We live in a world of data. Many aspects of our lives depend on it. Yet, many people are challenged by data literacy, unable to decipher the meaning hidden in plain sight. Meanwhile, machine automation is advancing at a rapid pace, so too is the public mistrust in AI and algorithmic decision-making. Humans and machines each make their own mistakes, but together they complement each other's strengths.

In an age of quickly evolving technology and the growing prevalence of artificial intelligence, what humans will do for jobs, what the workforce does, is gradually changing. Lifelong learning is the new normal as agility and adaptability become foundations of the future of work, especially in a digital economy. While many people feel that this is unchartered territory for the workforce and now heavily competing against machines for performing labor activities, history tells us a different story. What machines are capable of doing has changed over the last 100 years thanks to a suite of technological developments, including the internet, cloud computing, and hardware improvements, among others. When we look at what machines can do today, it's not anywhere near the same as what they were capable of 100 years ago.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the frontier of a new techno-tsunami that is transforming the way we live and work. "Historically, an AV researcher might see 10,000 viruses in a career. Today there are over 700,000 per day," says Ryan Permeh, Chief Scientist of Cylance. Could AI be the solution to solving the big data problem, and bridging the widening workforce gap in the Cyber Security industry? Intelligent machines now have the power to make observations, understand requests, reason, draw data correlations, and derive conclusions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the frontier of a new techno-tsunami that is transforming the way we live and work. "Historically, an AV researcher might see 10,000 viruses in a career. Today there are over 700,000 per day," says Ryan Permeh, chief scientist of Cylance. Could AI be the solution to solving the big data problem, and bridging the widening workforce gap in the cybersecurity industry? Intelligent machines now have the power to make observations, understand requests, reason, draw data correlations, and derive conclusions.

The rhetoric surrounding AI and robots have some believing that we are nearing the ability to introduce something like Joi, the AI hologram from Blade Runner 2049. While in fact this kind of advancement remains in the realms of fiction, the AI Index Annual Report 2017 shows that AI is fighting to level the playing field in the battle of humans versus machines. With Artificial Intelligence technologies being developed in a wide range of applications, the AI Index revealed several surprising insights on where humans stand in the robot vs biological brain race. While robots easily outperform regular employees in certain visual tasks, natural language processing is not yet superior to human capability. Scientist reached a major breakthrough this year, with tests revealing that the best Artificial Intelligence system recognised speech from phone call audio at 95% – neck-and-neck with human ability.

In a match last October, the AlphaGo program developed by Google's "DeepMind" subsidiary beat, 5 games to 0, the French professional player Fan Hui,1 who is ranked 2 dan (on the professional scale from 1 dan to 9 dan) and is today Europe's best player. The story was related by the journal Nature.2 This was the first time that a computer beats a professional player. But in the world of artificial intelligence, the progress demonstrated by the AlphaGo victory wasn't expected for another ten years or so. The moment of truth, however, will take place between March 9-15 in Seoul, where AlphaGo will face the South Korean Lee Se-dol, who is 9 dan, and is considered the best player in the world as well as a Go living legend. This new game, which will be broadcast live on the Web, comes with a 1,000,000 prize for the human champion if he wins.