Monthly Archives: July 2017

Experts offerdiffering views about where advances in artificial intelligence are leading us to in the long term. However they mostly agree that in the short term we have to get ready for an era where AI accounts for most routine jobs previously thought to be the exclusive domain of human intelligence.

This does not mean that humans will run out of jobsyet. What it does mean, however, is that the dynamics governing the employment landscape are rapidly shifting. Humans will have to become smarter and much faster at obtaining knowledge and acquiring the skills required to perform tasks that have not fallen prey to automation.

Here are some of the trends that are helping us (humans) maintain our edge in a world that is fast being taken over by robots.

Augmented reality, the real-time overlaying of graphical elements on real world imagery, is still in its infancy. Yet much more than games and entertainment, AR is promising to be the computing platform of professional work.

Many industries are using AR to augment efficiency and productivity in of professional settings. By using AR glasses or headsets, engineers, healthcare workers, industry workers, and professionals in many other fields will be able to see real-time information and instructions about the task theyre performing while keeping their hands free to do the job.

For instance, as the following video shows, an AR glass boosts a technicians speed by 34% when wiring a wind turbines control box because it replaces paper manuals with line-of-sight instructions.

AR assistance can help address the skills gap that many industries are currently suffering from by cutting the time and effort required to train the workforce for jobs with high skill requirements.

The practical uses of AR in workplaces has given rise to a new industry of AR applications and hardware, including the Enterprise Edition of the ill-fated Google Glass, which might become a favorite in manufacturing settings.

Ironically, one of the technologies that will help humans survive AI is AI itself. When viewed from a different perspective, AI can become a job enabler by breaking down the complexity of tasks as well as speeding up the learning process.

AI algorithms can collect and analyze information about learners interactions with a course in various ways, and help speed their way through the training by providing personalized content and guidance that addresses their specific pain points. Applying AI in education can be crucial as requirements for professional jobs change at a faster pace and workers need to be constantly learning new skills.

Elsewhere, the automation of complicated tasks by AI algorithms is enabling less-skilled or -experienced professionals to take on tasks that previously required years of education and work experience.

Were seeing this in fields such as healthcare, where AI algorithms are helping clinicians and doctors be more productive at their jobs by providing them with knowledge and suggestions based on patterns obtained from the outcome of thousands and millions of previous diagnoses and treatment processes. Another field is cybersecurity, where AI algorithms are doing the bulk of the work in finding alerts and reducing false positives, while analysts decide which events need to be investigated.

Scientists and thought leaders agree that (for the time being) when humans and artificial intelligence work together, they can accomplish much more than any of them alone. Whether it will remain so in the future is to be seen.

Some believe that the only way we can survive the robot uprising is by becoming cyborgs, including Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla motors, whose eccentric plans include colonizing Mars. Musk, who strongly favors the AI doomsday theory, suggests that to avoid being outsmarted by artificial intelligence, we must merge with machines.

Musks ventures include Neuralink, a company that plans to create devices that can be implanted in the human brain to improve memory or allow for more direct interfacing with computing devices. Among the things that such technology can accomplish is the direct uploading or downloading of thoughts and knowledge to and from the brain.

While Musks idea might sound outrageous, hes not the only person who wants to enhance humans through technology. Others include Bryan Johnson, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who personally spent $100 million to launch Kernel, a company that aims to build neural tools that will allow the brain to do things that were previously impossible.

The belief that science and technology can help humans evolve beyond their physical and mental limits has very strong advocates, including Zoltan Istvan, the founder of the Transhumanist Party, who ran for U.S. president in 2016 and will be running for governor of California in 2018. Istvan plans to conquer death through science and technology.

Whether robots will obey humans forever, fight and eradicate them or drive them into slavery remains to be seen. In the meantime we need to make the best of the technology that surrounds us.

This post is part of our contributor series. The views expressed are the author's own and not necessarily shared by TNW.

Read next: Hackers kick off #leaktheanalyst campaign by dumping data of $1bn security firm

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How humans will stay competitive in the age of artificial intelligence - TNW

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed from a futuristic concept to powerful force which is transforming operations in traditional industries. Top executives are beginning to take note as startups in the field are expanding at an astounding rate.

We use AI to increase Operational Excellence, says CEO Iris Tsidon of Okapi and author of Six Steps to Operational Excellence. Heads of industry know that change is coming and are committed to improving their companies. Our job as entrepreneurs is to show them that this isnt coming in the future, the capabilities are already here now.

According to a white paper by Bell-Hawk systems, real-time Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques originally developed for the USAF and NASA are being applied to manufacturing organizations to enable managers to run their manufacturing plants with less stress and much smaller management teams.

David Brooks on the PBS evening news said "Manufacturing is going through a revolution from a labor intensive, blue-collar industry to a white-collar, Silicon Valley industry." This use of AI to assist managers to efficiently run their operations is part of the transition from manufacturing being a labor intensive business to being highly automated at the operations management level as well as on the production floor.

This revolution is enabling manufacturers in the USA to rapidly design, engineer, and make products to order in response to products ordered over the Internet. In fact, recent research into AI from Accenture Research shows that the technology will be critical to economic growth in existing and developing markets. Accentures CTO Paul Daugherty states, Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform business in ways weve not seen since the impact of computer technology in the late 20th century. Our research demonstrates that as AI matures, it can propel economic growth and potentially serve as a powerful remedy for stagnant productivity andlabor shortages of recent decades.

Iris Tsidon of Okapi notes that about 85% of the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) projects in the business world fail. That is a staggering number but when AI is used, the transformation is immediate.

OKAPI was created as an AI based software to address this problem. By transforming the complex technology into a simple and easy to use platform and app, Okapi is able to use use artificial intelligence to analyze and provide our customers the best KPIs for their business. This produces outstanding insights, which can be turned into valuable operational intelligence.

The most important thing is that high level technology becomes accessible at every level of an organization. Its not just for the C-Suite executives, in order for it to be meaningful, it has to help every employee in the organization from the boardroom to the factory floor

While artificial intelligence may seem like a high level concept, in the coming years, we are going to see it translate into tools which will be used through out every level of an organization.

OKAPIConversations is a series of interviews discussing Startups, Artificial Intelligence, Operational Excellence and Business Intelligence and the impact on business andsociety

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Artificial Intelligence from the Boardroom to the Factory Floor - HuffPost

Artificial intelligence is fast changing the world. The premise that intelligent machines will perform tasks more efficiently and at a lower cost than human beings is by no means far-fetched. The challenges facing the workers of the future are multiplying before our very eyes.

Some of the most vulnerable jobs in the transition to automation, robotics and artificial intelligence are related to transport, mechanical work in factories and customer service. But no sector, be it health, finance or even the military, is excluded.

In the study When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts, conducted by researcher Katja Grace from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, 350 artificial intelligence experts predict that AI will outperform human beings within the next ten years in activities such as translating languages (in the year 2024), essay writing at secondary school level (in 2026) and truck driving (in 2027). Writing a bestselling book or replacing a surgeon will come a little later (in 2049 and 2053), but it will come.

The potential conflicts vary considerably according to the level of economic development. In developed countries, there is a concern that new forms of artificial intelligence will compete with humans for jobs, given their increased comparative advantage in areas of cognitive ability. Whereas in emerging and developing countries, concerns around automation are principally associated with the risk that it will replace manufacturing jobs which have been central to past growth strategies. The central theme, of course, in both instances is the risk that jobs will be replaced by technology, senior economist at the ILO, Steven Tobin, tells Equal Times.

Tobin emphasises that, in the past, technological innovation did not lead to the technological unemployment so widely feared. In this sense, the future of work is not pre-determined. It is up to us, particularly the governments and social partners, to forge the kind of future we want. Our task is to manage technological innovation in an effort to seek the best labour market and social outcomes, he adds.

To some extent, automation almost intrinsically means progress, in the sense that it gives human beings greater freedom from the sacrifices that work demands of us. The problem is that the advantages or profits derived from the increased productivity resulting from automation do not necessarily benefit all social groups in equal measure. It depends on the negotiating capacity, on the power held by each social group, warns Juan Torres Lpez, professor of applied economics at the University of Seville.

Tobin points out that recent decades have seen a growing disconnect between growth in productivity and how workers benefit from the profits (in the form of potential wage growth).

In addition, the global rise of non-standard forms of employment, such as temporary or part-time employment, agency work, subcontracting, dependent self-employment or ambiguous employment relationships, could generate even greater insecurity when combined with technological innovation. Such non-standard forms of employment are often linked to greater insecurity for workers. In this sense, better regulation is needed that ensures equal treatment for workers regardless of their contractual arrangement, underlines the ILO.

Another key factor, in addition to effective social protection for workers, is broader and better access to training, to develop their skills. We need to ensure that individuals have access to the right education and skills to take up the new jobs, and that effective social protection measures are there to provide minimum guarantees, explains Tobin.

As with automation, many people rush to make a judgment with respect to robots and the risk that they will take away jobs, adds Tobin The reality is that we dont have a clear answer and further debate and research is required.

For the ILO economist, Germany and Japan, which have managed to introduce robots within companies without compromising jobs, are positive examples. Robots are now able to undertake tasks that are hazardous and dangerous for humans, he points out. The challenge lies in stimulating innovation and cutting costs without compromising the fair redistribution of income, regardless of the workers contractual arrangement.

Barcelona is to launch a programme in September that will run for 24 months, to trial four minimum income schemes in 1,000 households in the Bess district. It is a pilot project with a budget of 13 million euros. The aim is to study what can be done to ensure that all the people residing in the city of Barcelona have access to the minimum level of income needed to live a decent life. It is based on the certitude that the current welfare benefit system is inadequate and too complex to achieve this objective, explains the social rights section of Barcelona city council.

The plan is to examine, in conjunction with the European Union and various universities, the impact, for example, of limiting this type of welfare support and placing conditions on it.

The 1000 households involved will be divided into four subgroups to see how their income is reduced, or not, when they receive supplementary or unexpected income, as well as the impact of being obliged, or not, to take part in specific socio-labour projects.

As the city council points out: Despite the wealth of literature on the subject, there are not many practical studies, to date, that examine, in detail, the best way for this type of income to meet its ultimate goal, which is to reduce inequalities and ensure genuine equality of opportunity. Similar studies are currently underway in the province of Ontario (Canada), the city of Utrecht (Netherlands) and Finland.

At the end of the two-year trial, an assessment will be made of how these policies impact the social protection and the reduction of inequalities. Our rationale is based on the fact that current policies, often too assistentialist or paternalistic, have not helped to curb the rise in poverty and inequality, which is why we believe it would be good to explore basic income in greater depth. It could also contribute to condensing exiting benefits and reducing the amount of bureaucracy, says the city council.

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The future of work in the era of artificial intelligence - Equal Times

Aida is the perfect employee: always courteous, always learning and, as she says, always at work, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Aida, of course, is not a person but a virtual customer-service representative thatSEB AB, one of Swedens biggest banks, is rolling out. The goal is to give the actual humans more time to engage in more complex tasks.

After blazing a trail in online and digital banking, Swedens financial industry is now emerging as a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Besides Aida at SEB, theres Nova, which is a chatbotNordea Bankis introducing at its life and pensions unit in Norway.Swedbankis adding to the skills of its virtual assistant, Nina. All three are designed to sound like women, based on research suggesting customers feel more comfortable with female voices.

There are some frequent, simple tasks that we need to deal with manually today, and in that effort were looking into AI to see how we can deploy it and Aida is one, Johan Torgeby, the chief executive officer of SEB, says.

Chatbots have access to vast amounts of individual client data, meaning they can quickly handle straightforward customer requests. That in turn frees up human employees to deal with more complex services, like coming up with the best mortgage plan to suit a specific customer.

Basically all banks are closing branches, Mattias Fras, head of robotics, strategy and innovation at Nordea, says. This is a way to return to full service again.

Nordeas chatbot will eventually help customers who want investment advice, who want to cancel lost credit cards or to open savings accounts.

Swedish banks have already seen their customer satisfaction scores drop to a20-year lowafter shutting branches and pushing people onto online services. But AI might be part of the cure. According to a recent study by market researcher GfK, there are wide gaps between what consumers hope to receive from banks in terms of service and financial advice, and what they actually get. AI applications such as chatbots hold the promise of filling in these service gaps, given the right data and programming, GfK says.

Swedbank, which already operates its chatbot Nina in Sweden and plans to roll it out to its Baltic markets as well, says one of the benefits to the technology is that it eases users into the new digital age. AI can help our customers become more digitised, for example by guiding a client in paying bills on the Internet, Swedbank spokeswoman Josefine Uppling says.

Petra Stenqvist, a partner at Pond, which looks into innovative business ideas, says its unlikely AI will ever be able to think like humans. It will never be able to replace subjective assessments, she says. But it will be able to contribute to better decision making. And because of the massive amounts of data that AI can store, individuals will be able to find out things about themselves that they didnt even know.

Bloomberg

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Swedish banks embrace artificial intelligence as a cure to closures - The Independent

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are slowly seeping into the capital markets, though not as quickly as many vendors would have you believe. Even still, these offerings will become ubiquitous and as such, this year we decided to add this category to honor the vendor making the greatest strides in this realm. And the winner of the inaugural best AI technology provider category is AlphaSense.

AlphaSense offers a financial search engine that helps analysts and portfolio managers to find information thats buried in dense text documents, from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings (including footnotes) to broker research reports, pieces of news and conferencetranscripts.

One of the key aspects of AlphaSenses offeringwhich the San Francisco-based firm describes as the Google for company researchis its ability to take a sea of data and narrow it down to specifically what users are looking for, and also alert them to key words that they might not have considered. The vendor has its own financial-world-specific dictionary and thesaurus to help direct portfolio managers and traders toward information that they might have otherwise missed. One portfolio manager told Waters that the platform has cut his search times down on an individual company from four or five hours to 30 or 45 minutes. According to the vendor, two-thirds of the top 50 largest equity-focused hedge funds in the world use AlphaSensesplatform.

In March this year, AlphaSense announced that it had raised $33 million in funding, which includes new investors in the form of Tribeca Venture Partners, Triangle Peak Partners and Quantum Strategic Partners, as well as individual investors, including former Thomson Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer, who had previously acted as an advisor to the vendor prior to hisinvesting.

In the wake of its fundraising, AlphaSense made a number of key hires. First, to expand its content library, it added Bob Magri as the firms chief content officer. It also hired Kevin Broom to serve as executive vice president of product development in order to drive updates across the platform. Weve also made significant increases to our sales team to build into new verticals, including corporate intelligence, notes a spokesperson. Using the funding, AlphaSense will continue to look to build out its platform, including the additions of newlanguages.

Earlier this year, AlphaSense won the best analytics product at the Sell-Side Technology Awards, and took home the same award in 2015 at the Buy-Side Technology Awards.

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Waters Rankings 2017: Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology ProviderAlphaSense - http://www.waterstechnology.com

After recent concerns over the implications of artificial intelligence, a report says that Facebook has shut-down an artificial intelligence system after researchers found out that it had started talking in a language they could not comprehend, reminiscent of the Terminator films.

A report in Tech Times says that the bots started communicating in a language that it created, and which was not English, their earlier preference.

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Bob: "I can can I I everything else."

Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to."

The above is a reported conversation between the bots, unintelligible to humans, but designed to make communication faster between them. The bit is scary since experts like Stephen Hawking have been warning against the same, saying that humans, used to slower evolution, will be fast outpaced by these intelligence bots.

An IBTimes report quotes Dhruv Batra, a visiting Facebook AI research scientist saying: Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves, Batra said. Like if I say the five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isnt so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, CEOs of Facebook and Tesla, respectively, got into a public argument over Artificial Intelligence recently.

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I keep sounding the alarm bell, he reportedly told attendees at a meeting earlier this month. But until people see robots going down the street killing people, they dont know how to react.

In a Facebook live, Zuckerberg called Musk a naysayer, saying that what Musk had said was pretty irresponsible. Musk responded on Twitter.

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Facebook Shuts Down Artificial Intelligence System That Created Language To Talk To Itself - Outlook India