Russia 2020: Industry 4.0 and Sustainable Development Issues

In the article, the author considers the question of the relationship between the integration of innovations, united by the concept of Industry 4.0, and the concept of sustainable development, which in modern conditions of civilizational turbulence continues to be in the foreground. Taking as a basis the basic components of the sustainable development paradigm – the economy, society and ecology, the author examines the impact on them of basic innovations generated on technologies that make up the essence of Industry 4.0 – big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, Internet services, cyber-physical systems. The results of the analysis show that there are ultimately two basic scenarios that can be formed on the basis of scientific discourse: an optimistic one, whose supporters tend to see only positive features of accelerating the development of the economy and society of modern civilization, thanks to the introduction of innovations, and a pessimistic one, whose supporters point to the likelihood of social and environmental shocks that can be expressed in a significant, and possibly almost complete restructuring of modern social reality, leading to the disappearance of entire professions, the transition of huge masses of the population at the world level to the poverty line, a radical transformation of social interaction practices and the “fabric” of social reality at all. The author advocates the so-called balanced approach, which is applied in this work.