Notes from Reality is a series of posts on AI and its impact on humans, what can be done today, and what may happen tomorrow. No one has all the answers, but we are trying to arrive at the right questions.

Glancing around school classrooms in 2016, it's easy to miss just how far technology has transformed learning over the last decade. The desks, whiteboards and rows of chairs are the same, but so much else has changed that can't be seen. A third of Britain's schools are asking students to bring their own tablets and laptops into the classroom now, coding has been on the national curriculum for three years, and more and more education is happening outside school through apps and digital services. But these changes are just the start. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next giant leap in learning and, according to those working in the field of education and technology, we haven't seen anything yet.

SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM has been named "Diamond Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 21st Cloud Expo, which will take place on October 31 through November 2nd 2017 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. In an era of historic innovation fueled by unprecedented access to data and technology, the low cost and risk of entering new markets has leveled the playing field for business. Today, any ambitious innovator can easily introduce a new application or product that can reinvent business models and transform the client experience. In their Day 2 Keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Mercer Rowe, IBM Vice President of Strategic Alliances, and Raejeanne Skillern, Intel Vice President of Data Center Group and GM, discussed how clients in this new era of innovation can apply data, technology, plus human ingenuity to springboard to advance new business value and opportunities. Speaker Bios Mercer Rowe is Vice President, Strategic Partners for IBM's Cloud Business Unit.

Few of us look at artificial intelligence as a new, brilliant coworker. Instead, we see AI as the cyborg in the first "Terminator" movie: a futuristic menace who's come to wreak havoc -- and take our jobs. But if companies want to boost productivity and better serve their customers, employees must get educated about AI and embrace it. AI is a subset of "machine learning," the broad term used to describe machines that learn to perform certain actions based on data sets. For instance, a self-driving car operates via machine learning.

Nissan's next-generation Leaf EV will be its first car featuring its ProPilot driver-assist self-driving technology. The system will be activated by a button on the steering wheel and will control acceleration, braking and steering. The ProPilot system consists of a suite of assists, semi-autonomous functions and is designed mainly for highways, and not for busy city traffic. The company has been testing the system in Japan for some time and now and it is ready for a rollout in North America and Europe. "In the coming years, Nissan's ProPilot technology will offer increasing levels of autonomy, with the system eventually able to navigate city intersections. Set to help make driving more secure and more enjoyable, ProPilot Assist is part of Nissan Intelligent Mobility, the company's blueprint for transforming how cars are driven, powered and integrated into society," the company said in its press release Thursday.

Five months after President Donald Trump proclaimed "we are going to fight for every last American job" at a Boeing factory in South Carolina, the company announced Thursday it would be laying off "fewer than 200 people" at the North Charleston plant campus. "Our competition is relentless, and that has made clear our need as a company to reduce cost to be more competitive," Boeing said in a statement, Washington Post reported. During his visit to the company, Donald Trump said, "We're here today to celebrate American engineering and American manufacturing, we're also here today to celebrate jobs. Boeing employs about 140,000 workers in the United States, mostly in, California, Washington, Missouri and South Carolina, Washington Post reported. Lay offs at Boeing had been ongoing throughout this year, with over 400 employees already let go, reports said. Those however were from different Boeing plants. The plant where the president had visited and celebrated new jobs, saw layoffs for the first time this year. This is not the first time the airline company will be laying off employees. Boeing laid off more than 30,000 employees in 2001. Over the years, many renowned companies have cut jobs on a large scale. Boeing is not even the only company to lay off employees in big numbers. Here are some of the biggest corporate layoffs in U.S. history: In one of the biggest job cuts, IBM issued pink slips to 60,000 employees in 1993. IBM's core mainframe business was becoming obsolete with the arrival of personal computers. The company wanted to shift its focus on providing integrated solutions for its customers and CEO Louis Gerster had put aside $8.9 billion which led to the loss of 60,000 jobs. Citibank had 50,000 employees laid off in November, 2008. At that time, it was planning to start disinvestment. Addressing the employees, former CEO Vikram Pandit had said "There is nothing easy about these decisions and the impact on our people.

Ready or not, there are robots in your future. And some of them will be for health care. There has been growing concern that the rise of robots, along with artificial intelligence (AI), will create huge impacts on jobs. Within the last few months both McKinsey and PwC have issued white papers on the topic. The former found that nearly half of jobs have the potential to be automated (although most not totally), while the latter expects 38% of U.S. jobs at at high risk of automation within 20 years.

So what does this mean for us humans? Short answer: the benefits are limited only by our imagination. For a longer answer, here's what our faculty have to say about machines as counselors, coaches, chauffeurs, and full-fledged intellectual partners. Are therapist robots in our future? In a recent study, Kellogg's Eli Finkel and colleagues had participants share a difficult personal story to a robot named Travis.

Robo-advisory services are often associated with millennials. This makes sense since these services' client base skews younger than that of traditional wealth management firms. Wealthfront, for instance, has previously reported that 60% of its customers are younger than 35, while Betterment has said that 75% of its customers are under the age of 50. Robo-advisers also offer features that millennials prefer: simple and transparent fee structures, an intuitive digital user experience, and personalization based on the user's appetite for risk. Plus, today's robo-advisers are aggressively positioning themselves as the millennials' answer to traditional, stodgy wealth management firms, as evidenced by their marketing campaigns.

AI was very popular 30 years ago, then disappeared, and is now making a big come back because of new robotic technologies: driver-less cars, automated diagnostic, IoT (including vacuum cleaning and other household robots), automated companies with zero employee, soldier robots, and much more. Will AI replace data scientists? I think so, though data scientists will be initially replaced by "low intelligence" yet extremely stable and robust systems. There has been a lot of discussions about the automated statistician. I am myself developing data science techniques such as Jackknife regression that are simple, robust, suitable for black-box, machine-to-machine communications or other automated use, and easy to understand and pilot by the layman, just like a Google driver-less car can be "driven" by an 8 years old kid.