The amount of data humans and their devices create will rise to 163 zettabytes over the next eight years, according to a new report from data firm Seagate. That is ten times as much as we created last year. As usual, the amount of data described in the report is inconceivable. A linguist called Mark Liberman once estimated that every word ever uttered by human beings would create around 42ZB of stored data. So if I were to make up a fact such as that a printout of 163ZB of data could create a planet the size of Neptune, you’d have to believe it. It’s a lot and it’s rising exponentially, that’s all we need to know. The interesting thing apart from the scale of the storage issue, is that the major source of the increase will be businesses not humans and that by 2025, we will be interacting with an Internet of Things connected device an average of 4,800 times a day.

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The latest report to examine the disruptive potential of robots in the workplace has been published by PwC as part of the firm’s regular Economic Outlook series. The study claims that up to 30 percent of existing UK jobs will be susceptible to automation by robots and Artificial Intelligence by the early 2030s, although in many cases the nature of jobs will change rather than disappear and the change will increase productivity and wealth. This is lower than the US at 38 percent and Germany at 35 percent, but higher than Japan at 21 percent. The report looks in detail at the composition of jobs in different industry sectors and occupations, using machine learning techniques to model the potential impact of AI in the future based on OECD data. The likelihood of automation appears highest in sectors such as transport, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail, and lower in education, health and social work.

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The increasing ability of machines to perform cognitive, physical, and social tasks has polarised labour markets by “hollowing out” demand for middle-skill jobs, claims a new report published by IZA World of Labor based on research from economist Michael Gibbs of Chicago Booth School of Business. It suggests that analytical, problem solving, and social and communication skills are likely to be most valued in employees in the future. The new report finds that the advance of technology has opposing effects on jobs. It facilitates automation, creating fewer and less motivating middle-skill jobs. Conversely, it complements social and innovation tasks, creating more interesting low- and high-skill jobs. This causes labour market polarisation, “hollowing out” demand for middle-skill jobs, and increasing wage inequality.

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A new report by Tata Consultancy Services claims that 84 per cent of companies worldwide already see artificial intelligence as essential to their competitiveness while half see the technology as ‘transformative’. The study Getting Smarter by the Day: How AI is Elevating the Performance of Global Companies is based on interviews with 835 major businesses worldwide. It focuses on the current and future impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and found that the biggest adopters of AI today are, not surprisingly, IT departments, with two-thirds (67 percent) of survey respondents using AI to detect security intrusions, user issues and deliver automation. However, by 2020, almost a third (32 percent) of companies believe AI’s greatest impact will be in sales, marketing or customer service, while one in five (20 percent) see AI’s impact being largest in non-customer facing corporate functions, including finance, strategic planning, corporate development, and HR.

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UK insurance firm Aviva has asked 16,000 of its employees whether they believe their jobs could be done better by robots. The consultation process will see those people who answer yes retrained for a new role within the business. Research by Oxford Martin School recently warned that 35 percent of jobs in the UK were in danger of automation over the next 20 years. Insurance underwriters were at the top of the list, rated 98.9 percent at risk. Despite frequent warnings that automation will disrupt a wide swath of industries, many workers believe that their own job is safe. This is in spite of warnings such as that from Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, who claimed recently that automation could put 15 million British jobs at risk, equivalent to nearly half of the 31.8 million people who work in the UK. Most recent research backs this up. A White House report from 2016 concluded that between 9 percent and 47 percent of all American jobs are vulnerable, including around 80 percent of jobs paying less than $20 an hour. Image: SoftBank Robotics

University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Ed Hess and Katherine Ludwig have released a new book, Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age (Berrett-Koehler, January 2017), where they wrestle with the defining workplace question of our era and offer workable solutions for employees to stay relevant. In the book, Hess and Ludwig argue that workers of the world stand at the brink of an unprecedented transformation, as a coming age of smart machines promises to eliminate tens of millions of jobs across the socioeconomic spectrum. The transition to an era of widespread automation will be tumultuous for both companies and employees, and its effects on the fabric of society have not yet been fully considered by workers, government entities or global corporations.

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