First mentioned at the World Economic Forum in 2016, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is a technological revolution that fuses the boundaries of digital, bio-industrial, and physical science, with the development of IT and artificial intelligence at its core. It is steadily developing in our daily lives and creating new added value in various industries.
“Jarvis!” In the movie ‘Iron Man,’ the main character, Tony Stark, repeatedly calls ‘Jarvis,’ an artificial intelligence, and treats it like a real person and entrusts it with various tasks. In the movie, Jarvis is a high-performance AI that recognizes and responds to speech and performs tasks. Many people became interested in artificial intelligence through these movies and the controversial AlphaGo in 2016, and had high expectations for the “fourth industrial revolution” that it will lead. In 2017, Northstar Research was commissioned by ARM to conduct a global survey on AI. The results showed that 61% of people expected AI or automation to lead society in a positive direction, while 22% were concerned that it would lead to a negative direction. When asked, “What do you fear about AI?”, 57% agreed that AI will become more intelligent, and 63% agreed that AI is generally unreliable. As such, people are entering the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with many expectations and concerns about AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. For those who are living in such a society, I would like to talk about the concept and characteristics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and AI technology, which is the core keyword of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The World Economic Forum held in Davos on January 20, 2016, was held under the theme of “Understanding the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and the concept of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” was mentioned for the first time. The World Economic Forum defined the fourth industrial revolution as follows “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a technological revolution that builds on the Third Industrial Revolution and converges the boundaries of digital, bio-industry, and physics.” In other words, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an extension of the Third Industrial Revolution, not something new. The ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ is an extension of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ based on IT technology, but it is differentiated from the existing industrial revolution. The second and third industrial revolutions were processes of automation and increased connectivity using electricity and information technology, while the fourth industrial revolution involves the emergence of artificial intelligence to replace the human brain. At the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab said that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expected to be a turning point that will bring about many economic and social changes. As of 2024, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is progressing rapidly around the world, and countries are establishing policies and strategies to respond to it. In particular, Korea is making various efforts to strengthen its competitiveness in core technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud computing, and to promote digital transformation.
As mentioned earlier, the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ is based on the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’, so the development of information and communication technology is a necessary condition. In addition, the key words of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are ‘convergence’ and ‘connection’. Through the development of information and communication technology (ICT), the world is able to communicate more freely than ever before. In addition, technologies that were developed separately, such as information and communication technology and nanotechnology, have been able to converge smoothly, such as the Internet of Things. Therefore, the connection and convergence of various industries such as manufacturing and bio-industry can create new added value. The ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, which may seem a bit hard and distant, is not a story that is far away from our lives, nor is it a story of the future that has not yet come. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here and now, and it is developing and manifesting itself in our lives.
Let’s take a look at a recent example. Recently, the Kakao AI speaker has become popular in the Korean IT industry. This seemingly trivial AI speaker can also accumulate and analyze activity data such as what the person using it is curious about, what kind of music they like, and when they use it. In addition, the accumulated data can be processed and applied to the consumer market, labor market, art market, etc. to better understand the characteristics of consumers. The characteristics of the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ can be characterized as ‘hyperconnectivity’, ‘superintelligence’, and ‘predictability’. By connecting people, objects, and each other through the Internet communication network, it will be possible to analyze a huge amount of data through ‘hyperconnectivity’ to identify certain patterns and ‘predict’ people’s behavior through ‘superintelligence’. In the consumer market, this process will allow companies to respond to consumer needs more proactively than ever before. The ability to create new value from a large amount of data, such as this example, is the hallmark of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The technology that processes and analyzes a large amount of accumulated data to predict what will happen in the future is an example of ‘artificial intelligence technology’. Some people misunderstand the term “artificial intelligence” to mean only robots that think like humans, such as AlphaGo or Jarvis, and they think that such robots will dominate people and have a negative attitude towards artificial intelligence. So what exactly do we mean by “artificial intelligence technology”?
The field of artificial intelligence has been established since the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, when the term “AI” was proposed by Professor John McCarthy, a university professor at the time. ‘AI is the science and engineering of creating intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs,’ said Professor John McCarthy. However, many people were not very interested in the idea of AI at that time because it was based on a huge amount of data. However, now that we live in a society of massive information, AI has become the driving force behind the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. As such, AI does not refer to a single technology, such as telecommunications or nanotechnology, but rather to a field that studies intelligent programs.
In this article, we’ve discussed the relationship between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and AI. This will be of great help to us as we prepare for the upcoming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Different scholars have different opinions on what the future will look like with A.I., and different people have different ideas. However, I hope this article will clear up misconceptions about the future of AI and broaden your perspective on the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“The future cannot be predicted but the future can be invented.”
As Alvin Toffler said, we need to actively pioneer the AI era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, not just passively follow it.
