Policies and Education

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

intelligence

**1. Introduction**

Fourth Industrial Revolution:

Proposed Policies

*Evanthia K. Zervoudi*

ence is done for the case of Greece.

Opportunities, Challenges, and

In this paper, key elements about the Fourth Industrial Revolution are set under examination. Concerns, challenges, and opportunities related to the Industry 4.0 are analyzed, and specific policies to deal with the challenges and take advantage from the opportunities are proposed. Other issues that are set under consideration in this paper are the rate at which the human labor is threatened by the technological achievements, the main factors that increase workers' exposure to the risk of automation, the jobs that are more at risk due to automation, and the basic factors that make political intervention necessary in order to deal with the unpredictable consequences of the technological progress such as the threat of a nuclear disaster and a possible income and social inequality gap widening. Finally, a special refer-

**Keywords:** Fourth Industrial Revolution, industry 4.0, automation, technological progress, creative disaster, robots, artificial intelligence, STEM, true creativity, social

In the last decades, the technological progress was remarkable. The fast and major technological changes offer the chance to improve human life, but they also create concerns about the future. One of the biggest fears related to the new technologies is that the robots and the artificial intelligence will replace the human factor in work leading to the "technological unemployment." This is not the first time that people face the technological progress as a threat for their jobs. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when another major wave of technological progress took place, similar fears had arisen, but they had not been proven right; technological achievements of these centuries finally drove to the creation of new jobs that had fully compensated the consequences of the new job-saving technology adoption ("capitalization result"). However, in view of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that has already begun in Europe and in the United States, the fear that the automation and the digitization will drive to the "End of Work" [1] wakes up again. A great discussion about the possibility of human factor replacement by machines and robots and a probable "creative disaster" have been emerged in a series of studies. Frey and Osborne [2] in their study support that 47% of jobs in the United States may be at risk of automation in the near future (see **Figure 1**). Bowles [3] in his study concludes that the proportion of sensitive-in-automation jobs in Europe varies from 45–60%,
