Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology. In this episode, we talked to Jill Walker Rettberg, Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about machine vision's origins in polished volcanic glass, whether or not we'll actually have self-driving cars, and that famous photo-shopped Mother's Day photo released by Kate Middleton in March, 2024. Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence that has received a 15 million grant from the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2033). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2024), and of the ERC Advanced grant project AI Stories: Narrative Archetypes for Artificial Intelligence (2024-2029).

Of the many events that stand out as noteworthy in online discussions across Chinese social media in 2023, it's perhaps the rise of ChatGPT that will prove to be the most significant. Although the chatbot made by the US-based OpenAI was officially launched in late 2022, it took until 2023 for its unprecedented growth to raise eyebrows in China, where the government has set the goal of becoming the global AI leader by 2030. Over the past decade, the focus on AI in Chinese society and digital culture has grown. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, AI implementations in schools, office buildings and factories have rolled out in fast forward. AI facial recognition is employed in everything from public security to payment technology; smart glasses and helmets make it easier for many workers to perform their tasks; and intelligent robots have become a common sight in China's service industry, in malls, restaurants, and banks. There seemed little doubt over who would win the tech race between the eagle and the dragon; but then came ChatGPT.

The symposium on Artificial Intelligence – or AI – organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture, in cooperation with the German Embassy to the Holy See, will open in Rome on Thursday. The theme for the gathering is, "The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence for Human Society and the Idea of the Human Person". The aim of the meeting is to promote a better awareness of the profound cultural impact AI is likely to have on human society. The symposium will feature six experts from the fields of neuroscience, philosophy, Catholic theology, human rights law, ethics and electrical engineering. Experts from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Goethe University, Boston College, and Google will discuss questions regarding AI and whether it can reproduce consciousness, AI and philosophical challenges, and AI and religion, and what it would mean in relation to Catholic doctrine.

The incorporation of digital technology into all aspects of a business is known as digital transformation. It has a significant impact on the way a company works. This method is being used by firms to restructure their operations to make them more effective and lucrative. Ninety percent of businesses operate in the cloud. Much of what they're doing as they shift more data to the cloud is replicating current services in a digital version.

The digital culture is turning out to be a shelter hub for most business that carried out their operations traditionally or in ways that are physical. Retailers too are resorting to the powers of digitalization to ensure better returns on investment. If seen amidst the COVID-19 situation, the picture of retailing and retailers is pretty murky and rickety. With every kind of business being adversely affected, retailers too were not ready for the tolls that pandemic would take, which made them suffer from heavy losses. In order to prevent the adversities from repeating themselves, the retailer community is rushing to build their online presence and adapting to a digital transition.

Digital culture is the key ingredient for digital transformations; it increases productivity and innovation in order to maintain a competitive edge, said Aisling Curtis. At Women in Tech Dublin 2019 she spoke about the future of work and the role that digital culture plays in digital transformations. Our own research showed that with a strong digital culture, up to three times more employees say they are productive with one in five employees experiencing high productivity. With a strong digital culture – 37% more employees feel highly empowered. For the first time in history we have up to five generations in the workforce, said Curtis.

With intelligence at the heart of all digital businesses, IT and business leaders are continuing to make analytics and BI a top investment priority. Gartner's latest Hype Cycle report identified five of the main trends within this trajectory. The report also offered insights for data and analytics leaders to help make the transition to augmented analytics, to build a digital culture and to operationalise and scale analytics initiatives." Augmented analytics uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery, data science, and machine learning model development and insight sharing for a broad range of business users, operational workers and citizen data scientists. Gartner says, as it matures, augmented analytics will become a key feature of modern analytics platforms. "It will deliver analysis to everyone in an organisation in less time, with less of a requirement for skilled users, and with less interpretative bias than current manual approaches.

Sixteen hundred years after ancient Greek scientist Heron of Alexandria mentioned the rudimentary steam engine, the invention went on to create the first industrial revolution, allowing production to be mechanized and forging the modern age through industrial culture. This industrial culture led to subsequent industrial revolutions, which have driven the modern age. The second industrial revolution was driven by machines running on electricity and led to mass production of goods, as well as a further change in industrial culture driving new management practices, such as division of labour and just-in-time manufacturing to improve quality and output. The third industrial revolution began with the rise of electronics – the transistor and microprocessor – leading to the automation of production machinery and development of communication technologies – the Internet, Wi-Fi and cellular networks – and a cultural shift to people being empowered to work higher-level jobs, such as programming and engineering. Now, over 250 years after the steam engine helped spawn the industrial world, advances in computational technology, along with the merging of sensors and digital technologies, are changing the fundamentals of that world.

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and robotics are changing the world of work. However, to unlock the full potential AI it's integral for organizations to have the right mix of people, culture, and mindset? Is HR ready to lead this transformation? Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be penetrating every aspect of our life, at a startling pace. Machines and programs can self-learn, problem solve and think which means that, when combined with algorithms, technology, and big data, AI is now mainstream.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to amplify and enhance people's ability to the point where they will be able to solve the most perplexing problems facing society today. But that potential won't be realised if leaders in organisations don't demystify AI for their teams and create a world of understanding around the impact and value that technology presents to a modern workforce. This is the view of Paul Shanahan, Cloud & Enterprise Business Group lead with Microsoft Ireland. "There is apprehension around AI and its introduction to the workplace," he says. "On the one hand we have new generations coming into the workforce who have grown up in a society where intelligent technology is widely used and accepted. On the other, we have older generations within the workforce who started working before smartphones and maybe even PCs weren't in common use. For that older cohort it would be very easy to imagine AI as something from the future, something unattainable in today's workplace."