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The pervasiveness of advanced technologies and their disruptive impact on society have spurred the debate on the emergence of a new industrial revolution and on its positive and negative effects, both at an individual and spatial level. This paper aims to contribute to this debate, focusing attention on the perception of changes related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution and exploring new methods of analysis of the manifestations of both techno‐enthusiasm and opposition to it. Starting from the extensive literature in this field, the work adopts two research perspectives: the study of imaginaries and narratives developed around the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which convey different messages from social groups and places; the geographies of opportunity and discontent, which address the resentment expressed by some localities towards advanced technological models and growing inequalities. In this work the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not interpreted through data about the technological variables or interviews to protagonists of the phenomenon; rather, emphasis is on the points of view of non‐institutional subjects and, in particular, the opinions expressed by people on the Web. For this reason, the sentiment analysis has been adopted to identify both positive and negative polarities and the relevance of specific feelings through the selection of key words related to the notion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The empirical analysis based on this methodology focuses on the Italian case in a specific period (first and second phase of the pandemic, from January 2020 to September 2021) and, at a local level, on the comparison between four medium‐sized cities (Pisa, Lecce, Taranto and Terni). This paper also tries to extend recent contributions through the provision of new perspectives for the definition of policies designed with the involvement of the population and places regarding both the processes of technological change and the definition of new socio‐spatial models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the fourth industrial revolution (4th IR) has features that are distinct from the previous three industrial revolutions in terms of a paradigm shift. Although 4th IR relevant technologies may have positive impacts in many fields, they may also create harmful impacts, just as every previous industrial revolution has. Most studies dealing with the 4th IR have focused on its positive impacts; the present research concentrates on its negative impacts and suggests technological opportunities to hedge against expected risks in the future. To this end, future societal topics are first identified through latent Dirichlet allocation based topic modeling using textual information of futuristic data, which is retrieved from the website, including information on future-related insights. Second, the risk topics related to the future are selected with the help of a weighting score using predefined risk keywords and sentiment analysis. Finally, safe technological opportunities are identified based on textual information derived from patent data related to risk topics with the perspectives on risk analysis that have prior (prediction, prevention) and posterior perspectives (response, recovery). To illustrate technology relevant to the 4th IR, artificial intelligence (AI) is selected. As a result, 36 topics related to future society and six future risk-related topics are suggested that reflects security-relevant properties of AI and three types of threats. Opportunities to ensure or safety through technology are also proposed in four perspectives. Technological opportunities related to safety are explored in two perspectives. One is to expand existing threats, and the other is to suggest new threats. This research can be utilized to plan future safety technology by taking a data-driven approach under the huge paradigm shift of the 4th IR and proposing potential technological solutions that are not future societal scenarios and policy solutions suggested in the previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]