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April 15, 2025, 7 A.M. Your smart alarm clock softly wakes you up, you get off the bed and your house comes to life. The bathroom light turns itself on and the shower is heating its water for you. After taking your shower, you go to the kitchen where your breakfast is already automatically served. You check your phone – the battery is almost out of charge but it’s not a problem. A push notification informs you that the new battery for replacement is ready. You can hear your car starting itself in the garage, ready to take you to the factory which you manage.   A notification informs you via your phone that one of the machines at your factory is not working properly. You rarely go to the factory - most of the time it takes care of itself. "Come on, why on earth can’t machines get things right?" you whisper as your auto pilot pills your car out from your garage.

Welcome to life after the fourth Industrial revolution, where all the devices you use are custom-made, interconnected and constantly working for your benefit. The words “fourth industrial revolution” evoke vague memories of history lessons in high school. Something about the first steam engine… Then about the mess with electrification and labor differentiation at the end of 1800s… Then something about the development of information technologies at the end of 1900s... 

Three years ago, the Germans predicted the fourth industrial revolution, which promised to change the workplace radically and finally force the whole world of objects to revolve around you.

Change again

The fourth industrial revolution, more commonly known as "Industry 4.0," derives its name from a 2011 initiative spearheaded by businessmen, politicians, and academics, who defined it as a means of increasing the competitiveness of Germany's manufacturing industries through the increasing integration of "cyber-physical systems," or CPS, into factory processes.

What is Industry 4.0 look like?

One of the most significant aspects of the fourth industrial revolution is the idea of "service-oriented architecture". This can range from customers using factory settings to produce their own products, to companies tailoring individual products for individual consumers.

This type of manufacturing has huge potential. Combined with intelligent computing and flexible manufacturing, the Internet enables mass production of customized products to meet an array of personalized demands. By using the Internet to provide smart, real-time services, independent of time and place, enterprises are expanding services to fit full product lifecycles. This approach achieves a shift from product-centric manufacturing to service-centric manufacturing.

If your phone knows it will soon "die", it can notify the factory where the task will be put to produce a new battery for your phone or a new device. When your phone kicks the bucket, there will already be another one waiting for you.

Furthermore, the increasing integration of smart factories into industrial infrastructures could mean large reductions in energy waste. Many factories squander large amounts of energy during breaks in production, such as weekends or holidays, something which could be avoided in the smart factory.

Obstacles and drawbacks

Meanwhile, there are some problems on both the technical and social sides of the Industry 4.0 revolution.

Maximizing the perks of the fourth industrial revolution will require massive cooperation across corporate boundaries, especially when it comes to getting all the machines speak the same language. If an unfinished product arrives at a machine that is incapable of reading its RFID chip because it was programmed at a different frequency, the manufacturing process would come to mess. Thus, determining common platforms and languages to allow machines to speak across corporate boundaries stands as one of the foremost problems for the widespread adoption of cyber-physical systems.

Contrarily, too much homogeneity can also be estimated as a danger. For example, like Google which controls 97 percent of internet searches in Germany,  a handful of influential companies can gain an abnormal advantage in Industry 4.0.

Where will the jobs go?

Futurists have long been discussing the redundant nature of human labor and the consequences of machines taking our jobs. The fourth industrial revolution has only exacerbated these fears.  Some of their concerns are groundless, but some are confirmed by estimations that within two decades 47 percent of jobs will have become automated, displacing millions of workers around the globe.

However, the epoch of machines stealing our jobs was more characteristic of the third industrial revolution, featured by a massive rise in automated machinery. The fourth industrial revolution is the plan to make these machines talk to one another without human interference.

The main concern is that Industry 4.0 will allow companies to expand their operations without creation of new workplaces for people, something that could become a problem as the overall human population continues to grow.

One thing is for certain, however: Industry 4.0 is already upon us and we are going to dive headlong into the age of the smart environment, where all objects are in constant communication with one another for our own benefit.