Looking back is much easier than looking forward - when Management Today published its first issue in 1966, Britain was debating decimalisation, the average weekly wage was 14 and workers were enjoying a'golden age' of employment and easy-to-find jobs. As our Future of Work special report has demonstrated, we've come a long way since then, but it's safe to say that the changes over the next 50 years will be ever more profound. Of course, no one can predict them with any accuracy - the future is not a mere extrapolation of the past. But each year CEBR, one of the UK's leading economics consultancies, predicts where the British economy will rank in 15 years' time. As things stand, it forecasts that in 2031 the UK will be the world's sixth biggest economy with a GDP of 4.7bn (compared to 3bn now), and that it could even overtake the German and Japanese economies during the 2040s.

SoftBank Corp. is selling its stake in Finnish game developer Supercell to Chinese technology firm Tencent in a deal announced Tuesday that values the company at about 10.2 billion. Under the deal announced by the three companies, Tokyo-based SoftBank will relinquish its stake in Supercell for 7.3 billion, and Tencent will gain up to 84 percent of Supercell. The rest of Supercell will be owned by its employees. It will continue to run its own operations in Helsinki. Supercell, founded in 2010, developed games for Apple and Google's Android smartphones and tablets, including hits such as "Hay Day," "Clash of Clans" and "Boom Beach."

This tanklike machine could now control a drone from the turret, too. A tank is a moving armored box designed to cause some pain. These tracked armored beasts of war are almost a century old, with the basic form more or less solidified by the end of World War II: put the big gun in the turret, and then drive, with a bunch of other tanks, towards the danger. In the massive battles of the European theater, and in the hypothetical plans for a NATO/Warsaw Pact fight in the Cold War, a tank was guaranteed to have clear targets. Today, as tanks are more often than not found patrolling cities and fighting insurgencies, foes are harder to find.

Young people will bear the brunt of Artificial Intelligence (AI) fuelled job losses as smart systems undercut entry-level roles in everything from marketing to retail. Machine learning and expert systems will not destroy jobs wholesale, predicts George Zarkadakis, digital lead at advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, but will remove the need for many tasks that employees have traditionally cut their teeth on at the beginning of their careers. Zarkadakis cited a study by consultants McKinsey, which found that just under one third of activities that make up 60 percent of existing jobs will be automated. Unfortunately for new entrants to job markets, the bulk of these activities will be concentrated in starter roles, said Zarkadakis. "We've done some research ourselves and looked at the impact on entry-level jobs. Jobs that graduates get once they leave university. We found that many of the entry-level jobs are very susceptible to complete obliteration," he told The AI Summit in London.

MUNICH – Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution. Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation. Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests. Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics.

From ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany, this week, Intel Corp. launched the second-generation Xeon Phi product family, formerly code-named Knights Landing, aimed at HPC and machine learning workloads. The company had been shipping "Knights Landing" silicon to early customers for the last six months and was waiting to ramp up production before making the product generally available. The window also gave OEMs time to complete their readiness, said Intel's Charlie Wuischpard, vice president of the Data Center Group and general manager of High Performance Computing Platform Group, in a media pre-briefing. Those OEMs include the usual names: Cray, HPE, Lenovo, Dell and others. The most distinguishing feature of the chip is that it's a bootable host CPU -- unlike its predecessor "Knights Corner," which is a coprocessor that connects over PCIe.

We are all familiar with the doomsday scenario depicted by many modern films, when artificial intelligence goes bad and takes over the world. But this is not going to happen, according to Google chairman, Eric Schmidt, who claims that super-intelligent robots will someday help use solve problems such as population growth and climate change. During a talk in Cannes, he said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. Artificial intelligence will let scientists solve some of the world's'hard problems.' During a talk in Cannes, Eric Schmidt said AI will be developed for the benefit of humanity and there will be systems in place in case anything goes awry. 'We've all seen those movies,' he said.

The number of sophisticated cognitive technologies that might be capable of cutting into the need for human labor is expanding rapidly. But linking these offerings to an organization's business needs requires a deep understanding of their capabilities. If popular culture is an accurate gauge of what's on the public's mind, it seems everyone has suddenly awakened to the threat of smart machines. Several recent films have featured robots with scary abilities to outthink and manipulate humans. In the economics literature, too, there has been a surge of concern about the potential for soaring unemployment as software becomes increasingly capable of decision making. Yet managers we talk to don't expect to see machines displacing knowledge workers anytime soon -- they expect computing technology to augment rather than replace the work of humans.

A university professor is heading the Japanese version of a U.S.-led movement to exonerate people who have been wrongfully charged and imprisoned using DNA testing. Mitsuyuki Inaba, 51, who is neither a lawyer nor an expert in criminal law, is a professor at Ritsumeikan University's College of Policy Science. He believes Japan's criminal justice system is rife with fundamental failures that lead to wrongful imprisonment due to the "unscientific" way in which investigations are carried out. Inaba, who specializes in cognitive science, took up the post of director at the Innocence Project Japan, which was launched in April in cooperation with lawyers and other legal experts. Similar movements have sprouted in Britain, South Africa and Taiwan.

The headquarters of Alphabet's X labs in Mountain View, California, is easy to miss. A simple yellow "X" marks the visitors' entrance to the sprawling building that was once a large indoor shopping mall. But on a weekday in late May, the parking lot is bustling, filled with employees and visitors, as X's pod-like driverless cars buzz about. Inside, various teams of mostly young people--the company won't say just how many people are employed at the facility--work on "moon shots," which Alphabet defines as transformative technologies that could have a huge impact on the world. Besides the driverless cars, publicly identified projects at X include Loon, an effort to use high-altitude balloons to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world; Wing, which is building self-navigating drones for delivering stuff; and Makani, which is developing odd flying wind turbines tethered to a ground station.