Towards Human-Centric Futures: An Affordance Perspective on the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The current era of technology-enabled change is often referred to as the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). Information systems research into the 4IR largely adopts a techno-economic perspective, according to which rapidly advancing digital technologies enable productivity-enhancing industrial innovations. As a result, insufficient knowledge is generated about such important issues as the implications of the 4IR for human welfare and environmental sustainability. In response, an affordance perspective on the 4IR is developed, which de-emphasizes technology and related deceptions and focuses on action possibilities and human agency. Analysis yields four machine affordances that emulate human cognition and communication: enhanced decision making, human-centered interaction, generativity, and extensible resource sharing. The affordance perspective on the 4IR involves machines that can sense, understand, interact, and react - opening new discourse and suggesting new research streams that transcend the techno-economic while building on existing research. Overall, the analysis centrally situates human agency in determining how and for what purpose evolving 4IR affordances are enacted - countering the presumption that an industry vision for a technology-infused future is inevitable.