6G as if People Mattered: From Industry 4.0 toward Society 5.0 : (Invited Paper)

While 5G was primarily developed to address the anticipated capacity growth demand and enable the increasing importance of IoT based industry verticals, 6G will require a substantially more holistic approach by embracing a much wider community. 6G will become more human-centered than 5G, putting people at the center of a future super-smart society. In this paper, we elaborate on the anticipated shift of research focus from an IoT based Industry 4.0 to a more human-centered Society 5.0 paradigm in future 6G mobile networks, whereby so-called cyber-physical-social systems (CPSS) will play a central role. To illustrate the potential of CPSS, we present two prominent examples of human-in-the-loop centric systems: The emerging Tactile Internet, one of the most interesting 5G low-latency applications, and the future Internet of No Things, an important stepping stone toward ushering in the 6G post-smartphone era. Finally, we take a brief trip into the emerging field of robonomics in the 6G era and touch on the potential of advanced blockchain technologies such as oracles to enable the on-chaining of blockchain-external off-chain information stemming from human users. In doing so, they leverage on human intelligence rather than machine learning only for the social integration of robots into human society.