Industry 4.0: reimagining higher education and value transformation

This chapter is an attempt to reimagine the impact of Industry 4.0 (Kagermann et al., 2011) on value transformation and higher education, in particular, that concerning the less charted area of ethics. Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution, refers to where new technologies and physical, digital and biological boundaries of our lives are blurred. For the purpose of this chapter, the two terms are used interchangeably.
This chapter is prompted by the World Economic Forum White Paper of August 2018 on Values, Ethics and Innovation—Rethinking Technological Development in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Philbeck, Davis & Larsen, 2018). The fundamental concept of value transformation for Industry 4.0 is based on social relations. With this background, a more detailed discussion of technologies and ethics follows, with a review of various approaches in assessing the ethics of technologies. Business eunomics, a theory of business ethics that assesses the changing interaction between means and ends, is examined. I provide examples of how this process can be implemented in higher education programs. Some of Nordin and Norman’s (2018) work on twenty-first-century education will also be referenced. The chapter expresses the author’s views of human-centered approaches to addressing the impact of Industry 4.0.