Dispatch: The White House's and NYU's Artificial Intelligence Workshop #AINow

Last week New York University hosted the final workshop of a series sponsored by the White House on the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence. Rather than focusing on the technical bits and bytes, the NYU-hosted schedule centered around the near-term social and economic impact of automation, mass data collection and new analytics. This leads directly into the White House's July 22nd deadline for its Request for Information on "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." While we often fantasize about the fallout from the coming robot apocalypse, that is simply not today's challenge. Today, we need to focus on the near-term impact of smart-er automation systems on labor and social structures.