March 2019

| INTERVIEWS & REPORTS | www.smartmachinesandfactories.com March 2019 | 43 | you look at your phone and see how much artificial intelligence it has compared to what we have in industry you would be totally surprised. So you can see the potential. “My view is that we are a couple of years behind the technology driven areas. So we have to look for other sectors which are running up front and use that.” Skills Another area of focus for Melzer is skills – very much the same as in the UK. The challenge for Melzer is that changes as a consequence of Industry 4.0 will be faster than ever before, and that’s a challenge for everyone, from Government to industry: “Digitalisation is driving the change of competence in our society faster than any industrial change before it.” As a result, one of his main focuses during his tenure as head of the Industry 4.0 platform steering committee for the digitisation of business in Germany, will be the qualification and further training of skilled workers. Some of the biggest concerns resulting from Industry 4.0 is the perception that robotics, A.I., and the Internet of Things may have an irrevocable, negative impact on livelihoods. Bill Gates, in an interview with Quartz magazine, said that governments “should tax companies’ use of robots, as a way to at least temporarily slow the spread of automation and to fund other types of employment”. Meanwhile PricewaterhouseCoopers published a report in in 2017 that said up to 30% of existing UK jobs are susceptible to automation from robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) by the early 2030s – although in many cases “the nature of jobs will change rather than disappear”. Manufacturing was one of the sectors singled out as most likely to be affected by this paradigm shift. For Melzer the main issue in terms of jobs, is that you will lose more manual work and this will be transferred to knowledge work - that’s the big shift in his opinion. However he highlights: “If you look positively at it, the jobs will be more meaningful, more motivational in the future, because you will use a lot more creativity rather than doing repetitive, boring, tasks that make you tired because we are not designed for doing 24 hours of the same stuff. In fact for the people themselves, I think it’s a good outlook.” Although he says things might not go completely smoothly, the benefits of these changes including increased wealth creation as more low paid jobs get automated, will ultimately result in a positive outcome for society. For further information please visit: www.plattform-i40.de www.festo.com very slowly because it is highly fragmented, he sees it as having has tremendous potential, highlighting the pace and scope of mobile phones: “If Festo involvement in the Industry 4.0 platform Festo has been involved in the research advisory board and several working groups since the founding of the Industry 4.0 platform. The experts are particularly involved in the topics of reference architectures, standards, security of networked systems and qualification.