Quincy Surasmith is a radio journalist and actor, but you may also hear his voice and never realize it. That's because he's been the voice of Thai-speaking cartoons, chattering background crowds, and characters without major speaking roles. "I'm making grunting noises, getting beat up by some guy," Suarasmith says. "It takes specific improv and acting skills." Soon those grunting and background chatter performances could be at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence.

It began with a tweet of a bar graph depicting a sharp rise in the month of February: Neil Clarke, the publisher and editor in chief of the science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, had plotted out the publication's past few years of plagiarized and spammy submissions. Until late 2022, the bars are barely visible, but in the past few months--and especially this month--the numbers climb dramatically, mostly due to AI-generated content. Clarke wrote a post laying out the situation entitled "A Concerning Trend." Five days and a massive amount of online chatter later, Clarkesworld announced it's closing submissions for now. Clarke says they've seen this problem growing for a while, but they took the time to analyze the data before talking about it publicly.

As a reader of this column, you probably know I am releasing a new book, The Augmented Workforce: How AR, AI, and 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make on May 25 with my co-author, John Buzzell. For the next four weeks, I'll be sharing excerpts from the book as columns to help brands, businesses and professionals prepare and understand what the era of the augmented workforce holds, how to prepare and how to leverage the changes to stay relevant in the future. Dearly disrupted we are gathered here to talk about the future spaces we will inhabit. We are living through a period of rapid change, possibly beyond society's capacity to keep up. Various emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 5G, along with dozens of devices that work together (Internet of Things), have helped to create an environment in which new inventions, possibilities, and learning curves change weekly. According to Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, authors of The Future Is Faster Than You Think, "Moore's Law is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1970s. In 2023 the average thousand-dollar laptop will have the same computing power as a human brain (roughly 1016 cycles per second). Twenty-five years after that, that same average laptop will have the power of all the human brains currently on Earth."

If you thought the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) experience was a challenge for companies, brace yourself. The mid-2000s brought waves of heterogeneous, non-sanctioned devices into the network. By 2009, workers had made it clear that they preferred BYOD, as CIOs began feeling the pressure of personal devices flooding the workplace. The result has been the creation of so-called "shadow IT" -- projects (applications and systems) managed outside of, and without the knowledge of, the IT department. The BYOD phenomenon went hand in hand with the adoption of non-sanctioned, cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) applications to address a line of business needs.

The autonomous driving world is about as incestous a place as Caligula's palace, and it got a little more so today, when Ford and Volkswagen announced a formal and long-anticipated alliance. "The alliance we are now building, starting from first formal agreement, will boost both partners' competitiveness in an era of rapid change," Herbert Diess, the CEO of Volkswagen, said on a call with reporters. He and Ford CEO Jim Hackett said the partnership--which is not a merger--will begin with the companies jointly developing and building medium-sized pickups and commercial vans, to debut as early as 2022. The automakers said the arrangement should "yield improved annual pre-tax operating results" by 2023. So hopefully, this makes everyone richer.

Because of this, she argues that artificial intelligence or AI is posing "an existential threat to the future of journalism." "Journalism itself is not actively …