The future of work in the age of AI

In his famous Foundation novels, written in the 1940s, Isaac Asimov imagined something called psychohistory, a discipline which used statistical modelling and a detailed understanding of the mind to predict the future. To Asimov, this idea seemed so futuristic that he placed it 20,000 years in the future. Data scientists are using the latest AI to model and predict the behaviour of crowds and other large groups of people in ways that help authorities plan the provision of services. In Japan, for example, the Kanagawa Prefectural Police is using AI to analyse variables such as weather data, crowd dynamics and even social media activity to predict crime patterns and deploy officers. This is just one of the ways in which AI is making us smarter.