Source: BLS
HT: CB Insights
AI: The Story So Far, Stuart Russell (Video)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBCOMm_ytwM]
Machine Learning Research Institute:
As previously announced, we recently ran a 22-day Colloquium Series on Robust and Beneficial AI (CSRBAI) at the MIRI office, co-hosted with the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. The colloquium was aimed at bringing together safety-conscious AI scientists from academia and industry to share their recent work. The event served that purpose well, initiating some new collaborations and a number of new conversations between researchers who hadn’t interacted before or had only talked remotely.
Over 50 people attended from 25 different institutions, with an average of 15 people present on any given talk or workshop day. In all, there were 17 talks and four weekend workshops on the topics of transparency, robustness and error-tolerance, preference specification, and agent models and multi-agent dilemmas. The full schedule and talk slides are available on the event page.
Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, gave the opening keynote. Russell spoke on “AI: The Story So Far” (slides). Abstract:
I will discuss the need for a fundamental reorientation of the field of AI towards provably beneficial systems. This need has been disputed by some, and I will consider their arguments. I will also discuss the technical challenges involved and some promising initial results.
Russell discusses his recent work on cooperative inverse reinforcement learning 36 minutes in. This paper and Dylan Hadfield-Menell’s related talk on corrigibility (slides) inspired lots of interest and discussion at CSRBAI.
IoT Facts and Figures
- In total, we project there will be 34 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, up from 10 billion in 2015. IoT devices will account for 24 billion, while traditional computing devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc.) will comprise 10 billion.
- Nearly $6 trillion will be spent on IoT solutions over the next five years.
- Businesses will be the top adopter of IoT solutions. They see three ways the IoT can improve their bottom line by 1) lowering operating costs; 2) increasing productivity; and 3) expanding to new markets or developing new product offerings.
- Governments are focused on increasing productivity, decreasing costs, and improving their citizens’ quality of life. We believe they will be the second-largest adopters of IoT ecosystems.
- Consumers will lag behind businesses and governments in IoT adoption. Still, they will purchase a massive number of devices and invest a significant amount of money in IoT ecosystems.
M2:
1. The worldwide Internet of Things market is predicted to grow to $1.7 trillion by 2020, marking a compound annual growth rate of 16.9%. – IDC Worldwide Internet of Things Forecast, 2015 – 2020.
2. An estimated 25 billion connected “things” will be in use by 2020. – Gartner Newsroom
3. Wearable technology vendors shipped 78.1 million wearable devices in 2015, an increase of 171.6% from 2014. Shipment predictions for this year are 111 million, increasing to 215 million in 2019. – IDC Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker
4. By 2020, each person is likely to have an average of 5.1 connected devices. – Frost and Sullivan Power Management in IoT and Connected Devices
5. In a 2016 PwC survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 45% say they now own a fitness band, 27% a smartwatch, and 12% smart clothing. 57% say they are excited about the future of wearable technology as part of everyday life. 80% say wearable devices make them more efficient at home, 78% more efficient at work. – PwC The Wearable Life 2.0: Connected Living in a Wearable World
6. By 2020, more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element, large or small, of the Internet of Things. – Gartner Predicts 2016: Unexpected Implications Arising from the Internet of Things
7. 65% of approximately 1,000 global business executives surveyed say they agree organizations that leverage the internet of things will have a significant advantage; 19% however, still say they have never heard of the Internet of Things. – Internet of Things Institute 2016 I0T Trends Survey
8. 80% of retailers worldwide say they agree that the Internet of Things will drastically change the way companies do business in the next three years. – Retail Systems Research: The Internet of Things in Retail: Great Expectations
9. By 2018, six billion things will have the ability to request support. – Gartner Predicts 2016: CRM Customer Service and Support
10. By 2020, 47% of devices will have the necessary intelligence to request support. –Gartner Predicts 2016: CRM Customer Service and Support
11. By 2025, the Internet of Things could generate more than $11 trillion a year in economic value through improvements in energy efficiency, public transit, operations management, smart customer relationship management and more. –McKinsey Global Institute Report: The Internet of Things: Mapping the value behind the Hype
12. Barcelona estimates that IoT systems have helped the city save $58 million a year from connected water management and $37 million a year via smart street lighting alone. – Harvard University Report
13. General Electric estimates that the “Industrial Internet” market (connected industrial machinery) will add $10 to $15 trillion to the global GDP within the next 20 years. – GE Reports
14. General Electric believes that using connected industrial machinery to make oil and gas exploration and development just 1% more efficient would result in a savings of $90 billion. – GE Reports
15. The connected health market is predicted to grow to $117B by 2020. Remote patient monitoring is predicted to be a $46 billion market by 2017. – ACT Report
16. Connected homes will be a major part of the Internet of Things. By 2019, companies will ship 1.9 billion connected home devices, marking an estimated $490 billion in revenue (Business Insider Intelligence). By 2020, even the connected kitchen will contribute at least 15 percent savings in the food and beverage industry, leveraging data analytics. – Gartner Research Predicts 2015: The Internet of Things
Benchmarking Digital Transformation
If your organization is moving toward digital too slowly, your people may be looking to leave. That’s one of the findings highlighted here and explored more fully in Aligning the organization for its digital future.
IoT to surpass phones as largest category of connected devices in 2018
Source: Ericsson
Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to surpass mobile phones as the largest category of connected devices in 2018.
Between 2015 and 2021, IoT is expected to increase at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent, making up close to 16 billion of the total forecast 28 billion connected devices by 2021.
HT: LTP
Skills and Jobs for the Digital Future
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-MZ288onbs]
Moderator:
George Westerman, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (@gwesterman)
Speakers:
Gerald Chertavian, Year Up (@yearup)
Prof. Tom Davenport, Fellow at MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (@tdav)
Karen Kocher, Cigna (@kkocher)
Steve Phillips, Avnet, Inc. (@Steven_phillips)
Are AI and robots eating jobs? Yes–some jobs more than others. But even as automation replaces some workers, it will enhance the roles of others. Companies will need people who can work closely with technology, as well as those who can do what computers cannot. How can CIOs develop a workforce that will thrive in the digital age? Which skills will be valued and which ones will be replaced? Does college still matter? Will on-demand workers replace full-time employees? Join our eclectic panel-–experts in AI and jobs, Human Resources, alternative skill development, and digital leadership–as they describe what the coming changes in skills, jobs, and careers mean for CIOs and their companies.
Forrester forecasts that cognitive technologies such as robots, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and automation will replace 7% of US jobs by 2025.
- 16% of US jobs will be replaced, while the equivalent of 9% jobs will be created — a net loss of 7% of US jobs by 2025.
- Office and administrative support staff will be the most rapidly disrupted.
- The cognitive era will create new jobs, such as robot monitoring professionals, data scientists, automation specialists, and content curators: Forrester forecasts 8.9 million new jobs in the US by 2025.
- 93% of automation technologists feel unprepared or only partially prepared to tackle the challenges associated with smart machine technologies.
Truck drivers dominate the map for a few reasons.
- Driving a truck has been immune to two of the biggest trends affecting U.S. jobs: globalization and automation. A worker in China can’t drive a truck in Ohio, and machines can’t drive cars (yet).
- Regional specialization has declined. So jobs that are needed everywhere — like truck drivers and schoolteachers — have moved up the list of most-common jobs.
- The prominence of truck drivers is partly due to the way the government categorizes jobs. It lumps together all truck drivers and delivery people, creating a very large category. Other jobs are split more finely; for example, primary school teachers and secondary school teachers are in separate categories.
The rise and fall of secretaries: Through much of the ’80s, as the U.S. economy shifted away from factories that make goods and toward offices that provide services, secretary became the most common job in more and more states. But a second shift — the rise of the personal computer — reversed this trend, as machines did more and more secretarial work.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, digital transformation
Tagged CB Insights, MIT CIO Symposium, NPR
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The Rise of the ‘Tech’ Giants
[August 1, 2016] was something of a red-letter day for the tech industry. When the stock market closed, the five most valuable companies on the planet were, for the first time, technology concerns. And they all hailed from the West Coast of the US, whether the San Francisco Bay Area (Apple, Alphabet and Facebook) or in and around Seattle (Microsoft and Amazon).
In subsequent days, ExxonMobil — which held the title of world’s most valuable company until it was overhauled by Apple — edged back above Facebook and Amazon. But it may only be a temporary reprieve. A seemingly inexorable shift in business and stock market momentum is under way, as today’s technology leaders assume a more central place in personal and business life.
Ten years ago, at the height of the PC era, Microsoft was the only tech company in the top 20. Now, though, the big five control a much wider array of digital platforms around which life and work revolve — from smartphones and cloud computing data centres to mobile messaging apps.
They are also racing each other to build the next platforms, from virtual reality headsets to driverless cars and digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence.
Only China, thanks to a domestic market that is hard for outsiders to penetrate, can lay claim to tech companies with the scale and ambition to compete.
That has been underlined by this week’s detente in the ride-hailing wars, which has seen Uber’s global expansion halted and a new Chinese digital champion crowned, in the shape of Didi Chuxing.
Today, the key question is: which markets are next in the big five’s sights, as they cast around more widely for growth?
The market value rankings over the last couple of decades offer a glimpse at the world’s changing economy. At the peak of the dot-com bubble in March 2000, tech companies including Microsoft, Intel and Cisco were among the biggest companies in the world — and they are still giants. Ten years ago, big banks, Chinese industrial and financial companies and global commodities firms crowded the market cap big leagues. Five years ago, Apple became the biggest company in the world by stock value, a position it has occupied with some interruptions since then.
In addition to Apple, the growing might of Google, Amazon and Facebook have lifted those companies to new heights and Microsoft’s market value has rebounded under a new CEO. Non-tech titans like Exxon and GE have slipped a bit. Stock investors are now willing to pay more for a dollar of future earnings for the tech superpowers than they are for most other corporations. Of course, technology’s Fab Five may not last in their lofty perch. The streak could end after one day. Good times never last. But for the moment, technology is on top of the world.
Every industry uses computers, software, and internet services. If that’s what “technology” means, then every company is in the technology business—a useless distinction. But it’s more likely that “technology” has become so overused, and so carelessly associated with Silicon Valley-style computer software and hardware startups, that the term has lost all meaning. Perhaps finance has exacerbated the problem by insisting on the generic industrial term “technology” as a synonym for computing.
There are companies that are firmly planted in the computing sector. Microsoft and Apple are two. Intel is another—it makes computer parts for other computer makers. But it’s also time to recognize that some companies—Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook among them—aren’t primarily in the computing business anyway. And that’s no slight, either. The most interesting thing about companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook is that they are not (computing) technology companies. Instead, they are using computing infrastructure to build new—and enormous—businesses in other sectors. If anything, that’s a fair take on what “technology” might mean as a generic term: manipulating one set of basic materials to realize goals that exceed those materials.
Wearables are today all about wellness
US consumer adoption of wearable devices will reach 29% in 2021, up from 18% last year, according to a new Forrester Data forecast. Today the vast majority of consumers who own and use wearables have a health or wellness device (17%), while monitoring, retail, notifications, and travel are expected to grow…
- Wearables sales will grow from $4.2 billion in 2015 to $9.8 billion in 2021. Both device volume and a larger mix of more expensive wearable devices such as smartwatches, apparel, and glasses will fuel the revenue number.
- Smartwatch sales will hit $16 million in 2021. By 2021, over one-third of the 46 million wearables sold will be smartwatches. Higher consumer adoption of mobile payments, voice, notifications, and wellness applications will spur growth.
- While some digital businesses have wearables strategies today, these are nascent with a focus on piloting watch apps in order to learn. Just over a third (34%) of businesses do not have a wearables strategy today and do not plan on implementing one in the future, while only 11% currently follow a wearables strategy.
No End to Moore’s Law
This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets.
The new IEEE roadmap—the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems—will also take this approach, but it will add computer architecture to the mix, allowing for “a comprehensive, end-to-end view of the computing ecosystem, including devices, components, systems, architecture, and software,” according to a recent press release.
Transistor miniaturization was still a part of the long-term forecast as recently as 2014, when the penultimate ITRS report was released. That report predicted that the physical gate length of transistors—an indicator of how far current must travel in the device—and other key logic chip dimensions would continue to shrink until at least 2028. But since then, 3D concepts have gained momentum. The memory industry has already turned to 3D architectures to ease miniaturization pressure and boost the capacity of NAND Flash. Monolithic 3D integration, which would build layers of devices one on top of another, connecting them with a dense forest of wires, has also been an increasingly popular subject of discussion.
The new report embraces these trends, predicting an end to traditional scaling—the shrinking of chip features—by the early 2020’s. But the idea that we’re now facing an end to Moore’s Law “is completely wrong,” Gargini says. “The press has invented multiple ways of defining Moore’s Law but there is only one way: The number of transistors doubles every two years.”
Moore’s Law, he emphasizes, is simply a prediction about how many transistors can fit in a given area of IC—whether it’s done, as it has been for decades, in a single layer or by stacking multiple layers. If a company really wanted to, Gargini says, it could continue to make transistors smaller well into the 2020s, “but it’s more economic to go 3-D. That’s the message we wanted to send.”
Internet of Things Market Landscape
As in previous versions, the chart is organized into building blocks, horizontals and verticals. Pretty much every segment is seeing a lot of activity, but it is worth noting that those parts are not particularly well integrated just yet, meaning in particular that vertical applications are not necessarily built on top of horizontals. To the contrary, we’re very much very much in the era of the “full stack” IoT startup – because there is no dominant horizontal platform, and not enough mature, cheap and fully reliable components just yet, startups tend to build a lot themselves: hardware, software, data/analytics, etc. Some enterprise IoT companies, such as our portfolio company Helium, also have a professional services organization on top, as enterprise customers are at the stage where they try to make sense of the IoT opportunity and are looking for something that “just works”, as opposed to mixing and matching best of breed components. This is a typical characteristic of startups operating in an early market, and I would expect many of those companies to evolve over time, and possibly ditch the hardware component of their business entirely.