After honoring our veterans this past Veteran’s Day, it is also important to shed light on various ways to help ensure that Veterans and others with mental illnesses can receive the care that they may need for scars both visible and invisible.  Sadly, one of the most affected groups of suicide are veterans with an average of 20 Veterans passing away each day due to suicide, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. As written in a previous SIIA AI Spotlight, in the United States, suicide is ranked as the third leading cause of death among people ages 10 to 14, second among people ages 15 to 24, fourth among people ages 35-54, and tenth overall according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  One such tool that may aid in the field of suicide prevention is, unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard University developed a machine learning algorithm that, when paired ...

SIIA has done many artificial intelligence (AI) spotlights this year where we have featured impressive, boundary-breaking technology in the space.  We have also released a handful of issue briefs, culminating in the most recent brief that we’ve released on Algorithms and Ethics.  What we have not done until this point, is feature how different countries and regions across the globe are prepared to handle AI, will benefit from AI, and how they plan to use AI in the future.  In an effort to compare these regions to each other, we will begin publishing the AI Landscape series as an accessory to the AI Spotlight series where we will do just these things.  We begin this series with a feature on China. China According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), global GDP will receive a boost by $16 trillion by 2030 as a result of AI technology.  Nearly half of all that growth will come from China with AI increasing GDP in China by an estimated 1% each year.  C ...

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a majority of rivers and streams in America cannot support healthy life with the number of rivers being polluted trending upwards.  55 percent of waterways in America are currently listed as “poor” and another 23 percent are listed as “fair.”  Additionally, millions of Americans drink water that contains unsafe levels of industrial chemicals according to Environmental Science & Technology Letters.  When it comes to water pollution specifically, AI technology can help detect the sources of pollution for clean-up. This week’s AI spotlight is on a robot called Envirobot which uses AI technology to find sources of pollution in bodies of water.  Developed by scientists at the Swiss research institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Envirobot is a four-foot long eel-like robot that is made up with small compartments attached to each other.  Ea ...

U.S. companies have been bringing manufacturing home, and with this has come almost a quarter of a million jobs since 2010. And more are on their way — Deloitte reports that about half of U.S. manufacturing executives plan to bring home some portion of their operations by 2020. But there’s a hard truth beneath this positive trend: While domestic manufacturing is near all-time highs, America is not fully prepared to fill the jobs of the future.

Gavyn Davies writes in an April 30, 2017 Financial Times piece that “there have been some signs that productivity growth may be starting to recover from the low points reached a few years ago.”  Davies notes that Jan Hatzius from Goldman Sachs shows somewhat improving labor productivity growth starting in 2016 – Hatzius used official data and numbers from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) purchasing manager’s index.  And Juan Antolin-Diaz is slated to publish work in the Review of Economics and Statistic next month showing an increase in trend productivity growth from 0.3% in 2012 Q2 to 0.7% now.  Davies himself, however, concedes that these numbers are tentative.

Former Harvard University President and U.S. Treasury Secretary recently demolished the idea of a robot tax and also issued a ringing endorsement of an activist government role to manage the impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market and on society. 

Benoit Hamon, the French Socialist Party candidate chosen by primary voters this week, has a plan.  He wants to provide everyone in France with a basic income.  The idea has been around for generations.  Why now?  Because Hamon thinks robots are coming for our jobs and we’re going to need to share the wealth they create. U.S. companies and entrepreneurs are flirting with the idea as well. If advanced artificial intelligence can really replace workers at all skill levels, then there might not be enough work to go around.  Brynjolffson and McAfee warn that education and skills training might not keep pace with rapidly advancing technological change – by the time workers learned new skills they would already be made obsolete by the evolution of smart machines. Of course, this hasn’t really happened up to now.  Automation and computer technology have created more jobs than they destroy. When companies introduce automation, it cheapens t ...

Today Cloud Tech Insights released their January issue featuring long time SIIA Software member Corent Technology as a Top 10 Could Management Service Provider. Chief Executive Officer, Feyzi Fatehi also an active board member with the Technology Council of Southern California and SIIA’s Software and Services Division, is featured in the cover story discussing automating the cloud migration journey. We are proud of, not only Corent’s amazing accomplishments, but also the tremendous impact Feyzi has had on the industry as he gives back through various board commitments and philanthropic work within the Silicon Beach Community.  

On Wednesday, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo released an article titled, “How to Make America’s Robots Great Again” which discusses how to revitalize America’s manufacturing sector through the increased use of robots.   It is true that robots have replaced workers in many manufacturing jobs, but  embracing automation has the potential to be beneficial to workers and the economy.  While automation has caused some displacement, many manufacturers are still hiring.  However, these jobs require new and different skills, and many workers are not currently trained to interact with machines in the way that augments their skills and maximizes automation’s potential.  According to a Deloitte study, roughly 2 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled because of this skills gap.  One of the reasons for this, according to companies, is that education and training systems have not kept up with the evolving needs of indu ...

Yesterday, the McKinsey Global Institute released a new report called, “Harnessing Automation for a Future that Works.” This report comes after SIIA released its own report titled, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work” which touches on many of the same issues.  Similar to the SIIA report, it found that the adoption of automation carries significant benefits that outweigh the costs. In 2013, two Oxford economists estimated that occupations accounting for 47% of all U.S. employment were at risk of automation.  The McKinsey report states that more accurate assessment of the impact of automation on work is by looking at the impact by activity rather than the entire occupation.  By its assessment, only less than 5% of occupations can be fully automated with today’s technology.  Though, looking at automation via activity instead of by occupation, roughly half of all activities worldwide could be automated, totaling roughly $16 t ...