The fourth Industrial revolution emerges from AI and the Internet of Things

Big data, analytics, and machine learning are starting to feel like anonymous business words, but they're not just overused abstract concepts--those buzzwords represent huge changes in much of the technology we deal with in our daily lives. Some of those changes have been for the better, making our interaction with machines and information more natural and more powerful. Others have helped companies tap into consumers' relationships, behaviors, locations and innermost thoughts in powerful and often disturbing ways. And the technologies have left a mark on everything from our highways to our homes. It's no surprise that the concept of "information about everything" is being aggressively applied to manufacturing contexts.