On the Road: from Industry 4.0 to Society 4.0

The contribution builds on the desk research approach based mainly on studies performed by leading world ́s consultancies and agencies as the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and others, academic research performed e.g. at MIT and Harvard Business School, and other resources, and follows the one presented at the 2016 IMECS conference (Vacek, 2016). It focuses on the deep impact of Industry 4.0 on socio-economic issues resulting in what can be called Society 4.0. The contribution tries to highlight the challenges presented to society, economics and management by technology advancements and draw attention to building of necessary synergies between technology and socio-economic systems. The prevailing emphasize is today devoted to technology issues. According to author ́s opinion the rapidly advancing technology, if not accompanied by profound changes in socio-economic systems, can result in weakened social cohesion. Instead of pure technology transfer we should today discuss much broader category of knowledge transfer. Ample attention should be paid to intellectual capital, its protection, assessment, and reporting. This contribution does not pretend to present results of the primary field research. The opinions and conclusion expressed here are intended to open the discussion in the field the importance of which is until now overshadowed by that given to purely technological aspects.