A little over thirty years ago, when he was in his mid-forties, my friend David Howorth lost all hearing in his left ear, a calamity known as single-sided deafness. "It happened literally overnight," he said. "My doctor told me, 'We really don't understand why.' " At the time, he was working as a litigator in the Portland, Oregon, office of a large law firm. His hearing loss had no impact on his job--"In a courtroom, you can get along fine with one ear"--but other parts of his life were upended. The brain pinpoints sound sources in part by analyzing minute differences between left-ear and right-ear arrival times, the same process that helps bats and owls find prey they can't see.

It's mainstream and it's coming faster than anyone thought possible. Global developments in robotics and artificial intelligence will disrupt most industries, including the PR and creative industry. Speaking at the Holmes Report's PRovokes 2016 summit in Miami, Lipson shared an action packed keynote, with plenty of thought provoking examples to remind us we now live in harmony with robots, which are getting smarter by the day as a result of artificial intelligence (AI). "The industry is moving so fast it's surprising everyone in the field, where we've seen complete lines of research made obsolete," said Lipson. "For most of us, our view of robots was what see saw portrayed in Hollywood movies – robots were happy, emotional, cunning, smart and sophisticated. Recent studies mis-perceive AI to be these kinds of things. "If you look at industry today, millions of robots operate in factories with super human features, able to be very precise and very fast, but without intelligence.