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The world in which I grew up, the old industrial economy, was radically transformed by the last wave of innovation. The story is by now well worn: technology, automation, globalization.
Whereas land was the raw material of the agricultural age and iron was the raw material of the industrial age, data is the raw material of the information age.
The Internet has become an ocean of jumbled, chaotic information, but now there is a way to connect this information and draw actionable business intelligence from it. Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems.
there is no greater indicator of an innovative culture than the empowerment of women.
Fully integrating and empowering women economically and politically is the most important step that a country or company can take to strengthen its competitiveness.
The world’s most restrictive countries have been absent from the most recent wave of innovation, and they will not be home to industries and businesses of the future without making real changes.
Innovation doesn’t happen in closed environments, and innovative companies will continue to steer clear of countries with regressive policies on gender.
Welcome your new job takers and caregivers. The coming decade will see societies transform as humans learn to live alongside robots.
Japan already leads the world in robotics, operating 310,000 of the 1.4 million industrial robots in existence across the world.
Robots will be the rare technology that reaches the mainstream through elderly users first, spreading down as grandma shows off her next cutting-edge gadget for the kids and grandkids.
About 70 percent of total robot sales take place in Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and Germany—known as the “big five” in robotics.
There are more than 100 automation departments in Chinese universities, compared with approximately 76 in the United States despite the larger total number of universities in the United States.
The combination of cultural, demographic, and technological factors means that we will get our first glimpse of a world full of robots in East Asia.
Big data has enabled this quantum leap for the cognitive development of robots.
As the capex of robots continues to go down, the opex of humans becomes comparatively more expensive and therefore less attractive for employers.
As the technology continues to advance, robots will kill many jobs. They will also create and preserve others, and they will also create immense value—although as we have seen time and again, this value won’t be shared evenly.
Overall, robots can be a boon, freeing up humans to do more productive things—but only so long as humans create the systems to adapt their workforces, economies, and societies to the inevitable disruption. The dangers to so...
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Two Oxford University professors who studied more than 700 detailed occupational types have published a study making the case that over half of US jobs could be at risk of computerization in the next two decades.
Forty-seven percent of American jobs are at high risk for robot takeover, and another 19 percent face a medium level of risk.
A few years back, a team of scientists used the DNA of a dead bucardo, a wild goat indigenous to the Pyrenees Mountains that went extinct in 2000, to create bucardo embryos. These were implanted in 57 regular (as in not extinct) goats’ wombs. One of the embryos made it to term. That’s right: a regular goat gave birth to a once-extinct bucardo goat in 2003. Granted, the bucardo didn’t live long; it managed to survive for only several minutes after its birth.
In 2012, the Revive & Restore project was started in San Francisco to bring extinct animals back to life using advanced genomics technology.
But the code-ification of money, markets, payments, and trust is the next big inflection point in the history of financial services.
Many believe that today’s kids must also become fluent in a technical, programming, or scientific language. If big data, genomics, cyber, and robotics are among the high-growth industries of the future, then the people who will make their livings in those industries need to be fluent in the coding languages behind them.
“If I were eighteen right now, I would major in computer science or engineering, and I’d be taking Mandarin,”
“I think it’s really important that people have at least two other languages: one that is traditionally classically linguistic and one that’s technical.
And the reason is because the way the human capital markets are changing, you need to have this solidity to be able to converse with people in different parts of the world, understand their cultures, understand their languages, as well as being able to converse technically. My approach in our family is my kids need to learn two languages; one is Spanish—they’ve learned it from day one—and the second will be like Python or some other technical language, which they’ll learn when they’re six and older.
The number of people who have recently moved out of poverty in China alone is equal to double the population of the entire United States.
