IBM

From DSC:
Below are some further items that discuss the need for some frameworks, policies, institutes, research, etc. that deal with a variety of game-changing technologies that are quickly coming down the pike (if they aren’t already upon on). We need such things to help us create a positive future.

Also see Part I of this thread of thinking entitled, “The need for ethics, morals, policies, & serious reflection about what kind of future we want has never been greater!“ There have been so many other items that came out since that posting, I felt like I needed to add another one here.

What kind of future do we want? How are we going to insure that we get there?

As the saying goes…”Just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should.” Or another saying comes to my mind…”What could possibly go wrong with this? It’s a done deal.”

While some of the items below should have very positive impacts on society, I do wonder how long it will take the hackers — the ones who are bent on wreaking havoc — to mess up some of these types of applications…with potentially deadly consequences? Security-related concerns must be dealt with here.

5 amazing and alarming things that may be done with your DNA — from washingtonpost.com by Matt McFarland

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Venter is leading efforts to use digital technology to analyze humans in ways we never have before, and the results will have huge implications for society. The latest findings he described are currently being written up for scientific publications. Venter didn’t want to usurp the publications, so he wouldn’t dive into extensive detail of how his team has made these breakthroughs. But what he did share offers an exciting and concerning overview of what lies ahead for humanity. There are social, legal and ethical implications to start considering. Here are five examples of how digitizing DNA will change the human experience:

These are the decisions the Pentagon wants to leave to robots — from defenseone.com by Patrick Tucker
The U.S. military believes its battlefield edge will increasingly depend on automation and artificial intelligence.

Excerpt:

Conducting cyber defensive operations, electronic warfare, and over-the-horizon targeting. “You cannot have a human operator operating at human speed fighting back at determined cyber tech,” Work said. “You are going to need have a learning machine that does that.” He did not say whether the Pentagon is pursuing the autonomous or automatic deployment of offensive cyber capabilities, a controversial idea to be sure. He also highlighted a number of ways that artificial intelligence could help identify new waveforms to improve electronic warfare.

Britain should lead way on genetically engineered babies, says Chief Scientific Adviser — from.telegraph.co.uk by Sarah Knapton
Sir Mark Walport, who advises the government on scientific matters, said it could be acceptable to genetically edit human embryos

Excerpt:

Last week more than 150 scientists and campaigners called for a worldwide ban on the practice, claiming it could ‘irrevocably alter the human species’ and lead to a world where inequality and discrimination were ‘inscribed onto the human genome.’

But at a conference in London [on 12/8/15], Sir Mark Walport, who advises the government on scientific matters, said he believed there were ‘circumstances’ in which the genetic editing of human embyros could be ‘acceptable’.

Cyborg Future: Engineers Build a Chip That Is Part Biological and Part Synthetic — from futurism.com

Excerpt:

Engineers have succeeded in combining an integrated chip with an artificial lipid bilayer membrane containing ATP-powered ion pumps, paving the way for more such artificial systems that combine the biological with the mechanical down the road.

Robots expected to run half of Japan by 2035 — from engadget.com by Andrew Tarantola
Something-something ‘robot overlords’.

Excerpt:

Data analysts Nomura Research Institute (NRI), led by researcher Yumi Wakao, figure that within the next 20 years, nearly half of all jobs in Japan could be accomplished by robots. Working with Professor Michael Osborne from Oxford University, who had previously investigated the same matter in both the US and UK, the NRI team examined more than 600 jobs and found that “up to 49 percent of jobs could be replaced by computer systems,” according to Wakao.

Cambridge University is opening a £10 million centre to study the impact of AI on humanity — from businessinsider.com by Sam Shead

Excerpt:

Cambridge University announced on [12/3/15] that it is opening a new £10 million research centre to study the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity.

The 806-year-old university said the centre, being funded with a grant from non-profit foundation The Leverhulme Trust, will explore the opportunities and challenges facing humanity as a result of further developments in artificial intelligence.

Tech leaders launch nonprofit to save the world from killer robots — from csmonitor.com by Jessica Mendoza
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other tech titans have invested $1 billion in a nonprofit that would help direct artificial intelligence technology toward positive human impact.

2016 will be a pivotal year for social robots — from therobotreport.com by Frank Tobe
1,000 Peppers are selling each month from a big-dollar venture between SoftBank, Alibaba and Foxconn; Jibo just raised another $16 million as it prepares to deliver 7,500+ units in Mar/Apr of 2016; and Buddy, Rokid, Sota and many others are poised to deliver similar forms of social robots.

Excerpt:

These new robots, and the proliferation of mobile robot butlers, guides and kiosks, promise to recognize your voice and face and help you plan your calendar, provide reminders, take pictures of special moments, text, call and videoconference, order fast food, keep watch on your house or office, read recipes, play games, read emotions and interact accordingly, and the list goes on. They are attempting to be analogous to a sharp administrative assistant that knows your schedule, contacts and interests and engages with you about them, helping you stay informed, connected and active.

IBM opens its artificial mind to the world — from fastcompany.com by Sean Captain
IBM is letting companies plug into its Watson artificial intelligence engine to make sense of speech, text, photos, videos, and sensor data.

Excerpt:

Artificial intelligence is the big, oft-misconstrued catchphrase of the day, making headlines recently with the launch of the new OpenAI organization, backed by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other tech luminaries. AI is neither a synonym for killer robots nor a technology of the future, but one that is already finding new signals in the vast noise of collected data, ranging from weather reports to social media chatter to temperature sensor readings. Today IBM has opened up new access to its AI system, called Watson, with a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow other companies and organizations to feed their data into IBM’s big brain for analysis.

GE wants to give industrial machines their own social network with Predix Cloud — from fastcompany.com by Sean Captain
GE is selling a new service that promises to predict when a machine will break down…so technicians can preemptively fix it.

Foresight 2020: The future is filled with 50 billion connected devices — from ibmbigdatahub.com by Erin Monday

Excerpt:

By 2020, there will be over 50 billion connected devices generating continuous data.

This figure is staggering, but is it really a surprise? The world has come a long way from 1992, when the number of computers was roughly equivalent to the population of San Jose. Today, in 2015, there are more connected devices out there than there are human beings. Ubiquitous connectivity is very nearly a reality. Every day, we get a little closer to a time where businesses, governments and consumers are connected by a fluid stream of data and analytics. But what’s driving all this growth?

Designing robots that learn as effortlessly as babies — from singularityhub.com by Shelly Fan

Excerpt:

A wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked, babbling human baby hardly looks like the ultimate learning machine.

But under the hood, an 18-month-old can outlearn any state-of-the-art artificial intelligence algorithm.

Their secret sauce?

They watch; they imitate; and they extrapolate.

Artificial intelligence researchers have begun to take notice. This week, two separate teams dipped their toes into cognitive psychology and developed new algorithms that teach machines to learn like babies. One instructs computers to imitate; the other, to extrapolate.

Researchers have found a new way to get machines to learn faster — from fortune.com by Hilary Brueck

Excerpt:

An international team of data scientists is proud to announce the very latest in machine learning: they’ve built a program that learns… programs. That may not sound impressive at first blush, but making a machine that can learn based on a single example is something that’s been extremely hard to do in the world of artificial intelligence. Machines don’t learn like humans—not as fast, and not as well. And even with this research, they still can’t.

Team showcase how good Watson is at learning — from adigaskell.org

Excerpt:

Artificial intelligence has undoubtedly come a long way in the last few years, but there is still much to be done to make it intuitive to use. IBM’s Watson has been one of the most well known exponents during this time, but despite it’s initial success, there are issues to overcome with it.

A team led by Georgia Tech are attempting to do just that. They’re looking to train Watson to get better at returning answers to specific queries.

Why The Internet of Things will drive a Knowledge Revolution. — from linkedin.com by David Evans

Excerpt:

As these machines inevitably connect to the Internet, they will ultimately connect to each other so they can share, and collaborate on their own findings. In fact, in 2014 machines got their own ”World Wide Web” called RoboEarth, in which to share knowledge with one another. …
The implications of all of this are at minimum twofold:

The way we generate knowledge is going to change dramatically in the coming years.
Knowledge is about to increase at an exponential rate.

What we choose to do with this newfound knowledge is of course up to us. We are about to face some significant challenges at scales we have yet to experience.

Drone squad to be launched by Tokyo police — from bbc.com

Excerpt:

A drone squad, designed to locate and – if necessary – capture nuisance drones flown by members of the public, is to be launched by police in Tokyo.

An advance in artificial intelligence rivals human abilities — from todayonline.com by John Markoff

Excerpt:

NEW YORK — Computer researchers reported artificial-intelligence advances [on Dec 10] that surpassed human capabilities for a narrow set of vision-related tasks.

The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.

Somewhat related:

Novo Nordisk, IBM Watson Health to create ‘virtual doctor’ — from wsj.com by Denise Roland
Software could dispense treatment advice for diabetes patients

Excerpt:

Novo Nordisk A/S is teaming up with IBM Watson Health, a division of International Business Machines Corp., to create a “virtual doctor” for diabetes patients that could dispense treatment advice such as insulin dosage.

The Danish diabetes specialist hopes to use IBM’s supercomputer platform, Watson, to analyze health data from diabetes patients to help them manage their disease.

Why Google’s new quantum computer could launch an artificial intelligence arms race — from washingtonpost.com

8 industries robots will completely transform by 2025 — from techinsider.io

Addendums on 12/17/15:

Russia and China are building highly autonomous killer robots — from businessinsider.com.au by Danielle Muoi

Excerpt:

Russia and China are creating highly autonomous weapons, more commonly referred to as killer robots, and it’s putting pressure on the Pentagon to keep up, according to US Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work. During a national-security forum on Monday, Work said that China and Russia are heavily investing in a roboticized army, according to a report from Defense One.

Your Algorithmic Self Meets Super-Intelligent AI — from techcrunch.com by Jarno M. Koponen

Excerpt:

At the same time, your data and personalized experiences are used to develop and train the machine learning systems that are powering the Siris, Watsons, Ms and Cortanas. Be it a speech recognition solution or a recommendation algorithm, your actions and personal data affect how these sophisticated systems learn more about you and the world around you.

The less explicit fact is that your diverse interactions — your likes, photos, locations, tags, videos, comments, route selections, recommendations and ratings — feed learning systems that could someday transform into super–intelligent AIs with unpredictable consequences.

As of today, you can’t directly affect how your personal data is used in these systems

Addendum on 12/20/15:

Humans Are Slamming Into Driverless Cars and Exposing a Key Flaw — from bloomberg.com by Keith Naughton

Addendum on 12/21/15:

Facewatch ‘thief recognition’ CCTV on trial in UK stores — from bbc.com
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
Face-recognition camera systems should be used by police, he tells me. “The technology’s here, and we need to think about what is a proportionate response that respects people’s privacy,” he says.
…
“The public need to ask themselves: do they want six million cameras painted red at head height looking at them?

Addendum on 1/13/16:

The Algorithms Are Taking Over: Who Controls Our Online Future? — from forbes.com by Kalev Leetaru

6 items re: interesting innovations

On 12/15/2015, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, engineering, health, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, maker movement, marketing/social marketing, marketplaces, robotics, vendors, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, by Daniel Christian

The North Face uses IBM’s Watson to make online shopping smarter — from thestreet.com by Rebecca Borison

Excerpt:

Aiming to solve one of e-commerce’s challenges of not offering personalized service, VF Corp’s “The North Face” on Monday launched a new online shopping tool using IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system.

The tool, which is powered by Fluid and called XPS, guides a consumer through the online store to better find what he or she is looking for.

E-commerce today doesn’t generally give the personal attention a consumer might get when he walks into a store and is greeted by a human being. This new tool seeks to address that challenge.

Watch this robot solve a Rubik’s Cube in a world record 2.39 seconds — from singularityhub.com by Jason Dorrier

.

Novo Nordisk, IBM Watson Health to create ‘virtual doctor’ — from wsj.com by Denise Roland
Software could dispense treatment advice for diabetes patients

Excerpt:

Novo Nordisk A/S is teaming up with IBM Watson Health, a division of International Business Machines Corp., to create a “virtual doctor” for diabetes patients that could dispense treatment advice such as insulin dosage.

The Danish diabetes specialist hopes to use IBM’s supercomputer platform, Watson, to analyze health data from diabetes patients to help them manage their disease.

CES 2016: driverless cars and virtual reality to dominate at world’s biggest technology show — from mirror.co.uk
The world’s biggest technology showcase kicks off in Las Vegas on 6 January 2016. Here’s what we know about what will be happening at the Consumer Electronics Show

Build an automatic cookie decorating machine with LEGO Mindstorms — from lifehacker.com by Patrick Allan

Excerpt:

Decorating cookies by hand can be a pleasant activity, but with a LEGO Mindstorms set, you can crank out a bunch of perfectly iced cookies in no time at all.

World’s First Holographic Navigation System — from machinetomachinemagazine.com

Excerpt:

PARIS – The United States is the first commercial market to receive two innovative telematics devices that apply aerospace technology to land navigation. WayRay Navion is an augmented reality navigation system that projects holographic GPS imagery and driver notifications onto the windshield of a car, a first-of-its-kind for the automobile aftermarket. WayRay Element is a smart tracker that can be plugged into the diagnostics port of any automobile for monitoring driver performance, safety and fuel efficiency. The solutions arrive courtesy of WayRay, a Swiss startup dedicated to the advancement of connected car telematics, and Orange Business Services, a B2B global telecom operator and IT solutions integrator.

Will Lynda.com/LinkedIn.com pursue this powerful vision with an organization like IBM? If so, look out!

On 12/15/2015, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, adult learning, analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bring your own device (BYOD), cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, communities of practice, competency-based learning/education, convergence, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, cost of getting a degree, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, distance education, education technology, elearning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, future of higher education, game-changing environment, global / globalization, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, immersion, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, interactivity, internet, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, lifelong learning, machine-to-machine communications, mobile learning, mobile technologies, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, more voice more choice more control, multimedia, Near Field Communication (NFC), online learning, online media, online tutoring, participation, passions, personalized/customized learning, platforms, professional development, reinvent, second screen apps, simulations, social learning / networks, staying relevant, STEAM-related, streams of content, student-related, surviving, teaching online, technologies for your home, technology (general), telecommunications, telepresence, television, training / L&D, transmedia, trends, TVs, user experience (UX), using teams, vendors, videoconferencing, virtual field trips, virtual K-12 schools, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, virtual tutoring, web-based collaboration, webinars, workplace, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Back in July of 2012, I put forth a vision that I called Learning from the Living [Class]Room.

It’s a vision that involves a multitude of technologies — technologies and trends that we continue to see being developed and ones that could easily converge in the not-too-distant future to offer us some powerful opportunities for lifelong learning!

Consider that in won’t be very long before a learner will be able to reinvent himself/herself throughout their lifetime, for a very affordable price — while taking ala carte courses from some of the best professors, trainers, leaders, and experts throughout the world, all from the comfort of their living room. (Not to mention tapping into streams of content that will be available on such platforms.)

So when I noticed that Lynda.com now has a Roku channel for the big screen, it got my attention.

Lets add a few more pieces to the puzzle, given that some other relevant trends are developing quite nicely:

tvOS-based apps are now possible — and already there are over 2600 of them and it’s only been a month or so since Apple made this new platform available to the masses
Now, let’s add the ability to take courses online via a virtual reality interface — globally, at any time; VR is poised to have some big years in 2016 and 2017!
Lynda.com and LinkedIn.com’s fairly recent merger and their developing capabilities to offer micro-credentials, badges, and competency-based education (CBE) — while keeping track of the courses that a learner has taken
The need for lifelong learning is now a requirement, as we need to continually reinvent ourselves — especially given the increasing pace of change and as complete industries are impacted (broadsided), almost overnight
Big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to pick up steam; for example, consider the cognitive computing capabilities being developed in IBM’s Watson — which should be able to deliver personalized digital playlists and likely some level of intelligent tutoring as well
Courses could be offered at a fraction of the cost, as MOOC-sized classes could distribute the costs over a greater # of people and back end systems could help grade/assess the students’ work; plus the corporate world continues to use MOOCs to cost-effectively train their employees across the globe (MOOCs would thrive on such a tvOS-based platform, whereby students could watch lectures, demonstrations, and simulations on the big screen and then communicate with each other via their second screens*)
As the trends of machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT) pick up, relevant courses/modules will likely be instantly presented to people to learn about a particular topic or task. For example, I purchased a crib and I want to know how to put it together. The chip in the crib communicates to my Smart TV or to my augmented reality glasses/headset, and then a system loads up some multimedia-based training/instructions on how to put it together.
Streams of content continue to be developed and offered — via blogs, via channels like Periscope and Meerkat, via social media-based channels, and via other channels — and these streams of multimedia-based content should prove to be highly useful to individual learners as well as for communities of practice

Anyway, these next few years will be packed with change — the pace of which will likely take us by surprise. We need to keep our eyes upward and outward — peering into the horizons rather than looking downwards — doing so should reduce the chance of us getting broadsided!

*It’s also possible that AR and VR will create
a future whereby we only need 1 “screen”

Addendum:
After I wrote/published the item above…it was interesting to then see the item below:

IBM opens Watson IoT Global Headquarters, extends power of cognitive computing to a connected world — from finance.yahoo.com
1000 Munich-based experts to drive IoT and industry 4.0 innovation
Launches eight new IoT client experience centers worldwide
Introduces Watson API Services for IoT on the IBM Cloud

Excerpt:

MUNICH, Dec. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the opening of its global headquarters for Watson Internet of Things (IoT), launching a series of new offerings, capabilities and ecosystem partners designed to extend the power of cognitive computing to the billions of connected devices, sensors and systems that comprise the IoT. These new offerings will be available through the IBM Watson IoT Cloud, the company’s global platform for IoT business and developers.

Reflections on “Google’s Chromebooks make up half of US classroom devices” [Taylor]

On 12/03/2015, in Apple, Bring your own device (BYOD), Daniel S. Christian, education, education technology, Google, IBM, K-12 related, technology (general), vendors, by Daniel Christian

Google’s Chromebooks make up half of US classroom devices — from cnbc.com by Harriet Taylor

Excerpt:

Google, Microsoft and Apple have been competing for years in the very lucrative education technology market. For the first time, Google has taken a huge lead over its rivals.

Chromebooks now make up more than half of all devices in U.S. classrooms, up from less than 1 percent in 2012, according to a new report from Futuresource Consulting. To analysts, this comes as a big surprise.

“While it was clear that Chromebooks had made progress in education, this news is, frankly, shocking,” said Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder. “Chromebooks made incredibly quick inroads in just a couple of years, leaping over Microsoft and Apple with seeming ease.

From DSC:
I love Apple’s products and many of their philosophies. Their attention to detail and design is second to none — especially on things that Tim Cook and his leadership team really care about. I also appreciate Apple’s push into the enterprise — as evidenced by their partnership and collaborations with IBM.

In terms of Microsoft, Microsoft has designed and developed some excellent software through the years. Also, their current leadership seems to be far more innovative/effective than their former leadership (IMHO). This can be seen in endeavors like Microsoft’s push into augmented reality/mixed reality with their HoloLens product.

But from someone working in the education sector, it has felt like Apple and Microsoft have been blown out of the water by Google these last several years. So to see that Chromebooks now make up more than half of all devices in U.S. classrooms, it doesn’t surprise me at all. Their ease of setup and administration in addition to their low cost have made Chromebooks ideal for many K-12 schools.

If Apple and Microsoft want to be key players in the education space in the future, then they really need to majorly up their game — obtaining board level supported endeavors and investments. Otherwise, Google seems to be on a trajectory to dominate this space (at least until the next Google comes along).

IBM’s System ML (for Machine Learning) is open sourced

On 11/24/2015, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, computer science, corporate / business world, Google, IBM, programming, trends, workplace, by Daniel Christian

IBM’s SystemML machine learning system becomes Apache Incubator project — from zdnet.com by Larry Dignan
There’s a race between tech giants to open source machine learning systems and become a dominant platform. Apache SystemML has clear enterprise spin.

Excerpt:

IBM on Monday said its machine learning system, dubbed SystemML, has been accepted as an open source project by the Apache Incubator.
…
What’s notable about IBM’s SystemML milestone is that open sourcing machine learning systems is becoming a trend. To wit:

Google recently open sourced its TensorFlow machine learning tool under an Apache 2.0 license.
Facebook has also contributed its machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to the Torch open source project.

Also see:

Addendum on 11/25/15:

New IBM Cloud Service Enables Developers to Rapidly Translate Apps into Nine Languages — from finance.yahoo.com
IBM Globalization Pipeline, Available on IBM’s Cloud Platform, Quickly Opens Apps Up to Fastest Growing Global Markets
Excerpt:
ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 25, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new cloud-based service that enables developers to automatically translate cloud and mobile apps into the world’s most-spoken languages.

IBM Watson launches new app that can predict trends [Whitler]

On 11/19/2015, in analytics, business, computer science, corporate / business world, data related items, IBM, marketing/social marketing, marketplaces, technologies for your home, tools, trends, vendors, by Daniel Christian

The hot products for holiday 2015: IBM Watson launches new app that can predict trends — from by Kimberly Whitler

Excerpt:

The holiday season—that favorite time of year for retailers and shoppers alike—is just around the corner. And this year, IBM Watson is launching an app that provides shoppers with the ability to understand the top trends of the season and to predict which products are likely to sell out.

Distilling the sentiment of millions of online conversations across the internet (including social media sites, blogs, forums, ratings, reviews, etc.), the new Watson app (to download the free app, click here) goes beyond providing a static ranking of popular products to provide insight on how consumers feel about the products.

Also see:

Addendum om 11/30/15:

Why IBM spent billions buying technology it already had access to — from finance.yahoo.com by James Kosur and Julie Bort
Excerpt:
Schroeter sees a future where IBM’s analytics capabilities are paired with the Weather Company’s data ingestion technology to create the world’s leading internet of things.

IBM and Apple are now very much involved in healthcare

On 11/11/2015, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, analytics, Apple, data related items, health, IBM, platforms, tools, vendors, wearables, by Daniel Christian

IBM Watson, Boston Children’s team on rare pediatric diseases — from medcitynews.com by Neil Versel

Excerpt:

Here’s another practical application of IBM Watson technology in healthcare: Boston Children’s Hospital is going to tap the supercomputing platform to improve diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases.

Researchers at the Harvard-affiliated hospital’s Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research will train Watson in nephrology by reading medical literature and scanning data on mutations for a kidney disease known as steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome. They will then give Watson retrospective genomic data from patients in an effort to teach the computer to assist physicians in interpreting genome sequences as they look for abnormalities.

Wearables will see mass adoption via educated patients and digital health stores — from medcitynews.com by Shahid Shah

Excerpt:

In a fees-for-services (volume-driven) world, selling healthcare products and services to individual institutions is certainly time-consuming but reasonably straightforward. In an outcomes-driven (fees for value) world driven by shared risks and shared rewards, selling healthcare solutions across multiple disciplines, multiple stakeholders, and multiple institutions is much harder and even more time-consuming. That’s because there’s no easy buyer to identify. Population health is all the rage but our current $3 trillion + healthcare industry was never devised nor incentivized to work together as a team for long-term patient or population benefits (it’s reimbursed mainly for episodic care).

Our country’s healthcare industry is more about sick care and episodic transactions rather than longitudinal care. But, since we are moving to population and outcomes driven care where the patient is more responsible for their own care management and payment, it would seem patient education and digital health tools are more important than ever. So, perhaps we need to get together and innovate around how we’re going to present next-generation solutions from across multiple innovators and showcase them to patients and their caregivers.

Watch users claim Apple wearable improves health — from fiercemobilehealthcare.com by Judy Mottl

Excerpt:

Nearly two-thirds of Apple Watch users are exercising more often and for longer periods of time, and 72 percent claim the wearable is improving their health and fitness levels, according to a new report.

IBM forms new health data analytics unit, extends Apple partnership— from zdnet.com by Charlie Osborne
With the help of Apple, acquisitions and new partnerships, Big Blue plans to tap into the vast amount of data offered by health-tracking devices.

After medical school, IBM’s Watson gets ready for Apple health apps — from zdnet.com by David Shamah
The Watson Health Cloud – set to become an important component of Apple’s health platform – is targeting medical care, IBM says.

Excerpt:

“Watson went to medical school, and now it’s set to graduate,” said Dr Aya Soffer, director of big data and cognitive analytics at the Israel facility. “We’ve had it study the medical literature, and now it’s ready to apply its natural language processing skills to real-life applications.”

Just in time, too. Last week, IBM announced the launch of Watson Health Cloud to “provide a secure and open platform for physicians, researchers, insurers, and companies focused on health and wellness solutions”.

The platform will be used by health companies Johnson and Johnson and Medtronic, as well as by Apple. The Mac maker has its own platform and hopes to become a top health company itself. It has established a new business unit, called Watson Health Cloud, to administer the big data apps that will use Watson’s intelligent analysis and understanding of medical data.

Addendum on 11/13/15:

NYU Medical Students Learning How to Analyze Big Data — from imedicalapps.com by Brian Wu
Excerpt:
Big data is changing the way information is shared in the medical field. Current technologies such as IBM’s Watson are working to merge data from multiple sources to make it easier to access as well as share. Even ten years ago most doctors would not have known anything about big data, and it was definitely not taught in medical school. Today big data is becoming a crucial part of the healthcare field including the diagnosis and treatment of patients. It is important that doctors not only understand the importance of data but know how to properly access and interpret the data. The NYU School of Medicine requires that its first and second-year students complete a health care by the numbers project. Students are given access to a giant database with more than 5 million anonymous records, which includes information on every hospital patient in the state for the preceding two years.

IBM Launches Industry’s First Consulting Practice Dedicated to Cognitive Business

On 10/06/2015, in analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, corporate / business world, emerging technologies, IBM, innovation, workplace, by Daniel Christian

IBM Launches Industry’s First Consulting Practice Dedicated to Cognitive Business — from by finance.yahoo.com
Specialists in analytics and data science lead client journeys spanning cognitive banking, retail, supply chain and healthcare, among others

Excerpt:

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) [on 10/6/15] launched the industry’s first consulting organization dedicated to helping clients realize the transformative value of cognitive business.
…
Cognitive represents an entirely new model of computing that includes a range of technology innovations in analytics, natural language processing and machine learning. Industry analyst firm IDC predicts that by 2018, half of all consumers will interact regularly with services based on cognitive computing.

IBM Expands Watson Platform for Next Generation of Builders; Extends Industry’s Largest Portfolio of Cognitive APIs — from ibm.com

– New APIs Broaden Watson’s Language, Vision and Speech Capabilities
– Developer Tools Simplify Combining APIs and Data
– Upcoming Platform Innovations Previewed including Industry Data Sets & Robotics Integration
– New Watson Hub to Open in San Francisco

Excerpt:

SAN FRANCISCO – 24 Sep 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded the industry’s largest and most diverse set of cognitive APIs, technologies and tools for developers who are creating products, services and applications embedded with Watson.

The announcement was made by IBM during its forum on cognitive computing and Artificial Intelligence, where the company announced a new Watson location in San Francisco. IBM also previewed new platform innovations and research projects that will extend its industry-leading cognitive portfolio.

Excerpts from IBM Watson Ecosystem Partners in Market Building Businesses:

Student Career Counseling: Carney Labs is an education technology company that provides a platform embedded with Watson language capabilities to help schools learn about a student’s personality characteristics in order to build them a career roadmap. The Commonwealth of Virginia adopted a policy for all high schools in the state to leverage this app to use with students entering their freshman year.

Knowledge Management: Bloomfire is a cloud-based knowledge network platform that helps employees within a company easily find the information they need to do their jobs. By scanning posts within the platform and automatically creating tags via the Watson data insights API, employees at companies including Whole Foods, Dun & Bradstreet and Etsy spend less time searching for information and more time doing meaningful work to improve company performance.

Research & Development: Inno360, an enterprise research and innovation management platform provider, is embedding a powerful combination of 7 Watson APIs for language and data insights into its SaaS platform to transform the way its clients, including Fortune 50 companies, conduct research and process big data. Inno360 is able to provide its clients advanced analysis of their R&D data to resolve product issues quickly and bring new products to market more rapidly.

Talent Sourcing and Matching: UnitesUs is a cloud based hiring & recruitment platform utilizing cognitive computing and big data analysis to match prospective employees to hiring organizations based on personality, company cultural fit, and core qualifications. By analyzing the personalities of job candidates leveraging Watson language capabilities and characterizing a company’s work environment, UnitesUs uses proprietary, automated matching algorithms to help companies, including imaging and electronics company Ricoh USA and fitness gym chain 24 Hour Fitness, make better hiring decisions.

The jobs that AI can’t replace — from bbc.com by Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee
At the heart of capitalism is the concept of creative destruction. And this phenomenon is turbocharged by technological progress. Innovations from the cotton gin to electricity to the computer have created dramatic changes in the way that we work and the jobs that are available.

Excerpt:

Current advances in robots and other digital technologies are stirring up anxiety among workers and in the media. There is a great deal of fear, for example, that robots will not only destroy existing jobs, but also be better at most or all of the tasks required in the future.

Our research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has shown that that’s at best a half-truth. While it is true that robots are getting very good at a whole bunch of jobs and tasks, there are still many categories in which humans perform better.

Get ready for ‘The Economy Of Things’ — from forbes.com by Veena Pureswaran

Excerpt:

The IoT is not just about smart homes that light up when you arrive or washing machines that text you when the cycle is done. The IoT will turn physical assets into participants in real-time global digital markets. As the Internet of Things continues to turn physical assets into participants in new real-time, digital marketplaces, it’s creating what we describe as a new “Economy of Things.”

These types of assets will become as easily indexed, searched and traded as any online commodity. In fact, such digital marketplaces represent huge economic opportunities for growth and advancement.

Who’s the boss? Hitachi looks to promote artificial intelligence — from blogs.wsj.com by Jun Hongo; with thanks to Norma Owen for this resource

Excerpt:

Hitachi Ltd. is looking to promote artificial intelligence to management.

The Japanese electronics maker said it has developed a new artificial intelligence program that will enable robots to deliver instructions to employees based on analyses of big data and the workers’ routines.

“Work efficiency improved by 8% in warehouses with the new artificial intelligence program, compared to those without them,” a Hitachi spokeswoman said. “The program can examine an extremely large amount of data to provide the most efficient instruction, which is impossible for human managers to handle.”

Hitachi last month unveiled a fast-moving two-armed robot which it says may replace humans in performing basic functions like retrieving items in warehouses.

Tomorrow’s workers want mobile, but are employers ready? — from domo.com
70 percent of future workforce expect a bring-your-own-device culture; value technology perks nearly five times more than a stocked kitchen

Excerpt:

The study, which polled more than 2,000 college students, confirmed what many have assumed: that millennials are a mobile-first generation. Not surprisingly, the survey confirms that millennials spend most of their time accessing the Internet via a mobile device, 46 percent via a mobile phone and 43 percent on a tablet or laptop. Additionally, the report uncovers how much time millennials spend on various mobile activities. More than 97 percent use their phones to send or receive text messages, 96 percent use them to access the Internet, and 68 percent turn to a mobile device to stream music and send or receive pictures.

The findings also affirm how critical it is for companies to adjust to the ever-changing mobile-centric business world in order to attract top talent, which will increasingly be comprised of the millennial generation.

‘Transformer in chief’: The new chief digital officer — from mckinsey.com by Tuck Rickards, Kate Smaje, and Vik Sohoni
The CDO role is changing dramatically. Here are the skills today’s world demands.

Excerpt:

In the alphabet soup that is today’s crowded C-suite, few roles attract as much attention as that of the chief digital officer, or CDO. While the position isn’t exactly new, what’s required of the average CDO is. Gone are the days of being responsible for introducing basic digital capabilities and perhaps piloting a handful of initiatives. The CDO is now a “transformer in chief,” charged with coordinating and managing comprehensive changes that address everything from updating how a company works to building out entirely new businesses. And he or she must make progress quickly.

According to social forecasts in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, the point at which our labor market has more freelancers than full-time employees is between 5 to 10 years away. The growing automation of knowledge work means that, globally, we are expected to lose around 2 billion jobs by 2030. Some of that loss will be softened by new jobs created, but they’re going to be of the low-paid, temporary, variety. Today’s university graduates are facing what has been termed a “high skills/low income” future. The recent rapid growth in “knowledge process outsourcing” — the breaking up of salaried jobs into bid-for tasks, through websites like Elance.com and Freelancer. com — may well be transforming economies of developing countries like India, but it is causing futurists in the west to predict “the end of job.”

— What the Future Economy Means for How Kids Learn Today

The unlikely cities that will power the U.S. economy — from bloomberg.com

Excerpt:

Huntsville is one of a growing number of smaller U.S. cities, far from Silicon Valley, that are seeking to replace dwindling factory jobs by reinventing themselves as tech centers. Across the Midwest, Northeast, and South, mayors and governors are competing to attract tech companies and workers.

How freelancers are fighting for their labor rights — from fastcompany.com by Dillon Baker
In the absence of unions, creative freelancers are finding new ways to work collectively.

Excerpt:

“On average, our members are owed over $10,000 in unpaid invoices and spend 36 hours tracking down each missing payment,” says Freelancers Union founder and labor lawyer Sara Horowitz. She explains that nearly half (44%) of their members report issues in getting paid.

But getting paid on time is just one of the hurdles that the growing independent workforce faces.

For example, the Internet has lowered the bar to entry for professional writing and created more opportunities than ever, which on one hand is good news for entry-level writers, but shrunken profits have also hollowed out freelance rates at many publications.

4 ways to prepare for the workplace of the future — from fastcompany.com by Erin Palmer
Millennials face a much more volatile workplace than ever. Here are four ways to adapt.

Excerpt:

The workplace of the future will be a world of contradictions—which the next generations that enter it will need to master.

Charting a career path in a mercurial workforce means staying focused and adaptive in equal measure. That’s something millennials and their younger generation Z counterparts will need to be able to do more successfully than their elders ever had to.

For now, though, the learning curve still looks steep. A recent study by the online work company Upwork found that despite the millions of millennials looking for work, 53% of hiring managers said that they struggle to find and retain millennial employees.

Today’s leaders have gotten to where they are by adapting to what’s now and what’s next, not blindly clinging to one specific path.

Addendum on 9/15/15:

APIs Are The New FTEs — from techcrunch.comby Gaurav Jain
Excerpt:
A decade ago, a VP of engineering at a startup might have evaluated the resumes of five solid front-end engineers. Five years ago that VP would have looked at GitHub profiles. Today, they are just as likely to evaluate a front-end framework like Ionic, Meteor or Aurelia and build it themselves.

It’s not just front-end options. We’ve seen a massive proliferation in frameworks, libraries and other tools that allow a single talented engineer to do the work of a team.

Companies and products like Heroku, Celery, RabbitMQ, Mandrill, Fastly, Chartio, Chargebee, Shipwire, Docker, Codeship, Rainforest QA, Replicated and Chartbeat have changed the nature of tech development. These are just a small subset of services that replace the work of individuals or entire teams.

WordPress Ate Webmasters
This trend has pros and cons. It will make life harder for those with only mid-tier technical knowledge. Look at what WordPress has done to “webmasters.” The blogging platform turned CMS has colonized the web, and accounts for ~23 percent of Internet traffic.

What might our learning ecosystems look like by 2025? [Christian]

On 07/31/2015, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, active learning, adult learning, analytics, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Augmented Reality (AR), blended learning, business side of he, career development, changing business models, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, competency-based learning/education, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, cost of getting a degree, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, digital storytelling, disruption, distance education, education, education technology, elearning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, expectations, experimentation, formal learning, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, Google, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, ideas, informal learning, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, liberal arts, lifelong learning, marketplaces, mobile learning, more voice more choice more control, online learning, online media, online tutoring, pace of change, participation, personalized/customized learning, platforms, professional development, reinvent, second screen apps, social learning / networks, staying relevant, streams of content, student-related, surviving, technologies for your home, technology (general), telepresence, television, training / L&D, transmedia, trends, TVs, universities, user experience (UX), using teams, videoconferencing, virtual field trips, virtual K-12 schools, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, virtual tutoring, vision/possibilities, web-based collaboration, workplace, by Daniel Christian

This posting can also be seen out at evoLLLution.com (where LLL stands for lifelong learning):

From DSC:
What might our learning ecosystems look like by 2025?

In the future, learning “channels” will offer more choice, more control. They will be far more sophisticated than what we have today.

That said, what the most important aspects of online course design end up being 10 years from now depends upon what types of “channels” I think there will be and what might be offered via those channels. By channels, I mean forms, methods, and avenues of learning that a person could pursue and use. In 2015, some example channels might be:

Attending a community college, a college or a university to obtain a degree
Obtaining informal learning during an internship
Using social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn
Reading blogs, books, periodicals, etc.

In 2025, there will likely be new and powerful channels for learning that will be enabled by innovative forms of communications along with new software, hardware, technologies, and other advancements. For examples, one could easily imagine:

That the trajectory of deep learning and artificial intelligence will continue, opening up new methods of how we might learn in the future
That augmented and virtual reality will allow for mobile learning to the Nth degree
That the trend of Competency Based Education (CBE) and microcredentials may be catapulted into the mainstream via the use of big data-related affordances

Due to time and space limitations, I’ll focus here on the more formal learning channels that will likely be available online in 2025. In that environment, I think we’ll continue to see different needs and demands – thus we’ll still need a menu of options. However, the learning menu of 2025 will be more personalized, powerful, responsive, sophisticated, flexible, granular, modularized, and mobile.

Highly responsive, career-focused track

One part of the menu of options will focus on addressing the demand for more career-focused information and learning that is available online (24×7). Even in 2015, with the U.S. government saying that 40% of today’s workers now have ‘contingent’ jobs and others saying that percentage will continue climbing to 50% or more, people will be forced to learn quickly in order to stay marketable. Also, the 1/2 lives of information may not last very long, especially if we continue on our current trajectory of exponential change (vs. linear change).

However, keeping up with that pace of change is currently proving to be out of reach for most institutions of higher education, especially given the current state of accreditation and governance structures throughout higher education as well as how our current teaching and learning environment is set up (i.e., the use of credit hours, 4 year degrees, etc.). By 2025, accreditation will have been forced to change to allow for alternative forms of learning and for methods of obtaining credentials. Organizations that offer channels with a more vocational bent to them will need to be extremely responsive, as they attempt to offer up-to-date, highly-relevant information that will immediately help people be more employable and marketable. Being nimble will be the name of the game in this arena. Streams of content will be especially important here. There may not be enough time to merit creating formal, sophisticated courses on many career-focused topics.

With streams of content, the key value provided by institutions will be to curate the most relevant, effective, reliable, up-to-date content…so one doesn’t have to drink from the Internet’s firehose of information. Such streams of content will also offer constant potential, game-changing scenarios and will provide a pulse check on a variety of trends that could affect an industry. Social-based learning will be key here, as learners contribute to each other’s learning. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will need to be knowledgeable facilitators of learning; but given the pace of change, true experts will be rare indeed.

Microcredentials, nanodegrees, competency-based education, and learning from one’s living room will be standard channels in 2025. Each person may have a web-based learner profile by then and the use of big data will keep that profile up-to-date regarding what any given individual has been learning about and what skills they have mastered.

For example, even currently in 2015, a company called StackUp creates their StackUp Report to add to one’s resume or grades, asserting that their services can give “employers and schools new metrics to evaluate your passion, interests, and intellectual curiosity.” Stackup captures, categorizes, and scores everything you read and study online. So they can track your engagement on a given website, for example, and then score the time spent doing so. This type of information can then provide insights into the time you spend learning.

Project teams and employers could create digital playlists that prospective employees or contractors will have to advance through; and such teams and employers will be watching to see how the learners perform in proving their competencies.

However, not all learning will be in the fast lane and many people won’t want all of their learning to be constantly in the high gears. In fact, the same learner could be pursuing avenues in multiple tracks, traveling through their learning-related journeys at multiple speeds.

The more traditional liberal arts track

To address these varied learning preferences, another part of the menu will focus on channels that don’t need to change as frequently. The focus here won’t be on quickly-moving streams of content, but the course designers in this track can take a bit more time to offer far more sophisticated options and activities that people will enjoy going through.

Along these lines, some areas of the liberal arts* will fit in nicely here.

*Speaking of the liberal arts, a brief but important tangent needs to be addressed, for strategic purposes. While the following statement will likely be highly controversial, I’m going to say it anyway. Online learning could be the very thing that saves the liberal arts.

Why do I say this? Because as the price of higher education continues to increase, the dynamics and expectations of learners continue to change. As the prices continue to increase, so do peoples’ expectations and perspectives. So it may turn out that people are willing to pay a dollar range that ends up being a fraction of today’s prices. But such greatly reduced prices won’t likely be available in face-to-face environments, as offering these types of learning environment is expensive. However, such discounted prices can and could be offered via online-based environments. So, much to the chagrin of many in academia, online learning could be the very thing that provides the type of learning, growth, and some of the experiences that liberal arts programs have been about for centuries. Online learning can offer a lifelong supply of the liberal arts.

But I digress…
By 2025, a Subject Matter Expert (SME) will be able to offer excellent, engaging courses chocked full of the use of:

Engaging story/narrative
Powerful collaboration and communication tools
Sophisticated tracking and reporting
Personalized learning, tech-enabled scaffolding, and digital learning playlists
Game elements or even, in some cases, multiplayer games
Highly interactive digital videos with built-in learning activities
Transmedia-based outlets and channels
Mobile-based learning using AR, VR, real-world assignments, objects, and events
…and more.

However, such courses won’t be able to be created by one person. Their sophistication will require a team of specialists – and likely a list of vendors, algorithms, and/or open source-based tools – to design and deliver this type of learning track.

Final reflections

The marketplaces involving education-related content and technologies will likely look different. There could be marketplaces for algorithms as well as for very granular learning modules. In fact, it could be that modularization will be huge by 2025, allowing digital learning playlists to be built by an SME, a Provost, and/or a Dean (in addition to the aforementioned employer or project team). Any assistance that may be required by a learner will be provided either via technology (likely via an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled resource) and/or via a SME.

We will likely either have moved away from using Learning Management Systems (LMSs) or those LMSs will allow for access to far larger, integrated learning ecosystems.

Functionality wise, collaboration tools will still be important, but they might be mind-blowing to us living in 2015. For example, holographic-based communications could easily be commonplace by 2025. Where tools like IBM’s Watson, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Deepmind, and Apple’s Siri end up in our future learning ecosystems is hard to tell, but will likely be there. New forms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) will likely be mainstream by 2025.

While the exact menu of learning options is unclear, what is clear is that change is here today and will likely be here tomorrow. Those willing to experiment, to adapt, and to change have a far greater likelihood of surviving and thriving in our future learning ecosystems.

Opinion: Apple and IBM have big data plans for education [Evans]

On 07/16/2015, in analytics, Apple, data related items, education technology, IBM, mobile learning, mobile technologies, student-related, by Daniel Christian

Opinion: Apple and IBM have big data plans for education— from computerworld.com by Jonny Evans
Apple and IBM are developing solutions that underpin a future of personalized mobile learning that lasts a lifetime.

Excerpt:

Apple and IBM have been developing the “Student Achievement App” for several months and this is due to enter real world tests this year. The partners recently began approaching US school districts to trial the new technologies. For example, in June a large delegation of Apple and IBM folk met with the Coppell ISD Board of Trustees.

They discussed a proposed partnership between IBM, Apple and CISD to develop these solutions, which are described as “content analytics for student learning”, according to the meeting minutes.

From DSC:
One paragraph reads:

It’s no surprise Apple wants to do what it can to improve the education industry. Co-founder Steve Jobs was famously frustrated with the way the sector works in the US. Speaking to Fortune, Denise Young Smith, Apple’s vice president of human resources said Apple CEO Tim Cook is also committed to and involved in the company’s educational technology programs. “Education and learning is our legacy but Tim goes above and beyond,” she says.

Though I’m a huge fan of Apple, I’d have to disagree here. I’m much more skeptical/dubious as to whether Apple’s leadership is as committed to education as they once were; and if they still are, it hasn’t been showing much these last few years. Instead, they’ve let Google make major inroads on this turf; to the point that I would even say that Google is blowing Apple out of the water in this space.

So from my edtech-based perspective, Apple has dropped the ball on education in recent years — instead, leadership focused far more on the iPhone, music, and other consumer-oriented goods and services. From a business standpoint, I get it. They’re the largest company in the world (by market cap) and their strategies are clearly working for them.

That said, I am encouraged when I see items like the one mentioned above and I hope that such education-related projects/endeavors — and the budgets and resources allocated to them — play a larger role at Apple in the future.

From DSC:
Many times we don’t want to hear news that could be troubling in terms of our futures. But we need to deal with these trends now or face the destabilization that Harold Jarche mentions in his posting below.

The topics found in the following items should be discussed in courses involving economics, business, political science, psychology, futurism, engineering, religion*, robotics, marketing, the law/legal affairs and others throughout the world. These trends are massive and have enormous ramifications for our societies in the not-too-distant future.

* When I mention religion classes here, I’m thinking of questions such as :

What does God have in mind for the place of work in our lives?
Is it good for us? If so, why or why not?
How might these trends impact one’s vocation/calling?
…and I’m sure that professors who teach faith/
religion-related courses can think of other questions to pursue

turmoil and transition — from jarche.com by Harold Jarche

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

One of the greatest issues that will face Canada, and many developed countries in the next decade will be wealth distribution. While it does not currently appear to be a major problem, the disparity between rich and poor will increase. The main reason will be the emergence of a post-job economy. The ‘job’ was the way we redistributed wealth, making capitalists pay for the means of production and in return creating a middle class that could pay for mass produced goods. That period is almost over. From self-driving vehicles to algorithms replacing knowledge workers, employment is not keeping up with production. Value in the network era is accruing to the owners of the platforms, with companies such as Instagram reaching $1 billion valuations with only 13 employees.
…
The emerging economy of platform capitalism includes companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. These giants combined do not employ as many people as General Motors did. But the money accrued by them is enormous and remains in a few hands. The rest of the labour market has to find ways to cobble together a living income. Hence we see many people willing to drive for a company like Uber in order to increase cash-flow. But drivers for Uber have no career track. The platform owners get richer, but the drivers are limited by finite time. They can only drive so many hours per day, and without benefits. At the same time, those self-driving cars are poised to replace all Uber drivers in the near future. Standardized work, like driving a vehicle, has little future in a world of nano-bio-cogno-techno progress.

Value in the network era is accruing to the owners of the platforms, with companies such as Instagram reaching $1 billion valuations with only 13 employees.

For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the knowledge economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization.

Also see:

Will artificial intelligence and robots take your marketing job? — from by markedu.com by
Technology will overtake jobs to an extent and at a rate we have not seen before. Artificial intelligence is threatening jobs even in service and knowledge intensive sectors. This begs the question: are robots threatening to take your marketing job?

Excerpt:

What exactly is a human job?
The benefits of artificial intelligence are obvious. Massive productivity gains while a new layer of personalized services from your computer – whether that is a burger robot or Dr. Watson. But artificial intelligence has a bias. Many jobs will be lost.

A few years ago a study from the University of Oxford got quite a bit of attention. The study said that 47 percent of the US labor market could be replaced by intelligent computers within the next 20 years.

The losers are a wide range of job categories within the administration, service, sales, transportation and manufacturing.

…

Before long we should – or must – redefine what exactly a human job is and the usefulness of it. How we as humans can best complement the extraordinary capabilities of artificial intelligence.

This development is expected to grow fast. There are different predictions about the timing, but by 2030 there will be very few tasks that only a human can solve.

Looking at these 2 toys, do we really believe that the expectations of today’s children will be the same as previous generations?!

On 03/10/2015, in 21st century, analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, digital learning, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, expectations, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), IBM, innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, personalized/customized learning, play, student-related, by Daniel Christian

Cognitoy-ElementalPath-March2015
CognitoyFramed-March2015

From DSC:
Given the above…what are the ramifications of that in our/your work?

Also see:

Kickstarter campaign: CogniToys: Internet-connected Smart Toys that Learn and Grow
2,003 backers | $243,021 pledged of $50,000 goal
Elementalpath.com
IBM Watson
A somewhat-related resource: AlchemyAPI Now a Part of IBM Watson, following acquisition

A related addendum on 3/11/15
Look at the different expectations of the generations found in this article:

What is work to a Millennial? — from clomedia.com by Ladan Nikravan

A related addendum on 3/17/15:

MIT’s DragonBot Evolving to Better Teach Kids — from spectrum.ieee.org by Evan Ackerman

Excerpt:
The overall goal for DragonBot (which, as far as I can tell, is a common platform used for many different projects) is to develop “personalized learning companions” for children. In other words, MIT is finding ways in which robots like DragonBot can effectively help kids learn.

DragonBot isn’t intended to work like that IBM Watson-based dinosaur robot; it’s not a primary source of knowledge, and it’s not actively teaching a whole bunch of new facts to kids who use it. Rather, DragonBot is intended to help with the process of learning itself, encouraging kids to be interactively engaged in whatever they happen to be learning about.

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