Whether AI and the technologies it enables will reach their full potential depends on the workforce that will work alongside them. Yet the skills that that workforce needs to do this are in short supply. Rather than debating what to do about massive job losses from AI, discussion should focus on how best to prepare workers' skills for the types of jobs that they will need to fill.
A shifting job picture
A 2017 McKinsey’s report says that approximately half of all activities done by the current workforce could be automated. They point out, however, that this does not point to...
If you’ve read the many predictions about the future of AI, you’ve likely found them to be wildly different. They range from AI spelling doom for humanity, to AI ushering in Golden Age of peace, harmony and culture, to AI producing barely a blip on society’s path toward ever-greater technological achievement.
Those three views – dystopian, utopian and organic – present issues we need to consider as we move deeper toward an AI-integrated future. Yet they also contain exaggerations and false assumptions that we need to separate from reality.
The Dystopian View of AI Future
Those with a dystopian view of emerging technologies...
Ask people on the street how much AI uses today affect their lives, and most would probably answer that it doesn’t affect them right now. Some might say that it’s pure science fiction. Others might say that it may affect our future but isn’t used in our world today. Some might correctly identify a few ways it’s used in modern technology, such as voice-powered personal assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana. But most would be surprised to find out how widely it is already woven into the fabric of daily life.
AI uses for personal assistants and other humanlike bots
Voice-powered...
Today’s business leadership face a conundrum. Artificial Intelligence (AI) unquestionably will play an enormous role in the future of their organizations and the business environment in which they operate, but what effects will it have? Prognosticators have wildly different visions of the future it will create, ranging from causing the extinction of humanity to ushering in a Golden Age in which machines provide all humanity’s needs and free us to focus on altruistic service to one another and the advancement of human culture.
Both of these most commonly heard predictions are based on assumptions that lead to wild speculation that...
AI’s effect on the workplace will not be limited merely to repetitive, production line-type jobs. Increasingly, it also enters the realm of highly trained knowledge workers. It will also affect those who manage workers currently employed in such jobs. AI likely will reshape jobs all the way up to the C-level offices. That doesn’t mean, though, that managers and executives will no longer be needed. They simply need to prepare themselves for shifts in their work responsibilities.
In my latest article Why AI Is Neither the End of Civilization nor the Beginning of Nirvana I argued that AI will bring...
In the summer of 1956, a small gathering of researchers and scientists at Dartmouth College, a small yet prestigious Ivy League school in Hanover, New Hampshire, ignited a spark that would forever change the course of human history. This historic event, known as the Dartmouth Workshop, is widely regarded as the birthplace of artificial intelligence (AI) and marked the inception of a new field of study that has since revolutionized countless aspects of our lives.
Origins of the Dartmouth Workshop
The idea for the Dartmouth Workshop was conceived by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. These visionary individuals...