The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Opportunities and Challenges

By Min Xu, J. David, Suk‐Hi Kim. 2018

860 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The fourth industrial revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, describes a world where individuals move between digital domains and offline reality with the use of connected technology to enable and manage their lives. (Miller 2015, 3) The first industrial revolution changed our lives and economy from an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing. Oil and electricity facilitated mass production in the second industrial revolution. In the third industrial revolution, information technology was used to automate production. Although each industrial revolution is often considered a separate event, together they can be better understood as a series of events building upon innovations of the previous revolution and leading to more advanced forms of production. This article discusses the major features of the four industrial revolutions, the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution, and the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/277315aaf2aa6d1643f3537cb07b32206519e8f7

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. Elias Hadjielias
2. Michael Christofi
3. Demetris Vrontis
4. Ignazio Blanco
5. Vijay Pereira

Citations in the corpus

• A systematic literature review on the impact of artificial intelligence on workplace outcomes: A multi-process perspective (2021, positive): “This is a new era of bridging the physical with the digital world (Xu et al., 2018), strengthening human-machine interactions (Eberhard et al., 2017; Ferreira, Oliveira, Silva, & da Cunha Cavalcanti, 2020) and fostering automation through integrations between smart machines and intelligent software…”
• The Use of Composite Materials in 3D Printing (2020, background): “and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) meeting in Orlando, Florida, Organovo Inc, a regenerative medicine company focused on bioprinting technology, announced the release of the first fully bioprinted blood vessels and probably it started the fourth industrial revolution [9].”