THE LONG HISTORY OF THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The article proposes a review of key notions for the redefinition of the stages of technological development since the beginning of modernity and their respective relationship with the organizational modes of the economy and social functioning. Through the historical tracking of the origin and meaning of concepts such as data processing, information and computing, it is revealed that these terms, usually associated with the mode of production inaugurated by the emergence of electronic computing in the mid-twentieth century, and after with artificial intelligence in the XXI, are notions born at the dawn of the modern era, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since then they played an essential role in the emergence and survival of industrial society, as well as in human wage labor, the manufacturing system and the discovery of new materials and energy sources. The solution of the needs related to data processing and computing represented since the beginning of commercial capitalism a challenge as vital to the functioning of industrialism as the productive and distributive processes based on matter, the burning of coal and hydrocarbons and the muscular effort of animals and workers.