Industry 5.0 and AI: Is Putting People at the Centre Enough?

From one number to the next

Writers have long named industrial stages with numbers: steam, then electricity, then computing, then "Industry 4.0", which connected machines to data. Then came the fifth number. What does it mean, and who says so?

The European Commission defines "Industry 5.0" as a vision that goes beyond efficiency and productivity and rests on three pillars: human-centricity, which places workers' wellbeing and skills at the heart of production systems; sustainability, which adopts technologies that respect planetary boundaries; and resilience, meaning industry's capacity to withstand and adapt to disruption. The Commission's 2021 document says it shifts the focus "from shareholder to stakeholder value", and that it builds on Industry 4.0 rather than replacing it.

Five years before that, Japan's Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan of 2016 put forward "Society 5.0", a human-centred society in which economic development and the resolution of social issues are compatible, coming after the hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial and information societies.

A name its own family disputes

The term is not universally accepted. On 22 April 2024 the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), the Research Council Industrie 4.0 and the Plattform Industrie 4.0 issued a statement criticising what they called the unfounded and unnecessary use of the phrase "Industry 5.0", which, they said, "contains no new content". They argue that Industry 4.0 has always had benefit to society as its most important goal, and that what is now discussed under the fifth label is covered by existing terminology. One participant in the statement said the debate was "not only misleading" but endangered fundamental acceptance.

So we are looking at a European policy vision more than at an agreed historical stage. There is no harm in that, as long as we know its limits.

Where is AI?

AI is the most prominent tool in this discussion, but the Commission does not confine the vision to it. What concerns us is the question: is the tool used to extend human capability or to sideline it? The answer is measured by how institutions behave, not by slogans. Examples of measurable questions:

1. Do workers take part in designing the tools that will change their work?
2. Is the tool's introduction accompanied by real training and time to learn it?
3. Are errors handled with clear human accountability?

The figures that matter to the reader

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on a survey of more than a thousand employers representing over 14 million workers in 55 economies, estimates that about 170 million new jobs will be created by 2030 and about 92 million displaced, for a net gain of 78 million. It expects 39% of current skills to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030. These are employers' estimates, not facts; they vary across economies and sectors, and they say nothing about the situation of any individual.

The practical meaning is that the tool does not wait for whoever delays retraining, and that retraining begun today costs less than repairing unemployment tomorrow.

How to read dazzling promises

Foresight books often offer polished scenes of a day in a person's life in 2031, with smart homes and driverless vehicles. Those are fictional pictures, not measures. The more honest measure is to ask about the worker, the family and the firm today: what actually improves in their lives? Not everything that shines in a demonstration survives in reality.

What tomorrow holds is in God's hands. Ours is to take the means: to try, measure and train, preserving the worker's dignity and the trust of the profession, and to rely on God for what lies beyond.