First Amazon announced plans to fully automate its new brick and mortar store with robots. Then we learned that Foxconn plans to automate 30 percent of its factory workforce by 2018. And recently, Wendy’s announced plans to add automated kiosks at more than 1,000 stores. One thing is clear — robots are changing the way we live and work.
Humans plus machines will drive society forward. This was the central message conveyed by Dr. John Kelly, senior vice president of IBM Research, at the Augmenting Human Intelligence Cognitive Colloquium, which took place in San Francisco.
The world is on the brink of a new industrial revolution in which advances in the field of artificial intelligence will obsolete human labor, according to many economists and technologists today. Two Oxford researchers recently analyzed the skills required for more than 700 different occupations to determine how many of them would be susceptible to automation in the near future, and the news was not good: They concluded that machines are likely to take over 47 percent of today’s jobs within a few decades.
Strapping electrodes to your head and running a small amount of electrical current through it can actually help your brain perform better, according to a growing body of scientific evidence. Continue reading… “The future of therapy: DIY brain shocking?”
“We’re increasingly going to be working with technology, and clearly some technologies are going to replace us.”
Former Secretary of Labor and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Reich and Susan Hassler, editor in chief of IEEE Spectrum magazine, Susan Hassler , are joined by engineers, scientists, and futurists from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Rice University, and the Institute for the Future to give listeners insights into how technology will redefine work in the not too distant future. (Podcast)
Machine learning is advancing at exponential rates. Many highly skilled jobs once considered the exclusive domain of humans are increasingly being carried out by computers. That may be good or bad depending on whom you talk to. Technologists and economists tend to split into two camps, the technologists believing that innovation will cure all ills, the economists fretting that productivity gains will further divide the haves from the have-nots.
Futurist Thomas Frey: In 1964, and open letter was drafted and sent to President Johnson, warning him of the coming Triple Revolution.
Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist, thinks the best way to improve health care is to get rid of most doctors. Human judgment simply cannot compete against machine-learning systems that derive predictions from millions of data points, Khosla told an audience last week, the final day of Stanford University School of Medicine’s Big Data in Biomedicine Conference.
Robots have been working in factories for decades.
Ray Kurzweil predicted a new era of thinking machines that will meet and then exceed human intelligence when he published The Age Of Spiritual Machines in 1999. The idea seemed outlandish at the time, but not so much anymore.
We’re going to see artificial intelligence do more and more.
We have seen a lot of advances in the past few years. We have seen cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots, speech recognition and synthesis systems, 3D printers, Jeopardy!-champion computers. These aren’t even the crowning achievements of the computer era. They’re the warm-up acts. As we move deeper into the second machine age we’ll see more and more such wonders, and they’ll become more and more impressive.
Machines will generate more data than will people in 2014.
Connected fitness gadgets such as Fitbit and Jawbone are being snatched up by consumers this year. But in 2014, we will see this kind of ubiquitous sensor technology extend to the enterprise as part of the “Internet of things,” according to an analyst at Frost & Sullivan.
Technology changes the skills we need to learn.
A New York Times column written a while ago by Bill Keller, stirred up some controversy when he wrote that he was worried about his 13 year-old daughter joining Facebook and how it would have a debilitating effect on her intellectual faculties. Technology advocates pounced on his article.