Artificial intelligence is already reshaping society as we know it in both business and consumer realms. Early use cases with Alexa, autonomous vehicles and AI-driven supply chains provide just a glimpse of the disruption that AI is poised to deliver in the near future and for years to come. Yet despite all the AI hype and initial successes, it remains in its infancy. That makes now the ideal time for young people to build the knowledge, skill sets and connections they need to capitalize on the fast-growing market for AI jobs and build a strong AI career. One reason is simply practical. Gartner predicts that AI may eliminate 1.8 million jobs by 2020, yet is on track to create 2.3 million new positions.

Autonomous driving company Zenuity runs under the motto "Make it real." To achieve that goal, it began by solving one of the auto industry's biggest challenges: seamlessly managing enormous loads of data. Self-driving cars require enormous amounts of data to run in the real world. Zenuity is a joint venture between Volvo Cars and Veoneer, a new technology subsidiary spun out from auto supplier Autoliv. The company, which launched in April 2017, is developing software for advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving cars.

Higher Educational Failure - Colleges and universities are still educating the majority of its students for the last century, not this one. Students graduating from medical school, law school, education, journalism, and dozens of other majors have no training in how robotics or AI will impact them. Higher education needs to rethink curriculum for the future. Massive, Permanent Underclass - More than 26m people in the US perform some form of manual labor as their sole source of income. Older Americans are, because of the high costs of health insurance and benefits, with no long-term loyalty by a company, much harder to reemploy.

Elon Musk's neural lace project could turn us all into cyborgs, and he says that it's only four or five years away. The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla has long been an outspoken critic of unrestricted artificial intelligence, and has been quietly researching the concept of "neural lace," a merger of machine learning and human intelligence that could revolutionize our species. In a profile published Monday in Vanity Fair, Musk said he thinks a "meaningful partial brain interface" could be here in less than half a decade. Musk, in general, is kind of terrified of artificial intelligence, saying that he thinks the A.I. takeover is inevitable. The key to survival, he says, is to find a way to create some sort of symbiosis with computers that can enhance human intelligence to compete with the machines.

By 2020, self-driving cars will have progressed so far that they can drive safely at speeds as fast as 200 mph in their own partitioned lanes on highways. In these circumstances, the commute to Los Angeles from San Francisco would take only an hour and a half -- without the need to catch a connection to a supersonic pod. From Abu Dhabi to Al Ain or Dubai could take the car 30 to 40 minutes, door to door. In other words, Elon Musk's self-driving cars and HTT's short-haul Hyperloops may be competing with each other. I'm one of those who would prefer the convenience of having their car come with them so that they can keep extra stuff in the back and be working uninterrupted on the commute.

Remember the ice bucket challenge? The meme of 2014 brought a splash (ha) of attention to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS, the neurodegenerative disease Stephen Hawking lives with along with some 450,000 other people around the world. The American ALS Association (ALSA) received an outpouring of donations, which directly led to the discovery of a gene that contributes to the disease. Now, artificial intelligence is set to bring the next breakthrough in the fight against ALS -- specifically regarding the development of drugs. Jackie Hunter, CEO of BenevolentBio, said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Tuesday in London that her company expects to make a difference for ALS patients in the next five years because of pharmaceuticals that could be developed based on the findings of artificial intelligence that scans the oceans of medical studies being published every day.

The "rise of the machines" may not be so far after all as Hitachi appointed its first Artificial Intelligence manager back in September 2015. Isaac Asimov (Late American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University,) coined the term robotics in his 1950 classic I, Robot. The Japanese Multinational conglomerate enthroned a robot as a supervisor to induce more efficiency and productivity. The golem chief proved to be efficient, as 8% increase in efficiency was noticed. Lately, Airbus has announced the commencement of a program dedicated to the research and development of humanoid robotic technology to carry out intricate manufacturing errands in factories.

AlphaGo has won its series in the game Go against grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1. I wrote an initial post about AlphaGo after its first victory against a lesser ranked player. Humans have very big brains compared to the neural networks used by the program which shows that humans are unlikely to be able to use much of their brain for any one specific task. This, combined with the ability to run machine networks fast and against a lot of training data will make this technology formidable for many tasks. Many people have been claiming that creativity will be one area in which machines will not be competitive with humans any time soon.