Will robots take my job? This question has inspired numerous memes and websites and was even a topic in the U.S. presidential campaign. It is something I think about often as a technology entrepreneur and as someone who leads a team of remarkable people. Progress is an unstoppable force, but how can we ensure that people don't become casualties of it? In January 2019, global leaders gathered in Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF).

This year the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) is being run as a virtual event. One interesting feature of this conference is that it has been extended to run from 31 May to 31 August. A number of workshops were held on the opening day and here we focus on two of them: "Learning of manual skills in humans and robots" and "Emerging learning and algorithmic methods for data association in robotics". It brought together researchers from human motor control and from robotics to answer questions such as: How do humans achieve manual dexterity? What kind of practice schedules can shape these skills? Can some of these strategies be transferred to robots?

With the introduction of new technology, skill in the workplace is significant and since the fourth industrial revolution, adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) marks an acceleration over the shifts of even the recent past. The requirement of skills, for instance, technological, social and emotional skills which are in demand as well as physical and manual skills, will drop at the modern workplace. These changes will require employees to develop their existing skill sets to the expected level or acquire new ones. Companies need to think how work is organised within their organisations with the latest technological changes. How do workforce skills change with automation?

The average worker of the future is a socially adept leader, entrepreneur, and life-long learner with transferrable technology skills, who is also happy to work in a team, suggests a new McKinsey report. Chris Middleton looks at whether organisations can really find such people. Reports about the growing IT skills gap in digitally enhanced organisations have been circulating for as long as the internet has existed as a business tool, suggesting that the supposed urgency of fixing the problem has not been an impediment to many successful organisations. However, a new report from management consultancy McKinsey suggests that the rapid introduction of automation and artificial intelligence systems within companies is changing the very nature of work itself, as technologies increasingly augment some human skills, and replace others completely. Over the next decade, this will force companies to reconsider how work is organised internally.

Demand for technological, social and emotional, and higher cognitive skills will rise by 2030. How will workers and organizations adapt? Skill shifts have accompanied the introduction of new technologies in the workplace since at least the Industrial Revolution, but adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will mark an acceleration over the shifts of even the recent past. The need for some skills, such as technological as well as social and emotional skills, will rise, even as the demand for others, including physical and manual skills, will fall. These changes will require workers everywhere to deepen their existing skill sets or acquire new ones. Companies, too, will need to rethink how work is organized within their organizations.

President Emmanuel Macron together with many Silicon Valley CEOs will kick off the VivaTech conference in Paris this week with the aim of showcasing the "good" side of technology. Our research highlights some of those benefits, especially the productivity growth and performance gains that automation and artificial intelligence can bring to the economy -- and to society more broadly, if these technologies are used to tackle major issues such as fighting disease and tackling climate change. But we also note some critical challenges that need to be overcome. To see just how big those shifts could be, our latest research analyzed skill requirements for individual work activities in more than 800 occupations to examine the number of hours that the workforce spends on 25 core skills today. We then estimated the extent to which these skill requirements could change by 2030, as automation and artificial technologies are deployed in the workplace, and backed up our findings with a detailed survey of more than 3,000 business leaders in seven countries, who largely confirmed our quantitative findings.