I get very annoyed when I see discussion or predictions of "when AI will reach human-level intelligence". That implies that intelligence is just one thing that you can measure linearly. Humans do not have even just 7 intelligences, as proposed by Howard Gardner. There are more dimensions to intelligence than we can imagine. Machines have already vastly outperformed human "intelligence" in myriad domains, including of course almost all games we have invented, among them chess and Go, and a multitude of data-driven judgments and decisions.

This year has seen massive advances in article writing by AI. The Open AI Institute released its GPT-2 article generator last month after earlier in the year saying it was too dangerously powerful to release to the public. You can try it with small text seeds here. Another article generator introduced in May, Grover, is described as'A State-of-the-Art Defense against Neural Fake News' which can detect whether AI wrote articles, however it also swiftly generates fairly good articles. Below I have put an article generated by Grover given only the title and my website as a reference (I do like how it calls me Professor!).

Yesterday I gave a briefing on Technology Trends and the Future of Work to a group of Non Executive Directors of major corporations, organized by a large professional services firm for its clients. The group was the first to get a run-through of my new concept framework Vectors of Disruption, shown below, which I used to introduce and frame the rest of my presentation. The first comment is that I – as many others – am not a fan of the word'disruption', which has lost much of its meaning through misuse and overuse in recent years. However I cannot find a better word for what is meant here. Overall the intent of the framework is to distinguish between the different layers that are driving disruption, from the underlying forces, through the high-impact developments and finally key structural shifts.

There is massive uncertainty on the future impact of artificial intelligence. Among those who we can consider the'experts' – the most qualified on the planet to judge – there are deep disagreements on the potential for general artificial intelligence, the evolution of work, whether AI is an existential threat to humanity, and almost every other aspect of the impact of AI. Let us leave aside for now the full scope of the future relationship between humans and machines. On the subject of work, I have frequently found myself bemused by the many people who appear to believe that machines will before long do all work, leaving nothing for humans to do other than hopefully bask in the leisure we have. While it is possible that fewer people will be in gainful employment (which is not a given, more on that in another post), I don't believe we will ever have a world of no human work, for many reasons.

Yesterday I gave the keynote on Creating the Future of Work at The End of Nine to Five. For the last years in addressing the future of work I have often focused on the human capabilities that will drive value as machines become more capable and the work landscape is transformed. To help define and clarify these capabilities I created a landscape on the role of Humans in the Future of Work, which I first shared publicly in my keynote yesterday. Click on the image to see full size You can see full details of the framework on my keynote speaker website. This framework overlaps and builds on my Future of Work Framework, specifically building out the distinctive human capabilities that will be relevant and valued as the work landscape is transformed.