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1. Friends With Benefits
Imagine robots did all the cooking, cleaning and dog-walking around your house. They ferry you around town, care for a sick parent, teach kindergarten to your child, deliver packages, perform your favorite hit songs … and have sex with you. Guess what? Many of those kinds of robots are already available, and will only get better at human-like tasks in the coming years.
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We should not necessarily be thinking of AI and robotic technologies as adversaries in the workplace. For manual labor, think wearable exoskeletons that can improve efficiency and reduce injury. For knowledge work, it can be a powerful assistant that helps us do our jobs better, one that reduces our own cognitive load and frees us to work on higher-order tasks and more interesting and creative things. Plus, some jobs that we don’t think of being that creative today, like project manager, could get a major … human … makeover. The project managers of the future will have to make sophisticated decisions to get the best out of both humans and machines.
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3. Product Enhancement
Transhumanists — “cyborg” is so passĂ© — explore the symbiosis of man and machine, some going so far as to upgrade parts of their bodies. Think supercharged ears or a bionic arm to replace an amputated one. And then there’s professional mad genius Elon Musk, who wants to fuse human brains with computers to create super-intelligent beings, and has dedicated his company Neuralink to the task. But at what point do we cease being human? We're a long way from drawing that line.
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In many areas, AI has not yet lived up to the hype. Despite overly optimistic predictions, fully autonomous cars are still only in use in certain trial programs. It often can exacerbate racial bias. And the technology has not yet made a dent in complex fields such as accounting, law, engineering and health care. These disappointments are breeding the technology's many doubters.
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5. COVID-Accelerated
Some AI trends are getting a boost amid the pandemic and economic turbulence. Fast food chain White Castle is hiring Flippy, a burger-flipping robot, later this year to reduce human contact with the food. AI is being pressed into service to identify the next pandemic. But the crisis has also exposed AI’s limits: When our behavior went haywire in response to the virus, machine-learning systems for inventory management, streaming recommendations and other areas couldn’t keep up.
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