Why AI will force businesses to rethink balance between the work of humans and machines - TechRepublic

In their groundbreaking book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pointed to employment trends to illustrate a workforce that is inarguably affected by automation--and how companies must transform in order to remain relevant. Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and McAfee, principal research scientist and co-director at the MIT IDE, have follow-up book out in June. And this one pinpoints specific qualities of the "second machine age," which the authors argue is maturing to a point at which technologies are now replacing workplace tasks once considered routine. We are now, they write in Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, at the "second wave of the second machine age." In a keynote panel at MIT's CIO Symposium in Cambridge, MA, Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of the MIT Technology Review, moderated a session with Brynjolfsson and McAfee that addressed questions such as: How can businesses harness AI and machine learning to stay ahead of the curve?