We publish below the introduction of "Controrder Compagni - Manual of resistance to technophobia for the rescue of work and Italy", the new book by the secretary of the Fim-Cisl, Marco Bentivogli, published by Rizzoli.
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We are not at any moment in the history of humanity. We may decide to close our eyes, as many do, but innovation, as we know, does not ask for permission.
Today, catastrophic visions seem more reassuring. One of these uses an image by Warren Bennis and tells of a future in which a man, a dog and a robot appear which completely replaces human labour: «The industry of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to prevent the man from touching anything." As suggestive as it is, this image only returns half of the truth. The book you are holding in your hands has this objective: to explain as clearly as possible that there are always pitfalls and threats, but that the future is a formidable terrain of challenge in which nothing is predetermined; that it is important to grasp some trends already underway, and above all deciding what and how to do so that the person remains the goal of every human project, be it economic, industrial, technological or social.
Everything changes, even our perception of space and time variables is changing in relation to the changes that technology brings to our lives. The use we make of it is conditioned by the speed and by the possibilities, not infinite but certainly increased, that innovation offers. There are two approaches: the first is the passive, individualistic and pessimistic one which involves being overwhelmed, guided, replaced. The second is, however, that of govern processes, fill them with content and objectives that overcome the narrow space of our worries and outline a future in which people re-enter the "us" dimension and human and supportive progress.
“Time is superior to space. This principle makes it possible to work in the long term, without the obsession with immediate results» writes Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium. «One of the sins that is sometimes found in socio-political activity consists in privileging the spaces of power instead of the times of the trials. Giving priority to space leads to going crazy to solve everything in the present moment, to try to take possession of all the spaces of power and self-affirmation. It means crystallizing processes and trying to stop them. Giving priority to time means taking care of starting processes rather than owning spaces. […] It is a question of favoring actions that generate new dynamisms in society and involve other people and groups who will carry them forward, until they bear fruit in important historical events.»
It is an extraordinary lesson that the Holy Father will take up again in 2015 with the Laudato si ': in starting and managing the process, with a look beyond himself, the human being lays the foundations for building a better society. And it is a call to action from which it is necessary to move in order to interpret in advance, with active serenity, the powerful changes that the fourth industrial revolution brings with it.
THE SPEED OF CHANGE
Electricity and the electric motor took more than forty years to become widespread. For many reasons, including the low reliability of the first applications. Today, thanks to algorithms, data and computing power, innovation gallops and spreads very quickly. Probably the relationship that can best express the growth determined by the technologies we are witnessing, and which we will witness in the coming years, is that of an exponential function: not a rapid progress but, on the contrary, at first slow, then sudden and explosive, with largely unpredictable transformative outcomes to date.
From the first great revolution in the history of humanity, the Neolithic one, David Landes wrote, «it took about ten thousand years to make the next step forward of a comparable magnitude: the introduction of new industrial techniques to which we give the name of Revolution industrial. […] Thanks to this progress, it took less than two hundred years to leapfrog to atomic energy and automation; and meanwhile the pace of change has accelerated in every field.' While writing these words at the end of the XNUMXs, the American historian could hypothesize that the world was at the beginning of the third industrial revolution and that many revolutions corresponding to "distinct sequences of industrial innovation" would also take place in the future. . But he almost certainly could not have predicted what would happen in a few decades, namely that the new, fourth revolution would be much more similar to a real change of structure rather than linear progress. Industry 4.0 is, we will see, much more than an industrial revolution: combined with blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, it is configured as humanity's second leap forward.
The world demographic data until the nineteenth century are more or less regular. The first leap forward came with the spread of the steam engine: this invention and its subsequent improvements allowed the limits of human and animal muscular power to be overcome. Today the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution broaden and increase the cognitive abilities of our species. This, with respect to production, will give life to a world that we are unable to fully imagine and which implies discontinuity with respect to the past.
Production, work, new ecosystems will change everyone's life, so the first thing to do is to understand what awaits us and understand that it is a more demanding transformation than a simple robotization.
The 1978 Fiat Ritmo was also fully automated and was produced by robots in the Cassino plant, in the province of Frosinone, but factory 4.0 is something completely different: it is interconnected with a level of interdependence within an intelligent ecosystem, in a dialogue between machine and machine and between machines and humans. The real breakthrough is the constant connection with the material and immaterial external ecosystem through data clouds (cloud). In Italy, in fact, there is still nothing of the kind. The first small experiences in our country are niches, construction sites that don't even resemble a 4.0 factory. The latter is instead completely integrated internally on the nine enabling technologies, which we will see in detail later on: advanced production systems, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, simulations, horizontal and vertical integration of information systems, the Internet of things, cloud manufacturing, cybersecurity, use and analysis of big data.
The factories of Siemens and Bosch were the first really try your hand at 4.0. This mutation implies the need to rethink production and the people involved in production, but also to regenerate the area around a smart factory. A factory works if there are workers with adequate professionalism, but above all if there is an intelligent ecosystem around it. It is this context that makes it possible to bring manufacturing back to the center, and Industry 4.0 is the opportunity – the last one – to achieve the goal, with all due respect to those who speak of the dematerialisation of the economy.
To achieve this, as well as training - this will be discussed extensively later - there is a need for political and social programming and planning that takes into account the techno-industrial and human megatrends, to be developed over the very long term and not limited to blackmail.
