Industry 4.0: smart machines are new industrial revolution - raconteur.net

Automation is the past, current and next big thing. For a long time, getting robots and software to work for us has been the Holy Grail of business. In theory it makes everything cheaper, more reliable, more powerful and it frees humans up to work on creative projects. Ever since the first industrial revolution, capitalists have looked for ways to extract human labour from the means of production and replace it with smart systems. This, of course, was initially driven by greed.