There’s no doubt that digital technology has been highly disruptive. In industry after industry, from retail to media to travel and hospitality, nimble digital upstarts have set established industries on their head, completely changing the basis upon which firms compete. Many incumbents haven’t survived. Many others are greatly diminished. Still, in many ways, the digital revolution has been a huge disappointment. Besides the meager productivity gains, we’ve seen a ​​global rise in authoritarian populism, stagnant wages, reduced productivity growth and weaker competitive markets, not to mention an anxiety epidemic, increased obesity and, at least in the US, decreased life expectancy. We can—and must—do better. We can learn from the mistakes we made during the digital revolution and shift our mindset from disrupting markets to tackling grand challenges. This new era of innovation will give us the ability to shape the world around us like never before, at a molecular level and achieve incredible things. Yet we can’t just leave our destiny to the whims of market and technological forces. We must actually choose the outcomes we prefer and build strategies to achieve them. The possibilities that we will unlock from new computing architectures, synthetic biology, advanced materials science, artificial intelligence and other things will give us that power. What we do with it is up to us.

Will AI take away our jobs? Will AI destroy the world and/or become our ruler? I argue it is great to think and ask this kind of question and they should not be taken as pessimistic thinking. The goal of these questions is not to know the right answer, the goal is to understand different visions of the future, or at least how our experts are thinking about this important question. But before asking or thinking about these important questions let us think about something more basic, the relation between economic growth and innovation.

In our last article we discussed the fact that automation and algorithms are created by humans, and so, therefore, can be biased. For our final article on the subject of automation and where it's taking us, we want to examine the human's role in the automated society, and how important it is for us to fully understand it. The Industrial Revolution brought machines to common use in the world. Where you might have had 50 people engaged in a certain task, those 50 people were then replaced by 1 machine. When all was said and done, though, you still had a human being controlling what the machine was doing.

Steve Woods is co-founder and CTO of Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform. When the machines took over farming, a new set of industrial jobs blossomed. When the robots took over the factories, we moved to IT jobs that had never previously existed. Now that AI is taking over another swath of jobs, a wave of as-of-yet-unheard-of jobs, will soon flourish. The thinking that leads to this conclusion has a long, decorated history going back to Joseph Schumpeter's description of creative destruction in the 1940s.

Steve Woods is co-founder and CTO of Nudge.ai, a relationship intelligence platform. When the machines took over farming, a new set of industrial jobs blossomed. When the robots took over the factories, we moved to IT jobs that had never previously existed. Now that AI is taking over another swath of jobs, a wave of as-of-yet-unheard-of jobs, will soon flourish. The thinking that leads to this conclusion has a long, decorated history going back to Joseph Schumpeter's description of creative destruction in the 1940s.

Generation Z, the leading edge of young people born after 1997, are now 21 years old. Many of them are graduating from college and listening to the well wishes and advice of graduation speakers. After the microphones are silenced and the last diploma is awarded, Gen Z will enter the workforce. Today's workplace is undergoing an unprecedented rate of change placing new demands on workers of all ages. A new high velocity workplace is emerging – a world of work characterized by the rapid development of new knowledge, an accelerating rate of industry disruption and advancing technology.

Late last year I wrote a post on the future of automation and the economy, and why the theory--known as creative destruction--that tells us in the long run everything will be okay might be wrong. Creative destruction is the concept that as technology makes some jobs and even whole industries obsolete, new ones take their place. While that theory has largely proven true, Joseph Schumpeter, the creator of the theory, believed eventually creative destruction would reach an end point and new jobs wouldn't be created to replace the ones innovation destroyed. Andrew McAfee, a professor at MIT, is one modern academic who believes this wave of technology is different, and there may not be enough jobs to replace the ones eliminated by robots and artificial intelligence. That said, if there is any profession known for its stunning ability to be consistently wrong, it's economics.