Introduction

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the human civilization inaugurated a new era in its way of wealth production: the industrial production, or in other words, the so-called Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics tell us that since the inception of this radical transformation, human technology has enabled and promoted a series of disruptive transformations in the form of industrial production. Following this line of thought, the first industrial revolution, located at the transition from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, was characterized by the introduction of water- and steam-powered mechanical manufacturing facilities. The second industrial revolution, which happened at the transition from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, was based on the introduction of electrically powered mass production and the intensive division of labor. Then followed the third industrial revolution, which entrenched from the 1960s until the 1990s, whose main driving force was the usage of electronics and information technologies (digital revolution) to achieve further automation of manufacture. These three successive revolutions can be coined as Industry 1.0, Industry 2.0, and Industry 3.0, respectively.