Getting ready for AI, and the future of jobs and work

WORLDWIDE revenue from AI will surge past US$46 billion in 2020, according to research firm IDC. In Asia-Pacific, this is projected to rise to US$6.8 billion by 2021. Though researchers have been working on AI decades, development has accelerated in the past few years thanks to three factors – the ubiquitous availability of data, the growing capabilities of cloud computing, and more powerful algorithms developed by AI researchers. Most recently, a team of Microsoft researchers have developed the first machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as a person. Throughout history, the emergence of new technologies has been accompanied by dire warnings about human redundancy.