Workers and Machines of the World Unite! The Human in the Machine Meets the Machine in the Human

This presentation considers how the Industry 4.0 paradigm, specifically smart manufacturing in the context of post-normal times will shape the interrelationship between humans, augmented humans, machines, and the operational environment, through the lens of the emerging field of human-machine resources (HMR).

It describes the complexity, contradictions, challenges, and benefits that smart manufacturing creates, not least in terms of the extensive technology architecture development and integration and operational structures and management. It also considers the performance metrics and values that arise from the growing shift from a solely human-centric society to an integrated augmented human-machine-centric society.

While we face a major challenge in simplifying the integration of an enormous diversity of emerging technologies, processes, and data into a fully autonomous smart manufacturing ecosystem, a plausible benefit to this critical transformation will be to create new philosophies and strategies for human-machine resource optimization including independent and integrated performance, mutual intelligibility, new currencies of knowledge and ethics.

In summary, the presentation considers the development of smart manufacturing through the lens of HMR from a fully integrated human-machine-centric society rather than one where the human remains central to all future development.