The 5 Biggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends In 2023 — from forbes.com by Bernard Marr

Excerpt:

Today, the technology most commonly used to achieve AI is machine learning – advanced software algorithms designed to carry out one specific task, such as answering questions, translating languages or navigating a journey – and become increasingly good at it as they are exposed to more and more data.

Worldwide, spending by governments and business on AI technology will top $500 billion in 2023, according to IDC research. But how will it be used, and what impact will it have? Here, I outline what I believe will be the most important trends around the use of AI in business and society over the next 12 months.


Also relevant/see:


 

Futures Literacy: shaping your present by reimagining futures — from futurist.com by Nikolas Badminton and Loes Damhof

 

AI/ML in EdTech: The Miracle, The Grind, and the Wall — from eliterate.us by Michael Feldstein

Excerpt:

Essentially, I see three stages in working with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). I call them the miracle, the grind, and the wall. These stages can have implications for both how we can get seduced by these technologies and how we can get bitten by them. The ethical implications are important.

 

We must end ‘productivity paranoia’ on working from home says Microsoft — from inavateonthenet.net

Excerpt:

As part of a survey on hybrid working patterns of more than 20,000 people in 11 countries, Microsoft has called for an end to ‘productivity paranoia’ with 85% of business leaders still saying they find it difficult to have confidence in staff productivity when remote working.

“Closing the feedback loop is key to retaining talent. Employees who feel their companies use employee feedback to drive change are more satisfied (90% vs. 69%) and engaged (89% vs. 73%) compared to those who believe their companies don’t drive change. And the employees who don’t think their companies drive change based on feedback? They’re more than twice as likely to consider leaving in the next year (16% vs. 7%) compared to those who do. And it’s not a one-way street. To build trust and participation in feedback systems, leaders should regularly share what they’re hearing, how they’re responding, and why.”

From DSC:
It seems to me that trust and motivation are highly involved here. Trust in one’s employees to do their jobs. And employees who aren’t producing and have low motivation levels should consider changing jobs/industries to find something that’s much more intrinsically motivating to them. Find a cause/organization that’s worth working for.

 

This Uncensored AI Art Tool Can Generate Fantasies—and Nightmares — from wired.com by Will Knight
Open source project Stable Diffusion allows anyone to conjure images with algorithms, but some fear it will be used to create unethical horrors.

Excerpt:

Image generators like Stable Diffusion can create what look like real photographs or hand-crafted illustrations depicting just about anything a person can imagine. This is possible thanks to algorithms that learn to associate the properties of a vast collection of images taken from the web and image databases with their associated text labels. Algorithms learn to render new images to match a text prompt in a process that involves adding and removing random noise to an image.

Also relevant/see:

There’s a text-to-image AI art app for Mac now—and it will change everything — from fastcompany.com by Jesus Diaz
Diffusion Bee harnesses the power of the open source text-to-image AI Stable Diffusion, turning it into a one-click Mac App. Brace yourself for a new creativity Big Bang.


Speaking of AI, also see:

 

You just hired a deepfake. Get ready for the rise of imposter employees. — from protocol.com by Mike Elgan
New technology — plus the pandemic remote work trend — is helping fraudsters use someone else’s identity to get a job.

Excerpt:

Companies have been increasingly complaining to the FBI about prospective employees using real-time deepfake video and deepfake audio for remote interviews, along with personally identifiable information (PII), to land jobs at American companies.

One place they’re likely getting the PII is through posting fake job openings, which enables them to harvest job candidate information, resumes and more, according to the FBI.

The main drivers appear to be money, espionage, access to company systems and unearned career advancement.

 

10 in-demand soft skills to supercharge your career — from fastcompany.com by Melissa Rosenthal
Your résumé and experience may get you through the door, but these soft skills could help you clinch the job.

Excerpt:

A LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report shows that 92% of talent professionals reported that soft skills are equally or more important to hire for than hard skills. The same study reveals that 89% surveyed said that when a new hire doesn’t work out, it’s because they lack much-needed soft skills.

The hard truth about hard skills is that they can have a short half-life. Constant innovation, technology updates, and new feature releases render many of these skills obsolete quickly. Meanwhile, soft skills never expire—they are relevant, transferable, and keep a person highly employable.

 

Why Infosys’s cofounder Nilekani is urging leaders to use tech for good

Why Infosys’s cofounder Nilekani is urging leaders to use tech for good  — from mckinsey.com by Gautam Kumra
The cofounder of the multinational IT company believes Indian start-ups will soon develop technologies to transform education, healthcare, and other social challenges.

Excerpts:

McKinsey: The world has also become a more complex place, with recent geopolitics, inflation complexity, rocketing energy prices, excessive liquidity, and digitization challenges. How do you personally keep adapting and learning?

Nandan Nilekani: In the last 40 years, I think we have gone through every transition: mainframes to minicomputers to LANs [local area networks] to internet to smartphones to AI. It has been fun understanding and riding these waves.

In my view, if a billion people can use something, then that’s a benefit. A billion people can learn using technology. A billion people can get better healthcare using technology. A billion people can move around and change jobs using technology.

From DSC:
I hope I can meet Nandan Nilekani someday. I feel that he is a kindred spirit. Several things that he said really resonated with me.

 

New: Futurist Friday Podcast Interview with Gerd Leonhard: TheGoodFuture? — from futuristgerd.com by Gerd Leonhard

Excerpt:

Over the course of the summer of 2022, DonMacPherson and 12 Geniuses are releasing 12 interviews with futurists and forward thinkers in order to help their global audience of leaders become better visionaries for their organizations and be more prepared for the uncertain future.

In this episode, Gerd Leonhard joins the show. First, he points out that “the future is already here, we just haven’t paid enough attention to it.” He talks about how technology is promising to make us superhuman, that we are in the biggest shift era in recent history as far as energy and climate is concerned, and that machines and artificial intelligence are starting to emulate humanity.

 

Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should: What Genetic Engineers Can Learn From ‘Jurassic World’ — from singularityhub.com by Andrew Maynard

Excerpt:

Maybe this is the abiding message of Jurassic World: Dominion—that despite incredible advances in genetic design and engineering, things can and will go wrong if we don’t embrace the development and use of the technology in socially responsible ways.

The good news is that we still have time to close the gap between “could” and “should” in how scientists redesign and reengineer genetic code. But as Jurassic World: Dominion reminds moviegoers, the future is often closer than it might appear.

 

Inside a radical new project to democratize AI — from technologyreview.com by Melissa Heikkilä
A group of over 1,000 AI researchers has created a multilingual large language model bigger than GPT-3—and they’re giving it out for free.

Excerpt:

PARIS — This is as close as you can get to a rock concert in AI research. Inside the supercomputing center of the French National Center for Scientific Research, on the outskirts of Paris, rows and rows of what look like black fridges hum at a deafening 100 decibels.

They form part of a supercomputer that has spent 117 days gestating a new large language model (LLM) called BLOOM that its creators hope represents a radical departure from the way AI is usually developed.

Unlike other, more famous large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s LaMDA, BLOOM (which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) is designed to be as transparent as possible, with researchers sharing details about the data it was trained on, the challenges in its development, and the way they evaluated its performance. OpenAI and Google have not shared their code or made their models available to the public, and external researchers have very little understanding of how these models are trained.

Another item re: AI:

Not my job: AI researchers building surveillance tech and deepfakes resist ethical concerns — from protocol.com by Kate Kaye
The computer vision research community is behind on AI ethics, but it’s not just a research problem. Practitioners say the ethics disconnect persists as young computer vision scientists make their way into the ranks of corporate AI.

For the first time, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference — a global event that attracted companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla to recruit new AI talent this year — “strongly encouraged”researchers whose papers were accepted to the conference to include a discussion about potential negative societal impacts of their research in their submission forms.

 

The Future of Education | By Futurist Gerd Leonhard | A Video for EduCanada — from futuristgerd.com

Per Gerd:

Recently, I was invited by the Embassy of Canada in Switzerland to create this special presentation and promotional video discussing the Future of Education and to explore how Canada might be leading the way. Here are some of the key points I spoke about in the video. Watch the whole thing here: the Future of Education.

 

…because by 2030, I believe, the traditional way of learning — just in case — you know storing, downloading information will be replaced by learning just in time, on-demand, learning to learn, unlearning, relearning, and the importance of being the right person. Character skills, personality skills, traits, they may very well rival the value of having the right degree.

If you learn like a robot…you’ll never have a job to begin with.

Gerd Leonhard


Also relevant/see:

The Next 10 Years: Rethinking Work and Revolutionising Education (Gerd Leonhard’s keynote in Riga) — from futuristgerd.com


 

How to ensure we benefit society with the most impactful technology being developed today — from deepmind.com by Lila Ibrahim

In 2000, I took a sabbatical from my job at Intel to visit the orphanage in Lebanon where my father was raised. For two months, I worked to install 20 PCs in the orphanage’s first computer lab, and to train the students and teachers to use them. The trip started out as a way to honour my dad. But being in a place with such limited technical infrastructure also gave me a new perspective on my own work. I realised that without real effort by the technology community, many of the products I was building at Intel would be inaccessible to millions of people. I became acutely aware of how that gap in access was exacerbating inequality; even as computers solved problems and accelerated progress in some parts of the world, others were being left further behind. 

After that first trip to Lebanon, I started reevaluating my career priorities. I had always wanted to be part of building groundbreaking technology. But when I returned to the US, my focus narrowed in on helping build technology that could make a positive and lasting impact on society. That led me to a variety of roles at the intersection of education and technology, including co-founding Team4Tech, a non-profit that works to improve access to technology for students in developing countries. 


Also relevant/see:

Microsoft AI news: Making AI easier, simpler, more responsible — from venturebeat.com by Sharon Goldman

But one common theme bubbles over consistently: For AI to become more useful for business applications, it needs to be easier, simpler, more explainable, more accessible and, most of all, responsible

 

 

Can you truly own anything in the metaverse? A law professor explains how blockchains and NFTs don’t protect virtual property — from theconversation.com by João Marinotti

Excerpt:

Despite these claims, the legal status of virtual “owners” is significantly more complicated. In fact, the current ownership of metaverse assets is not governed by property law at all, but rather by contract law. As a legal scholar who studies property law, tech policy and legal ownership, I believe that what many companies are calling “ownership” in the metaverse is not the same as ownership in the physical world, and consumers are at risk of being swindled.

 

Announcing the 2022 AI Index Report — from hai.stanford.edu by Stanford University

Excerpt/description:

Welcome to the Fifth Edition of the AI Index

The AI Index is an independent initiative at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), led by the AI Index Steering Committee, an interdisciplinary group of experts from across academia and industry. The annual report trackscollatesdistills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence, enabling decision-makers to take meaningful action to advance AI responsibly and ethically with humans in mind.

The 2022 AI Index report measures and evaluates the rapid rate of AI advancement from research and development to technical performance and ethics, the economy and education, AI policy and governance, and more. The latest edition includes data from a broad set of academic, private, and non-profit organizations as well as more self-collected data and original analysis than any previous editions.

Also relevant/see:

  • Andrew Ng predicts the next 10 years in AI — from venturebeat.com by George Anadiotis
  • Nvidia’s latest AI wizardry turns 2D photos into 3D scenes in milliseconds — from thenextweb.com by Thomas Macaulay
    The Polaroid of the future?
    Nvidia events are renowned for mixing technical bravado with splashes of showmanship — and this year’s GTC conference was no exception. The company ended a week that introduced a new enterprise GPU and an Arm-based “superchip” with a trademark flashy demo. Some 75 years after the world’s first instant photo captured the 3D world in a 2D picture…

Nvidia believes Instant NeRF could generate virtual worlds, capture video conferences in 3D, and reconstruct scenes for 3D maps.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian