Being human 4.0

As digital technology enters all aspects of our lives, humankind experiences a convergence of the physical, digital and biological worlds. This series of works reflects on the human condition with our “enhanced abilities” and the opportunities and challenges that Industry 4.0 brings to our daily lives, societal structures and the natural planet.

While big data, social media, machine learning and AI are bound to influence, determine and control a vast spectrum of human endeavours and activities, distinct differences will also arise from cultural, social, national and family circumstances. Individual life experiences uniquely shape each human being and lead to distinctly human characteristics influenced by personal values such as dignity, ethics, empathy, compassion, sympathy, pride and honour.

With decisions made via the agglomeration of massive amounts of data, will machine decisions begin to influence human activities in a manner that distorts innate individual characteristics and values and the ensuing behaviour patterns? Whose algorithms and perspectives will determine values that are important to an individual? What kind of data are we relying on and under what basis? In other words, in the era of Industry 4.0, which human actions and activities are expected to be increasingly influenced by machine intelligence and decisions, and in short, what will it mean “to be human”?

Nature 4.0

Most technological advances ultimately lead to the betterment of human condition. However, many have also created unintended consequences that have deleterious effects on humans and society.

In 2000, at the dawn of the new century and the new millennium, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) of the United States released a list of 20 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. This list includes impressive accomplishments such as: electrification, automobile, airplane, computers, internet, and nuclear technologies. Several years later, the NAE also released a report on 14 global challenges of the 21st century such as restoring and improving urban infrastructure, securing cyberspace, providing access to clean water, preventing nuclear terror, and developing carbon sequestration methods. When we examine the two lists side by side, the greatest engineering achievements no doubt led to enormous benefits to humankind and elevated quality of life around the globe. However, we can’t help but wonder if certain achievements of the 20th century played a pivotal role in creating some of the toughest challenges in the 21st century.

At the same time, in the course of solving some of the hardest technological problems to produce innovative products that led to many tangible benefits to society, we created some of the most difficult challenges and unintended consequences for succeeding generations. In this instance, how likely will our even greater technological accomplishments of the 21st century driving Industry 4.0 not lead to even grander challenges for the 22nd century? What was missing in our collective thinking in the last century that needs to be addressed now so that we do not repeat our past mistakes in this century?

Human nature 4.0

While humans are social beings who perceive the world and operate through social and cultural lenses, technology has advanced to a level of sophistication whereby Global Positioning System (GPS) can pinpoint a location with real-time kinematic positioning and centimetre-level Precise Point Positioning (PPP). Atomic clocks routinely monitor time to a level of temporal accuracy whose error rate is better than a billionth of a second per day. Transmission electron microscopes now routinely provide clear images of individual atoms in materials with spatial resolution on the order of 0.1 nanometre. Personalised and individualised genetic testing of DNA from a saliva sample and associated data analysis can provide ancestry estimates down to 0.1% of global population and gene pool. Technological advances place increasingly greater emphasis on precision, perfection and prompt action in many human activities where they are deployed and adopted on a massive global scale. This trend has nurtured a relentless and ever-accelerating pace of work that encroaches on personal time and space, driving ever-greater precision, perfection and immediacy of action.

However, truth and beauty associated with imperfection and imprecision, deliberate allocation of sufficient time for relaxation, meandering, exploration and reflection, and the notion that failure and imperfection are necessary in the learning process and are also known to be essential ingredients for nurturing artistic creativity and scientific discovery. As technology forces individuals and professions towards greater degrees of precision and perfection in Industry 4.0, what will be the consequences for human behaviour in an intrinsically imprecise and imperfect world?