If you are ready to unleash your potential, it's time to start your career with Manulife/John Hancock. Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services group that helps people make their decisions easier and lives better. We operate primarily as John Hancock in the United States and Manulife elsewhere. We provide financial advice, insurance, as well as wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups and institutions. At the end of 2018, we had more than 34,000 employees, over 82,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners, serving almost 28 million customers.

In his rather dystopian foray into an educated prophecy about what society will look like 100 years from now, the celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari remarked: "We will be the last generation of homo sapiens. In 100 years, the species that will inherit the Earth will be as different to us as we are from Neanderthals or chimpanzees." Equally telling was his assertion that the future of humankind will be decided by the people that own our data. With the pace at which the development of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) is gathering momentum and influencing our daily lives, this is probably going to happen much faster than Harari predicted. We, as humanity, submit ourselves to technological innovations that are radically changing our way of life and compromising our privacy beyond repair, without stopping to reflect on what it may be doing to us as individuals or societies.

The Alexa-powered Amazon microwave you didn't ask for is here. The company's big hardware splurge encompasses your car, your kitchen and even your walls. There's upgraded Echo devices, too, if that's what you were looking for. Meanwhile, Apple's iOS 12 is an update worth your time, and life insurance companies are very interested in your step count. The company announced not one, not two, but seven new Echo products at an event in Seattle.

If pen retailers and state legislators are to be believed, cursive handwriting is facing an existential threat. Since the advent of the Common Core standards--which emphasizes keyboard skills over nicely shaped P's and Q's--it's been common knowledge for years that teachers are abandoning cursive in droves, spending classroom time instead on new technology and typing. But lately, fancy handwriting is having somewhat of a comeback. Louisiana's governor signed a law in June requiring cursive instruction all the way through grade 12. Mississippi's education department recently added script to its standards. And starting this school year, third graders in Alabama are required to write legibly in cursive under the newly passed "Lexi's Law."

If you've watched the television series 24 on Netflix, the online streaming service will recommend that you catch up on Homeland, too. Now, a Boston-based technology firm is hoping to bring that same intuitive technology to financial services. Start-up indico Data Solutions Inc. announced Friday that it is collaborating with John Hancock Financial and the Boston insurer's Canadian parent Manulife Financial Corp. to help financial analysts and portfolio managers cull through thousands of pieces of data and find the most important information. Based on that data, managers at Manulife and John Hancock will be able to make quicker decisions on whether to invest in certain companies and industries or sell their shares. Think of it as Google on steroids.

Aug. 28--Insurance giant John Hancock and a small Boston startup are teaming up in the hopes of using artificial intelligence to guide the company's investment decisions. John Hancock -- and its Canadian parent company Manulife -- have started working with indico data solutions, a startup that makes AI software designed to create easily digestible trends, themes and other important information out of the mountains of data that financial analysts have to keep track of. "These guys are all drowning in data," said Vishal Daga, chief customer officer for indico. "The idea is to build an application using these deep learning techniques that can help analysts whittle down that stack of reading material in a useful manner." Indico's software can analyze word choices from stock analyst reports and automatically detect whether the language is positive or negative.

If you've watched the television series 24 on Netflix, the online streaming service will recommend that you catch up on Homeland, too. Now, a Boston-based technology firm is hoping to bring that same intuitive technology to financial services. Start-up Indico Data Solutions Inc. announced Friday that it is collaborating with John Hancock Financial and the Boston insurer's Canadian parent Manulife Financial Corp. to help financial analysts and portfolio managers cull through thousands of pieces of data and find the most important information. Based on that data, managers at Manulife and John Hancock will be able to make quicker decisions on whether to invest in certain companies and industries or sell their shares. Think of it as Google on steroids.