The relationship with work is strongly impacted. André does not evade any of these aspects of the ongoing digital revolution.
The book ends with prospective elements; it is a question of trying to understand where all this may lead us. Various more or less pleasing scenarios are outlined by the author. Finally, André naturally wonders what it would take to tame the digital revolution.
In total, André offers us an extremely rich reflection, a rich work in which everyone will find it necessary to nourish their own meditations on the world as it changes at a very high velocity. Finally, this book, with its encyclopedic bibliography, is a remarkable working tool for anyone wishing to discuss the subject of ongoing industrial and social changes.
Jean-Charles POMEROL
President of the AGORANOV incubator, Paris, France
President of ISTE Editions’ scientific board
Preface
Minc and Nora (1978), when considering the invention of writing, believe that it was a change that revolutionized the ancient world. They write: “today, computer technology may herald a similar phenomenon”. The analogies are a striking: extension of memory; proliferation and transformation of information systems and possible modification of authority models. So, with Industry 4.0, are we entering a simple evolution or are we participating in a real revolution?
In 1943, according to Bretones (2017), Thomas Watson of IBM said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”… By provocation and perhaps with a little hindsight linked to an increasingly advanced age, it would have been possible to initiate the desired reflection in this work with these sentences by Lewis Carroll (2010): “In the kingdom of the Red Queen, all subjects must run as fast as possible to remain in place. As Alice points out, perplexed and stunned, this is a very tiring way to get nowhere! Indeed, everything is moving around us, time is running out, we must always go faster and better but with an ever-lower time diversity and, in the end, for which society? For what well-being?” (translation from French book).
This short book does not aim to solve all the problems of the world at once, where different doctrines – liberal, political, religious, environmental – simultaneously confront each other, but always with more or less significant support from technology, even science, which prolongs, conditions and amplifies the appearance of our activity and our culture. Probably like Aesop’s language, technology is perhaps the worst and/or the best thing and it is up to the reader to try to position themself in relation to this uncertain world that implies a recent technology relative to others, that of digital technology, which is opening up more and more to us. To provide elements for reflection, certainly biased by one’s own culture, we need to accept that a personal point of view enters (and serves) a broader debate in order to finally rely on (or reject) Frankel’s (1955) quote, which is: “Responsibility is the product of defined social arrangements” (author’s translation). For the author, the social body must be enlightened to participate in collective decisions appropriate to an increasingly rapid change, which is beyond the scope of this small reflection, which nevertheless attempts to provide some preliminary insights.
There are many current topics where science and technology come into contact with our more or less cosy daily life. This book deals in a very general way with a subject that has emerged widely, but which has only emerged from the laboratories in recent years, or even a little more: the subject of digital technology, with a focus on a theme that concerns the author’s engineering training, the emergence of the concept of Industry 4.0 that serves to modify production processes, but also consumer products and their uses. “It is on this increased capacity for intelligent networking of supply and production resources that the concept of ‘Industry 4.0’ is based, a forward-looking vision of a fully connected factory where machines could communicate with each other through multiple sensors and could be controlled in an ‘intelligent’ way through the collection and analysis in real time of all the data produced. Modelling production processes, anticipating maintenance needs, optimizing the use of resources and continuous quality control are all possible implications of greater integration of advanced technologies in factories and on the various networks” (COE 2017a, 2017b).
But, from a historical point of view, it was the invention of the transistor in 1947 and then the microprocessor in 1971 that were among the most important technological breakthroughs of the 20th Century. The consequences in the form of continuous innovations that happened were not unexpected… Without these electronic elements, computers, the Internet and today’s Industry 4.0 could not have been possible. The Internet can also be considered as another technological breakthrough that has flooded our daily lives. As a reminder, Intel’s first chip had just over 2,000 transistors, and IBM reportedly announced a new engraving process that allowed 30 billion transistors to be engraved on the same chip (Trégouët 2018). It is because these changes in scale that the so-called 4.0 revolution was able to emerge and spread to all the company’s divisions.
Here is the first box below.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automatic learning, which are constituent elements of Industry 4.0, are becoming more and more present, even omnipresent in our lives. From medical and legal diagnosis to financial diagnosis, loan approvals and virtual personal assistants, AI has many uses that benefit our society through greater inclusion and access to goods and services (The Future Society 2018). At the same time, there is a transfer of activity from the professional to the end user, which must pass through the “Type 1 if…” Caudine Forks system (Furculae Caudinae in Latin, corresponding to a defeat of the Roman army in front of a Gallic tribe, forced to bow under horizontally placed spears)… AI does not only invade our daily lives, but becomes an integral part of the material (and immaterial) production activity, which is translated by the concept of Industry 4.0, which is discussed in this book.
Indeed, the experts are unanimous: humanity is on the brink of a new era; AI will transform our lives to an extent that we cannot imagine. This transformation has already begun and affects all areas of our lives. AI has many applications in fields as varied as health (Rodrigues et al. 2016; Ross et al. 2016; Ruggieri and Briante 2017), education, culture, security, defense… Research has grown considerably in recent years: not only the web giants (GAFAM, short for Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, which have a value that has exceeded 4,100 billion dollars, and outperform Germany’s GDP in terms of valuation; Babinet 2018), but also many countries are now investing massively in AI and are taking part in this fourth industrial revolution (Azoullay 2018). For the General Director of UNESCO, mass seems to have been said, but is it so sure?
For some, it is a step forward for humanity, a necessary step because it is the way to stay competitive and build (or reintegrate) factories in the territory, but for others, AI simultaneously presents significant risks leading to threats to humanity, such as the disintegration of people’s private lives, the absence of control agencies (Académie des Technologies 2018; Latonero 2018; PRC 2018a), large-scale disruptions due to weak cybersecurity (Tan 2018), disruption of social life, loss of jobs or qualifications (Agüiera 2018; PWC 2018), etc. The lack of guarantees regarding the protection of personal data is, for the Institut Montaigne (2015), one of the obstacles to public acceptance of Internet of Things technologies. But, at the same time, using AI as recommended by the G9+ Institute (2017) to use predictive policing to anticipate crimes and other misdeeds may raise some ethical issues regarding individual freedoms.
“With the implementation by the European Union of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – an important data protection law with global implications – and the adoption by California of a new privacy law, combined with several high-profile incidents involving companies exposing consumer data, President Trump’s administration is now seeking to develop an updated general framework for consumer data protection” (ITIF 2018). But is this first-degree provision sufficient?
What this book attempts to show is this very wide range of information, some of which is undoubtedly uncertain and provisional, to allow and/or engage in a debate because the opportunities and challenges of the Industry 4.0 revolution are inextricably intertwined and interdependent. Learning how science works in one of the subjects at the frontier of knowledge is a small stepping stone that allows scientists to judge, even among themselves, the difficulty of sharing knowledge to decide and act. It is not a question of voluntarily intervening on citizen choices based on diversions oriented toward the popularization and promotion of science in terms of employment or health progress (for example), but of learning how to orient toward “working together” for more positive, non-conflicting experiences. That is the author’s goal.
