White-collar workers are so overwhelmed with emails, web chats, and meetings that they are using AI tools to get their jobs done--even if their companies haven't trained them to do so, according to a work trends index published Wednesday by Microsoft and LinkedIn. Seventy-five percent of people in desk jobs are already using AI at work, and the amount of people using AI has nearly doubled over the past six months, the report found. The vast majority of workers using AI--regardless of whether they are baby boomers or Gen Z--are "bringing their own AI tools" rather than waiting for their companies to guide them. "People are overwhelmed with digital debt and under duress at work," Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft's chatbot Copilot and cofounder of Workload, said in a video announcing the report's results. "And they are turning to AI for relief." Microsoft (which also owns LinkedIn) stands to win from the adoption of AI, and is already cashing in on its generative AI tools.

Phantom Auto, a California-based startup focusing on remote vehicle operation, has struck a deal to provide logistics equipment heavyweight Mitsubishi Logisnext Co. with software that enables forklifts to be operated remotely from thousands of miles away. A unit of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Kyoto-based Mitsubishi Logisnext is the third-biggest company in the $45 billion-plus global market for forklifts. Via their tie-up, Bessemer Venture Partners-backed Phantom Auto and Mitsubishi will offer forklifts that can rove around a warehouse in California, controlled by workers sitting at a desk a continent away. "We're moving warehouse workers into office jobs," Elliot Katz, Phantom Auto co-founder and chief business officer, said in an interview. Because it removes geographic labor restrictions and improves efficiency as drivers can be "teleported" into factories experiencing surges, the software offers the potential to knock 30% or more off forklift operation costs, Katz said.

Many of them grew up playing video games where the challenge was thinking through the correct set of actions, out of a predefined set of options, corresponding to little, discrete buttons on a gamepad, in a virtual world. To beat a video game is to find the right sequence of actions. What many roboticists don't realize is how incredible, and incredibly complex, their own movement is in the real world–even in the most frequently encountered tasks. These categories have their uses, but they also create blind spots for those looking to quantify and replicate the movement of natural systems – or predict the future impact that these machines will have on our lives. In dance, my other professional home, the quirks of human behavior are something to be celebrated, explored, and even exploited.

AI and computer learning is quickly gaining use, so what happens when AI becomes commonplace? Before we dive into this it is important to understand what AI can and can't do today and what aspect of it is already common. Computer learning is a subset of AI, but the two are often discussed together or interchanged. Computer learning is a method where a computer is trained on a set of data and then uses that training to learn a task. Facial feature recognition is a common computer learning task where the computer is trained to recognize the various features (eyes, lips, nose and mouth) of anyone's face.

Could sailing be the next desk job? Some sailors of tomorrow will never have to get their sea legs. These sailors will be seated in office buildings on land, hundreds of miles from their ship, which won't have any humans on board. Automation is storming the transportation sector, eliminating some jobs and turning others into desk jobs. Sailors, pilots and drivers are slowly shifting from the high seas, blue skies and open roads to staid office buildings where they monitor vessels from afar.