Prepping people to stay ahead of technological change

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When education fails to keep pace with technology, the result is inequality. Without the skills to stay useful as innovations arrive, workers suffer—and if enough of them fall behind, society starts to fall apart. That fundamental insight seized reformers in the Industrial Revolution, heralding state-funded universal schooling. Later, automation in factories and offices called forth a surge in college graduates. The combination of education and innovation, spread over decades, led to a remarkable flowering of prosperity.

NOTE: A good way to stay ahead of the curve of technology changes is with DaVinci Tech Academy.

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Robots will destroy our jobs and we’re not even ready for it

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The McDonald’s on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York City doesn’t look all that different from any of the fast-food chain’s other locations across the country. Inside, however, hungry patrons are welcomed not by a cashier waiting to take their order, but by a “Create Your Taste” kiosk – an automated touch-screen system that allows customers to create their own burgers without interacting with another human being.

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9 Predictions for AI in 2017

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2016 was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Alpha Go’s victory over Lee Sedol was perhaps one of the most important, but we saw advancements in self-driving cars, the continued embrace of bots and personal assistants for retail, adoption and competition around in-house assistants like Amazon Echo, along with frequent, sometimes weekly, breakthroughs on the academic side, mainly relating to machine learning. With the biggest tech companies in the world–Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others–devoting more and more resources to AI, the momentum is going to increase.

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The patent bubble is ready to pop

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I’m certainly not going to win any popularity contests for writing this article.  The last thing anybody wants to talk about after a presidential election is a patent bubble.  After all, most of us took a nice stock market beat down during the recent housing bubble and mortgage crisis.

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Era of the robots

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Donald Trump tends to present the labor market as a zero-sum game: companies have shifted production to China and other emerging markets. He’s going to bring those jobs home. Put aside for a moment how moving jobs back to a country with high costs gives companies an incentive to automate. There’s a bigger problem: After displacing U.S. manufacturing workers, robots are poised to do the same in developing economies, too. It will be hard to re-shore jobs that no longer exist.

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IBM releases the annual five innovations that will change our lives within five years

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Imagine that you could have superhero vision, seeing in not only what we know as the visible spectrum, but using wavelengths that allow you to see through fog, and detect black ice. Or imagine a Star Trek-like medical tricorder that could take a tiny bit of body fluid and determine what was ailing you.

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Japanese company replaces workers with AI

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A Japanese company is making 34 employees redundant in order to replace them with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI. Human workers at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance are set to be replaced by an artificial intelligence that can calculate payouts to policyholders.

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Child care shortage has real consequences for working families

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One of the most stressful questions a new parent confronts is, “Who’s going to take care of my baby when I go back to work?” Figuring out the answer to that question is often not easy. When NPR, along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, surveyed more than 1,000 parents nationwide about their child care experiences, a third reported difficulty finding care.

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The collapse of parenting and why parents need to grow up

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For modern families, the adage “food is love” might well be more true put another way: food is power. Not long ago, Dr. Leonard Sax was at a restaurant and overheard a father say to his daughter, “Honey, could you please do me a favour? Could you please just try one bite of your green peas?” To many people, this would have sounded like decent or maybe even sophisticated parenting—gentle coaxing formed as a question to get the child to co-operate without threatening her autonomy or creating a scene.

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Five questions to help you become a better manager

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Shay Howe and Darby Frey believe the path to better management starts with a question. Howe, former VP of product at Belly, and Frey, former head of engineering at Belly (both recently left Belly for new, undisclosed jobs starting in 2017) just launched Lead Honestly, a weekly email product that sends managers five questions, and one management tip, per week. The service is aimed at creating better communication and trust between managers and employees, particularly as employees transition into leadership roles, which require a new skillset that can be tough to learn on the job.

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AI is going to make it easier to fake images and video

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Smile Vector is a Twitter bot that can make any celebrity smile. It scrapes the web for pictures of faces, and then it morphs their expressions using a deep-learning-powered neural network. Its results aren’t perfect, but they’re created completely automatically, and it’s just a small hint of what’s to come as artificial intelligence opens a new world of image, audio, and video fakery. Imagine a version of Photoshop that can edit an image as easily as you can edit a Word document — will we ever trust our own eyes again?

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

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