A new and connected era

Also called 4.0, this new robotic era we are living in follows the other three transformative historical processes. The fourth industrial revolution is an expression coined by the founder and leader of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, referring to the intense technological changes that have been modifying our productive and social processes since the middle of the last century: A fusion of technologies that blur the lines between our established physical spheres, both digital and biological.

Schwab himself declared that humanity is “on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before “.

According to Schwab and some other experts, now we have the opportunity to shape this Fourth Industrial Revolution, which will dramatically alter how we live and work. “The future of employment will be made of jobs that do not exist yet, in industries using new technologies, under planetary conditions that no human being has ever experienced,” sums up David Ritter, CEO of Greenpeace Australia / Pacific, in a column about the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the British newspaper The Guardian.

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Blockchain

The blockchain is so much more than just the technology behind cryptocurrencies. A digital account book of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value. Blockchain can add value in so many ways to the way in which we currently go about our lives and do business. Expect to see this technology become more and more prevalent in everyday life and business.

The 4.0 factory: Fully automated and very, very smart

So, what is this huge change about and why do some people identify it as a genuine revolution? If we follow the theorists’ main assumptions, it is not single and brilliant innovations that will decide our future productive processes, but the meeting of all those developments carried out during the last decades and still to come. In that sense, this trend represents a paradigm shift, instead of one more step in the frenzied technological race. We can be sure about one thing: In our current 4.0 factories, automation is already being carried out by cyber-physical systems, made possible by the internet of things and cloud computing systems. These cyber-physical systems combine both physical and tangible machinery with digital processes, acquiring the capacity to make decentralized decisions and cooperate with humans, through the evolving technology developed around the internet of things.

New technology will enable computers to run 100x faster

Until now, the major challenges that stood in the way of creating the terahertz microchip were overheating and scalability. However, following three years of extensive research, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) physicist Uriel Levy and his team have shown proof of concept using flash memory technology. “This discovery could help fill the ‘THz gap’ and create new and more powerful wireless devices that could transmit data at significantly higher speeds than currently possible,” said Levy, head of HU’s Nano-Opto Group. “In the world of high-tech advances, this is game-changing technology,” he added. In a paper published in the journal Laser and Photonics Review , Levy and HU emeritus professor Joseph Shappir showed proof of concept for an optic technology that integrates the speed of optic communications with the reliability and manufacturing scalability of electronics. Optic communications includes all technologies that use light to carry information through fiber-optic cab...

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