The future of work discussion has always been an interesting one, but never so much as it is right now, because of how much has changed in the past 18 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, the shifts businesses needed to make to adjust to the new reality were so major that there just seems to be no going back to the former pre-pandemic status quo. In speaking with experts across industries, Connected World has found that enterprise leaders in just about every vertical believe the pandemic sped up trends that were already underway, like the shift to hybrid work models and the adoption of technologies that facilitate digital transformation in the enterprise, by several years. A new report offers some insight into how the workforce sees the future of work shaping up. Global Workplace Analytics and Owl Labs recently released the State of Remote Work 2021 report, which suggests looking forward to 2022, the theme will be adapting to a hybrid workplace and working on defining what that actually means.

Spike Narayan is a seasoned hi-tech executive managing exploratory research in science and technology at IBM. Artificial Intelligence(AI) is an overused term today and as with any ubiquitous technology it is either loved or feared. Why does it have such a split following? It has a lot to do with its history and to some extent with how it is marketed today and more importantly how it is predicted to impact all facets of our lives tomorrow. AI made its humble beginnings many decades ago in academic circles as an endeavor to understand and mimic how humans think and act. While the goal was to understand and copy brain function, the field of AI developed largely with very little active collaboration between computer scientists and neuroscientists.

Human resource (HR) departments have long been integral to organizational success, and they're likely to remain that way for decades to come. But the nature of HR is likely to evolve with new technologies, research, and trends. For starters, we might see HR directing the charge in remodeling the form of the ordinary workforce. Increasingly, consumers and employers alike are valuing diversity and inclusion; firms are working harder to ensure a mixture of individuals from other backgrounds are included in any way levels of the company. Later on, this will develop into a much bigger priority. However, this is a slight change when compared with another generation of labor management.

A group of 226 engineers and other Google workers have formed a union, according to an article and opinion piece in the New York Times. Called the Alphabet Workers Union, it is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America and was organized in secret over the last year or so. "We are joining together -- temps, vendors, contractors, and full-time employees -- to create a unified worker voice," wrote the Parul Koul and Chewy Shaw, the executive chair and vice chair of the Alphabet Workers Union. "We want Alphabet to be a company where workers have a meaningful say in decisions that affect us and the societies we live in." The union represents a small minority of the company's 260,000 strong employee and contractor workforce.

Artificial intelligence and automation are continuing to drill deeper into our society. Yet, there seems to be a disconnect between the people designing and implementing these systems, and those who will be most affected by the outcome. The reported median annual salary for an AI programmer in the UK in 2019 is currently around £60,000. Meanwhile, the reported median annual salary for all workers in the UK is reportedly around £36,611. Automating routine operations presents a lot of benefits.

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) sets the wheels in motion for the crafting of the country's artificial-intelligence sector road map as testament to the Philippine potential as an AI powerhouse in the Asean region. Trade Undersecretary Rafaelita M. Aldaba of the Competitiveness and Innovation Group led the formal signing of an agreement with distinguished data scientists, Dr. Christopher P. Monterola and Dr. Erika Fille T. Legara, for the formulation of an AI road map early this month. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) where technology becomes more enmeshed with everyday life, AI advancement is seen as one of the key factors to help keep our country competitive. AI's importance is underscored as it is emerging to be a potential bright spot for our country with wide opportunities for growth for our competent work force. "The formulation of the AI road map is very important and timely. This effort provides the impetus that will move the country forward to keep up with the rapidly changing times," Aldaba emphasized.

Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Digitalisation – despite all the success stories it has written, the digital revolution is often also linked with the fear of people that it will eventually cost them their jobs. How realistic are these fears and how do individuals and companies need to face the digital transformation of the workforce? Cyborgs that hunt and eradicate humans, board computers of space ships that kill the crew, or an Artificial Intelligence that enslaves the human race – Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Matrix are just three examples of a long list of movies about the dangers of AI. When we speak about Artificial Intelligence, we regularly are reminded of the science fiction stories that warn us about the rise of AI and its unintended consequences. Such scenarios – if ever realistic – at least seem very distant.

We present a corpus and approach to deduce the difficulty of questions asked in a reading comprehension test. A feature-driven model is designed that associates each question with a difficulty level. This would eliminate the laborious task of manually annotating questions in a computerized testing environment. Experiments performed on our corpus show that our model can classify questions with a micro F-score of 0.68.

It's hard to miss the dogged technological ambition pervading this sprawling desert metropolis. In Scottsdale, Axon, the maker of the Taser, is hungrily snatching talent from Silicon Valley as it embraces automation to keep up with growing demand. Start-ups in fields as varied as autonomous drones and blockchain are flocking to the area, drawn in large part by light regulation and tax incentives. Arizona State University is furiously churning out engineers. And yet for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the American economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.

Ian Phillpot is the vice-president of Box Canada. There's been a lot of speculation and anxiety about the impact that disruptive technologies will have on the future of the work force. The speculation is fair – technology will have a dramatic impact on the way we work, even 20 to 30 years from now, and nobody knows for certain what the future might look like. However, the anxiety around the impact, and rhetoric that goes along with it, is unwarranted. The impact of artificial intelligence, the cloud, and other disruptive technologies will be much subtler than naysayers suggest.