How today's Industrial Internet came about

Many organizations, including the World Economic Forum, describe the IIoT as being the fourth generation of the Industrial Revolution. The four generations have shared a common business goal such as running businesses more efficiently and producing goods and services more cheaply for stakeholders and consumers at large. They owe their existence to new capabilities created by inventions and advances in technology. In each generation, old manual jobs disappear, but new jobs and job types are created that operate at higher efficiency levels.

Today, pessimists point to the fact that many jobs will disappear during the age of the Industrial Internet. Optimists believe that because many new job types will be created, new jobs (albeit with different skills) will also be created. Time will tell if individuals whose jobs are displaced will be able to move into these new jobs, but many now feel that another revolutionary change is occurring. The future of work in the age of Industrial Internet is becoming a critical topic and connects it to the societal aspects of these innovative solutions. The term Internet of People (IoP) is sometimes used to remind us that people consume the benefits from the information that is extracted from data generated by people and/or the machines.