Industry 4.0: And What Has Become of It

The “new factory” is up for discussion when it comes to socially acceptable technology design in the world of work. It is undisputed that the new factory must be a computer-based one. However, this view prohibits the ideology of technical progress, which suggests that technology—following its own laws, as it were—progresses along the one royal road. Of course, the “new factory,” just like the old one, is not only a place of the working world but also of the living world—essentially tangentially affected by clashes of interests, including labor disputes, as an essentially regenerative process of balancing interests. This understanding is based on the insight that the factory as a whole is part of our culture. The new factory is faced with the task of making its contribution to ensuring a good life for workers and their families. The fact that the ecological and technological constraints to design the factory in a certain way are becoming less important leads to an objective need for subject-related and social criteria for the design of the new factory. So what might be the path that could be taken in a humane new factory? There are at least two competing development paths as answers to the new challenges: (1) Computer-integrated neo-Taylorism is probably still the majority path to the future of the factory; and (2) this path competes with the “Human Centered CIM systems.” These are increasingly becoming the focus of vocational training research.