03 Mar 2021 Jennifer Johnson Industry 4.0 means assembly lines and supply chains will never be the same again, and the pandemic has hastened the pace of implementation (Credit: Shutterstock) Five or ten years ago, an optimistic futurist would have told you that humans were about to be made obsolete on factory floors. The combination of robotics, 3D printing, machine learning and the Internet of Things was going to make all but the most skilled workers redundant. But this vision was largely not borne out by reality. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has proven to be a process, rather than an event. Industrial automation has yet to fully live up to the hype that has surrounded it.