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Tag: artificial technology

  • Study Says Half of All Tasks Will Be Automated… Are We Facing a Jobless Future?

    Study Says Half of All Tasks Will Be Automated… Are We Facing a Jobless Future?

    Is artificial intelligence going to replace our jobs? That’s the question a panel of experts discussed at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference. James Manyika, Director of the McKinsey Global Institute, says that about half of all job tasks and activities are going to be replaced by AI. Are we facing a jobless future?

    James Manyika, Chairman, and Director of the McKinsey Global Institute talks about the impact of AI on jobs:

    When we think about AI, first it’s important to recognize that this is actually an extraordinary time and we’ve made so much progress in AI in the last five years or 10 years, much more than the last 50 years. Of course, these questions about work become very important to us. Rather than start with jobs, we should think about activities and tasks because what we all do is actually composed of tasks and activities. In fact, if we take any of our occupations they’re made up of a variety of tasks that we do every day and AI and other automation technologies are starting to be able to automate those tasks.

    We’ve looked at something like over 2000 activities and tasks that make up what people do in the economy and you look at what’s now possible to automate based on AI and automation technologies, you very quickly come to the conclusion that it looks like it’s going to be possible to automate close to about half the tasks that people do. That’s a lot, but it’s important to recognize these are tasks, not jobs because any job also constituent activities.

    If you then take this task view and then you try and map it back into occupations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks about 828 occupation categories. If you map these back to those occupations, you suddenly realize that about 10 percent of occupations look like they have nearly 100 percent of their tasks that can be automated. Approximately 60 percent of occupations have about a third of their constituent activities that can be automated. That means that many more occupations are going to be augmented by technology than will be automated away.

    It’s natural to wonder, so are we facing a jobless future? We concluded with the research that we’ve done that yes, of course, there will be jobs lost, but there will also be jobs gained, and also jobs changed. In some ways, the jobs that are going to be gained and changed are probably a much larger number. So do I worry about a jobless future, I actually don’t. That’s actually the least of my worries.

  • Marriott Using Salesforce Einstein to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

    Marriott Using Salesforce Einstein to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

    Salesforce Co-founder & CEO Marc Benioff announced at the Dreamforce conference a new partnership with Marriott that is going to bring the power of artificial intelligence into the hotel room via a phone app. This new Marriott app will connect directly with a Salesforce Einstein powered customer database that knows the customer’s preferences and will be accessible via Siri and other voice recognition platforms.

    Marc Benioff provided some interesting details of the Marriott and Apple partnership and in a discussion with CNBC’s Jim Cramer at the Dreamforce conference:

    Marriott Using Salesforce Technology to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

    Every company has to rethink who they are in the fourth industrial revolution. This includes Marriott, that’s why Arne Sorenson is here, the CEO of Marriott, and you are going to see in the keynote a whole new vision for the future of Marriott. All the technology, everything they need to do to connect with their customer in a whole new way via Salesforce.

    That includes the ability to check into a Marriott with your digital key right on your phone, and then the ability to talk to Siri and order your favorite sandwich. In the Salesforce customer database, we will know you want a turkey sandwich and we are going to bring it to your room. Then if you tell Siri to lower the lights and put the room temperature to 67 degrees the lights go down and the temperature adjusts.

    Salesforce Einstein Radically Empowering the Customer

    How does it know, where does it get all the data, how does it have the customer background, it comes from Salesforce, we’re the backend. This is what the conference is about, helping these incredible people, our trailblazers, know how to build these systems. We had to build something amazing first. This isn’t voice recognition that we did. We had to build something called Salesforce Einstein, the number one artificial intelligence platform in enterprise applications. We now are doing billions of Einstein transactions every day giving the ability for our customers to radically use artificial intelligence to make them more productive and smarter about their customers.

    We are connecting Einstein to Siri or Einstein to any other voice platform, then we take that voice recognition and we are able to move it to the database. Don’t forget, when I say I want my favorite sandwich, Siri knows what I’m saying with my voice, but then we have to take that and retrieve it or insert into the customer database. That’s the magic, that’s Einstein Voice, it is the glue, the middleware that links all the voice systems that you are using in your home and your phone with the number one CRM in the world Salesforce.

    Marc Benioff Say the Economy is Ripping

    The economy is ripping. There is incredible demand from customers to rebuild their systems, they’re benefitting from the tax breaks, they are benefitting from a huge economy that is growing at rates they’ve never seen before. Even here in San Francisco, our unemployment now is below 3 percent. That’s amazing!

  • The State of Artificial Intelligence at Facebook

    The State of Artificial Intelligence at Facebook

    When you think of Facebook, you think of data, but not so much technology. Get ready for an in-depth preview of how Facebook is and is further planning to use artificial intelligence and other key technologies that they see as critical to their future.

    “Facebook’s long-term roadmap is focused on building foundational technologies in three areas: connectivity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality,” wrote Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer. “We believe that major research and engineering breakthroughs in each of these areas will help us make more progress toward opening the world to everyone over the next decade.”

    Facebook Making AI Research Useful Now

    Tying all of these crucial technology projects together is AI. “We’re conducting industry-leading research to help drive advancements in AI disciplines like computer vision, language understanding and machine learning,” he says. “We then use this research to build infrastructure that anyone at Facebook can use to build new products and services. We’re also applying AI to help solve longer-term challenges as we push forward in the fields of connectivity and VR. And to accelerate the impact of AI, we’re tackling the furthest frontiers of research, such as teaching computers to learn like humans do — by observing the world.”

    Facebook has learned to quickly turn their AI research into productive uses by their development and production teams. “As the field of AI advances quickly, we’re turning the latest research breakthroughs into tools, platforms and infrastructure that make it possible for anyone at Facebook to use AI in the things they build,” said Schroepfer.

    The backbone of their AI product development is FBLearner Flow, which allows their coders to easily reuse algorithms across products. Also, very importantly considering the billions using the Facebook platform, it lets their developers run thousands of experiments to test scaling.

    Another advancement is AutoML, which according to Facebook automatically applies the results of each test to other machine learning models to make them better. This significantly improves the time to market on AI breakthroughs.

    A brand new product that they developed based on their AI research is Lumos, a self-serve platform that enables teams that haven’t been exposed to the technology a way to “harness the power of computer vision” for their products and services.

    How is AI Impacting Facebook’s Users?

    Facebook is quickly and sometimes quietly adding AI capabilities right into the products that Facebook users love. For instance, AI is used to help translate posts automatically from foreign language speaking friends. It also behind the one time controversial ranking of everyone’s News Feed. Remember when this used to be in chronological order?

    Facebook says that over the next 3-5 years AI will be used in features all across the platform.

    AI Being Used to Improve Aspects of Video

    Facebook sees video communication as its future and is working on ways to use AI to improve this experience.

    “We started working on style transfer, a technology that can learn the artistic style of a painting and then apply that style to every frame of a video,” said Schroepfer. “This is a technically difficult trick to pull off, normally requiring that the video content be sent to data centers for the pixels to be analyzed and processed by AI running on big-compute servers. But the time required for data transfer and processing made for a slower experience. Not ideal for letting people share fun content in the moment.”

    “Just three months ago we set out to do something nobody else had done before: ship AI-based style transfer running live, in real time, on mobile devices,” he added. “This was a major engineering challenge, as we needed to design software that could run high-powered computing operations on a device with unique resource constraints in areas like power, memory and compute capability.”

    All of this work has resulted in a new deep learning platform called Caffe2Go, which can capture, analyze and process pixels in real time on a mobile device, according to Facebook.

    “We found that by condensing the size of the AI model used to process images and videos by 100x, we’re able to run deep neural networks with high efficiency on both iOS and Android. This is all happening in the palm of your hand, so you can apply styles to videos as you’re taking them.”