Socio-economic and cultural effects of disruptive industrial technologies for sustainable development

Abstract

The size of the business intelligence market and its growth allows to estimate the short-term substitution effect, when the labour is replaced by artificial intelligence. Positive impacts of disruptive technologies include the dematerialisation of the industrial metabolism, and less ecological impact on nature, as prerequisites for the implementation of a circular economy. The negative consequences of disruptive technologies are difficult to predict, and the paper classifies them in eight groups: psychological impact; information vulnerability; increasing information dependence; the risk of creative potential reduction; the increasing cost of waste in the green economy; loss of jobs; privacy decrease; hacking and the loss of human control over cyber systems. The Internet of Things could not appear before the digital technologies (from a personal computer to 'cloud' technologies) reached industrial maturity. Also, societal, legislation and economic challenges raised by disruptive technologies for workers and firms are discussed.