Last Friday, I attended the final day of the ‘Artificial Intelligence for Leaders’-courseLeaders’ course at the Dutch Technology University of Delft. This last day covered Ethics in Artificial Intelligence and put the current developments inwithin a more historical context. In our discussions regarding current challenges in Digital Transformation, we often made comparisons with historical comparable situations from which we could learn. In general, all historians would state that it is often useful to look back in order to determinebetter understand the course inunder the light of new circumstances. Regarding the topics of Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation, I saw a lot of resemblance with challenges faced during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. In this article I would like to share some insights that I obtained during the course I attended at the University of Delft.

Historical context: From Industry 1.0 to Industry 4.0
The challenges faced in the first and the fourth industrial revolution are very similar. Often weWe often see the digital transformation being described as the fourth Industrial Revolution, theor Industry 4.0. The First Industrial Revolution gave us the steam engine, the second introduced Electricity and the combustion engine and the third was marked by the Computer advent. In the fourth transition, in which we are right in the middle of, connectivity between these technologies and applying data-analytics are the central themes. Although the technologies are different, at a higher abstraction level, the challenges faced in the first and the fourth industrial revolution are indeed similar. We will address five lessons which can be learned from the Industrial Revolution.