INDUSTRY 5.0: TOWARDS A NEW REVOLUTION
What is Industry 5.0?
Just ten years ago they started to talking about Industry 4.0 and yet today, we are on the doorstep of a new change: Industry 5.0. The experts define it as the natural evolution of Industry 4.0, which still dominates the world of small and medium-sized firms. The new industrial age originates from the development of technologies 4.0 at lightning speed, in particular in the ICT, AI and robotics fields, that are leading to Cyber Physical System (CPS) and increasingly powerful IoT devices. Industry 5.0 will be characterized by the cooperation between machines and human beings, with the ultimate aim to give an added value to production, by creating personalized products able to meet customers requirements.
Where were we? Let’s go back to Industry 4.0
We’ll make a step back to better understand what will happen in the next future. Today we are still in the era of Industry 4.0, based on digitisation, automation and interconnection of production processes. That industry which has seen the birth, the evolution and the establishment of advanced technologies such as Cloud Computing and Information Technology in general, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence. And yet Augmented Reality, Big Data, Robotics. At the basis of the Industry 4.0 that we know there’s the advent of the internet, which combined with the development of new technologies, has deeply changed the society in which we live as well as its industrial processes. Industry 4.0 was carrying a huge risk connected to what seemed to be the future of the fourth industrial revolution: a total digitisation which would replace the human workforce with machines. But is this really what will be next? Let’s find out right now.
The protagonists of the revolution
The forecasts declare quite the opposite. Rather than a substitution of human labour, we will assist to the development of the so called Super Smart Society, governed by the intelligent cooperation among humans and machines. In particular, the protagonists of Industry 5.0 will be cobots and Intelligent Software applications (bots). Cobots, unlike the robots currently used in the production cycles, are collaborative robots programmed to interact with humans in shared workplaces. Indeed, the differentiation and personalisation of products can’t be done without the guide of human mind. So, the purpose of Industry 5.0 is to use the capacities of machines (obviously, superior to ours) to keep high volumes of production but with a higher quality, precisely because of that collaboration.
Bots, instead, are Artificial Intelligence applications able to act for a user or another program in a mutually beneficial relationship. Bots are already widely used and in the future they will be used even more, especially in the industrial context. Cooperation and personalisation will be the core elements for the change of Industry 4.0 towards the future industrial paradigm. The redefinition of human intervention in production processes and the recognition of its value in determining the quality and personalization of the product, make the role of men meaningful and indispensable into industry 5.0.
How the working world will change with Industry 5.0?
This vision will affect soon the working world, by making up new, more specialised and better jobs. Indeed, the use of Artificial Intelligence in the industry aims to facilitate employees, not to eliminate them. What is expected is a redefinition of human activities in a context of men-robots integration which will get to a more performing and “light” production for workers. The collaborative dimension at the base of the next revolution in fact would lead to a rezising of work loads, by freeing the employees from hardest duties.
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