"The only thing constant in life is change," said 17th century French thinker François de La Rochefoucauld. The Internet of Things explained: What the IoT is, and where it's going next. That goes for double in the tech industry. By 2006, the people of the world were doing 100 million Google searches every day--which, by the way, we thought was an enormous number at the time. Now, we're doing 4.5 billion searches a day--45 times as many--which shows just how far and wide the digital revolution is still sweeping the planet and embedding itself deeper and deeper into our everyday lives.

The 21st century's longest shadow hanging over the technology industry, workers, and humanity in general, is the effect that artificial intelligence, robots, and automation are going to have on jobs. The popular narrative is generally filled with lots of doom-and-gloom about AI wiping out whole industries and millions of people going unemployed, but let's take a little reality check and look at where humans do a better job than AI, and vice versa, to give you some context for how the workforce of the future is going to change. ZDNet and TechRepublic looks at the dramatic effect of AI, big data, cloud computing, and automation on IT jobs, and how companies can adapt. It's no secret that algorithms and robots can smoke humans at repetitive tasks and solving problems that involve crunching large, well-organized data sets. Humans get bored and distracted doing the same things over and over again.

You can tell a lot about a company's values and its priorities by the way it spends its money. Each October on ZDNet we do a special report on how business leaders are planning to spend their tech budgets for the year ahead. In our survey of 2018 plans, we found that nearly two-thirds of decision makers are increasing their technology budgets in 2018, and almost a quarter of them are boosting their tech spend by 10% or more. SEE: Tech Budgets 2018: A CXO's Guide Aside from specific tech projects, 35% of leaders said they are investing in training existing employees and 29% said they are investing in hiring new employees. We also polled TechRepublic's CIO Jury, where 83% said their IT budgets would increase or stay the same in 2018.