Think Like a Futurist:
Know What Changes, What Doesn’t, and What’s Next
– Cecily Sommers – 2012
Thinking about the future will help us make better decisions today.
What career should I want to aim for? What skills will be useful? Where should I live? What will people care about in my industry?
Our answers to these questions are often based on what we believe the future will be like. It is important to get a grasp on what types of changes are coming and what aspects are likely to stay the same if we want to make informed choices about many important areas of our life or business.
Business, Future, Work
Question: How could thinking about the future help a teen pick a career?
The Second Machine Age:
Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
– Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee – 2014
Better hardware, software, and networking are the core changes that will have an impact on many industries in the future.
Hardware, software, and networks are at the core of the upcoming machine age. The combination of faster hardware, better algorithms and more data greatly affects how items are produced, delivered and received.
Business, Future, Technology, Work
Question: What new products could be built if we had better, software and networks?
The Economic Singularity:
Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism
– Calum Chace – 2016
Robots are becoming safer, cheaper, more versatile, and easier to program.
The combination of these four trends will help make robots useful for many new tasks, and in some cases, entire jobs or industries. Once a robot learns a skill, it can share that data with others running the same program. This simple feature can give robots the ability to learn some tasks millions of times faster than any human could.
Economics, Future, Technology, Business, Work
Question: What are some tasks that will be done with robots as they get safer, cheaper, more versatile and easier to program?
Surviving AI:
The promise and peril of artificial intelligence
– Calum Chace – 2015
Automation may allow humans to do more interesting work.
The kinds of tasks that end up being automated often consists of tasks that are less fun to do. As more tasks continue to be automated, people will be able to spend a higher percentage of their time doing creative and possibly exciting projects.
Technology, Future, A.I., Economics, Work
Question: What boring tasks could be automated?
Industries of the Future
– Alec Ross – 2016
Robots can incorporate experiences from other robots accelerating learning at a rate humans cannot.
Imagine how the human experience would evolve faster if we each had the knowledge of everyone else on the planet. We could train one AI doctor and duplicate the skills as easy as it is to duplicate a computer file. Then there would be two smart doctors. Compare that to the ten years of post-high-school education and the expense of getting a medical degree. Even if it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train the AI, it only needs to be done once then reproduce the program to get as many doctors as you need.
Business, Future, Technology
Question: What time-consuming training could be reduced by training one AI?
The New Digital Age:
Reshaping the Future of People, Nations & Business
– Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen – 2013
Security and privacy are not the same things.
Security refers to how safe your data is and privacy refers to who you choose to share it with. You may want your data to be secure but are fine if your friend sees it. In this case, it is secure but not private. It is up to individual companies to keep your data secure and up to you to decide who to share it with. You may willingly share your Facebook data with a company so you can use their product. In this case, the data is now out but you gave them permission. This is still an important issue but must be looked at separately from data breaches or hacks in which you did not give permission for your data to be used or shared.
Business, Technology
Question: What data do I not mind sharing but still want secure?
What Technology Wants
– Kevin Kelly – 2010
Networks connect people with ideas that they would not have had without being a part of the networks.
More people with new perspectives, each filtered through a different lens, have an impact on the type of ideas we are exposed to. Networks are great at connecting people in new and useful ways by giving the users access to other points of view, new information and the ability to add to the conversation.
Business, Media, Technology
Question: How can you more effectively harness networks in day-to-day life or business?
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