Human factor

We live in the era of the fourth industrial revolution and the natural question to ask are: 'What is next? Who will play a leading role in the new digital world - artificial intelligence (AI) or the humans?' In the search for answers, we need to make a short trip back in history. Technological advances have always led to changes in the social and economic structure: harnessing the power of water and steam, mankind leapt from the hunter society to the agricultural society. The discovery of the electric power and conveyers paved way for the transition to the industrial society. With electronic information technologies, we have found ourselves at the modern stage of development, which is information society. What is the next step? While Industry 4.0 was concerned with the automation of physical & technical processes, the latest trends of Society 5.0 are mostly oriented toward the automation of 'thinking' processes and the human collaboration with intelligent systems. Artificial intelligence and the universal 'digitalization' are intended to promote the achievement of the main goals - an increase in life expectancy, improvement of the quality of life, and the emergence of human 'actors' who create the intellectual property objects, which are then materialized by means of cyber-physical systems.