Right now, most big AI labs have a team figuring out ways that rogue AIs might escape supervision, or secretly collude with each other against humans. But there's a more mundane way we could lose control of civilisation: we might simply become obsolete. This wouldn't require any hidden plots – if AI and robotics keep improving, it's what happens by default. Well, AI developers are firmly on track to build better replacements for humans in almost every role we play: not just economically as workers and decision-makers, but culturally as artists and creators, and even socially as friends and romantic companions. What place will humans have when AI can do everything we do, only better?

Earlier this year, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines for a particularly outlandish claim: After engaging in conversation with a highly sophisticated algorithm named LaMDA, he decided that the A.I. was in fact a sentient being, and as a result it deserved legal personhood. Since Lemoine made this claim, Google has fired him, and almost everyone has concluded that he is clearly wrong, but this clearly-wrong claim nonetheless launched a barrage of articles, many with the premise "Yes, but what if he wasn't?" Attention to this case isn't surprising: A century of science fiction should be enough to demonstrate that we're fascinated by the prospect of creating true artificial life. By this point, however, we ought to recognize that claims about the advent of new techno-religions tend to be--to use an industry term--almost entirely vaporware, with exactly none of the grassroots interest or staying power of the movements that are typically classified as religions. Anthony Levandowski's much-hyped Church of AI, founded in 2015, officially closed last year (do religions "close?") after several years of inactivity.

The disruptive shifts of 2020, including covid-19 shutdowns that led to millions of workers working remotely, forced organizations to radically rethink everything from worker well-being, business models and operations to investments in cloud-based collaboration and communication tools. Across every industry, last year's best-laid plans were turned upside down. So it's not surprising that technology and work have become, more than ever, inextricably intertwined. As business moves toward an uncertain future, companies have accelerated their efforts to use automation and other emerging technologies to boost efficiency, support worker well-being, accelerate work outputs, and achieve new outcomes. Yet, technology investments are not enough to brace for future disruptions.

As we are propelled into an even-more digital age, companies and employees are both asking: To what degree will AI replace human intelligence and make jobs obsolete? In the inevitable future of AI, what is the outlook for human employees? Neil Jensen, Vice President, Product Strategy, Workday, identifies trends in areas like the future of work. I asked Jensen to share with us the trends he's seeing in the future-of-work space. John Winsor: What is the future of work as you see it?

Although Einstein himself made many advances in physics, from special and general relativity to the photoelectric effect and statistical mechanics, there were many problems he couldn't solve during his life. How much better could AI have done? At the dawn of the 20th century, there were a number of crises in physics. Radiating objects like stars emitted a finite, well-defined amount of energy at every wavelength, defying the best predictions of the day. Newton's laws of motion broke down and failed when objects approached the speed of light.

One of the most consequential pieces of news from the US in early 2017 was not from the White House, or even the Twitter feed of Donald Trump. Rather, it was hidden in a report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and made available on the DMV's website. It details the efforts of Google (or more precisely its Waymo subsidiary) to make autonomous driving a reality. According to the report, in 2016 Google's self-driving cars clocked 635,868 miles (1,023,330km), and required human intervention 124 times. That is one intervention about every 5,000 miles (8,047km) of autonomous driving.

These capabilities will in many cases be integrated into our living systems. We thus face the question: What might remain uniquely human? And does this question even matter? AIs will become better and faster than unenhanced homo sapiens at nearly everything. AIs will become better and faster than unenhanced homo sapiens at nearly everything.

These capabilities will in many cases be integrated into our living systems. We thus face the question: What might remain uniquely human? And does this question even matter? AIs will become better and faster than unenhanced homo sapiens at nearly everything. AIs will become better and faster than unenhanced homo sapiens at nearly everything.

Jonas Nwuke discusses how IBM Watson's cognitive computing will tackle problems that are "uniquely human" At our PSFK 2015 conference, we were thrilled to have Jonas Nwuke of the IBM Watson team as one of our speakers. You're likely to have heard of Watson as the grand champion of Jeopardy!, from pieces about its culinary capabilities, or from PSFK and IBM Waston's Good Data contest, but these are just teases of what's in store for intelligent machines and cognitive systems. With some of the recent forward steps taken by AI and cognitive computing, we wanted to look back on how these technologies are being developed, and where we can still go. "grand challenge" of 2011 served to help prove a hypothesis that humans can create systems capable of navigating ambiguous, confusing, and complex environments like language. As Jonas mentioned, the objective, then, is to build a machine that helps us focus on things that make us uniquely human--"finding inspiration, leveraging creativity, and solving problems by making meaning of the seemingly meaningless."

Anybody that's been paying attention to tech and the jobs market in the last couple of years has been paying attention to automation, and anybody paying attention to automation has seen this video by CGP Grey: There's a quiet rumbling on the Internet as slowly, people are starting to worry about the future of labor, debating whether mass technological unemployment is the true blue fate of humanity or just another Y2K scare. For those in-the-know, it seems pretty certain that automation will replace jobs, but the degree to which humans will be fiscally displaced, however, is up for debate. Bloggers, writers, and other creatives will argue against there ever being machines that can do their jobs and create pieces better, with more soul, if you will, than a human can. Unfortunately, those poor folks are in for a rude awakening; the machines have already begun to blog. In the U.S. in 2014, 720 bicyclists, 4,400 pedestrians, and 33,000 drivers died in auto accidents.