Forward Thinking: March of the Machines

The world stands poised on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution. Rapid advances in a host of technologies, including artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, robotics, Big Data and data science, genetics, medical imaging and computer vision are combining to alter almost every profession and every industry in potentially radical ways. What sets this "industrial revolution" apart from its predecessors is both its speed and its breadth. Instead, this fourth industrial revolution is also transforming services and professions. Tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive province of the human mind -- from driving trucks on busy highways to drafting legal documents to analyzing medical research -- can now be carried out by software, thanks to artificial intelligence and big data analytics.