Digital economy: backgrounds, main drivers and new challenges

Abstract

The industry development over the last hundred years has had a huge impact on the development of technological infrastructure and life change. Three main components of this development are related to personalization: a car as a personal vehicle and greater personal freedom; a personal computer as a means of intellectual autonomy; a personal phone as a means of freedom of communication and access to information. These three development factors significantly changed the employee psychology and created the conditions for diffusion of qualitatively new, synthesized (cyber-physical) technologies that became the basis of the Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things – two main working concepts of industrial and infrastructural development for the next 20 years. The conventional or classical industrial systems that are dominant to the present day have mainly been based on the principles of human muscle energy replacement, but the technological changes of our days raise the question of the substantial scale of displacement of the living manpower both in production and in management and services. The process of technological and industrial transformation that has already begun will inevitably lead to the transformation of social and economic systems, and here the key problem will not only be the provision of a new quality of economic growth, but also the solution of the employment problem interfacing a new technological platform, the information and social infrastructure of society.