Human + machine: how will al shape the workforce of the future?

• Author: Andra, Jacob
• Position: Technology

Will artificial intelligence bring a utopia of plenty? Or a dystopic hellscape? Will we, jobless and destitute, scavenge for scraps outside the walls of a few techno-trillionaires? Or will we work alongside machines, achieving new levels of productivity and fulfillment? The tech world has no lack of prognosticators: Bill Gates and Elon Musk, for example, see in AI an existential threat to the human species, while Ray Kurzweil thinks it can't come soon enough.

SILICON SLOPES AND BIG DATA

In fact, artificial intelligence is already here, and has been for some time. While many mistakenly equate AI with consciousness--Hollywood has done the robot-gains-consciousness plot to death--the two are distinct phenomena. As Noah Yuval Harari discusses in Homo Deus, AI need not be conscious to possess superhuman intelligence. Nor is it likely to be. Already, in domain-specific tasks, non-conscious computers are far beyond humans in intelligence. Watson beat humans at Jeopardy back in 2011; more recently, Google's AlphaGo AI beat Korean Grandmaster Lee Sodol for the fifth consecutive time at the incredibly complex game of Go. And, to those who point out the narrow scope within which such AIs can function, just remember how rapidly the scope has expanded in only a few years.

AI depends on intelligent algorithms, and such algorithms depend on the analysis of vast amounts of data. Which is why Utah is on the map with regard to AI advancement. The so-called Silicon Slopes has become, per Mark Gorenberg, "a world leader in data analytics." Gorenberg should know. He serves as managing director of Zetta Venture Partners, an AI-focused venture capital firm based in San Francisco, and has invested in a number of Utah companies. "The notion of analytics has become a cornerstone of Utah technology," he says.

Utah boasts high-profile data firms like Domo, Omniture (now part of Adobe) and Qualtrics, to be sure. But it also has an ecosystem of lesser-known players. Teem, for example, "started by putting software on an iPad so that corporate teams could book conference rooms," Gorenberg explains. "In the process, they gathered a ton of data that allows them to predict the digital workplace of the future." One Click Retail (my employer--full disclosure) uses machine learning and Amazon.com data points to help sellers optimize ecommerce operations. InsideSales employs data analytics to accelerate sales productivity by identifying the highest ROI accounts, contacts and...