Three Hornets' Nests and a Light: Industry 4.0, "Artificial Intelligence" and the Employment Apocalypse: From Technological Fetishism to Well-Governed Knowledge

Debates on technological transformation frequently conflate three distinct propositions: the arrival of a new industrial era, the attribution of intelligence to computational systems, and the wholesale disappearance of human work. This article subjects these claims to standards of demarcation, evidence and causality, distinguishing genuine advances from their commercial interpretation. It examines the semantic limitations of language models, the mechanisms through which tasks are displaced or created, the thermodynamic costs of computation, and the scarcity of attention that makes opportunistic decisions easier. Drawing upon agro-industrial processes, it proposes a constructive alternative: purposeful, human-centric organisations driven by testable knowledge and capable of correcting their decisions under different possible futures. Keywords: Industry 4.0; artificial intelligence; employment; knowledge; thermodynamics; attention; agro-industrial processes; governance.