British roboticist Peter Scott-Morgan doesn’t want you to see him as a man who died from a neurodegenerative disease. He wants to become Peter 2.0 – the most advanced cyborg ever.
There’s an extensive list of medical devices already helping him breathe, feed, and communicate; those technologies are set to grow in the near future. But, according to Scott-Morgan, this isn’t about staving off death; it’s about evolving.
“Yes, I know, this all sounds like science fiction,” he admits on his blog.
By Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, Alexandra Whittington, and Maria Romero
As artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionises work as we know it, how will the software testing and security industry be impacted?
The robots are coming: “Lock up your knowledge and protect your job at all costs!” The apocalyptic warnings are starting to flow of how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics combined with other disruptive technologies could eliminate the need for humans in the workplace. Equally sceptical voices are rubbishing the idea that anything drastic will happen, citing previous industrial revolutions as proof that new jobs will emerge to fill any gaps created by the automation of existing ones. In practice, no one really knows how quickly AI might eliminate jobs or what the employment needs will be of the future businesses and industries that have not yet been born.
But the future is not black and white. Aside from the potential to take (and make) jobs, AI might also transform jobs. Below, we share a list of some critical job roles that could be transformed or eliminated completely by the use of AI and robotics over the period from 2020 to 2030. The automation of the following six jobs would bring new opportunities to the software testing world, but could also change it in other possibly in unexpected ways.
Below we elaborate about how the role of AI in reshaping work could reverberate into the IT, software, and computer security sector of the future.
1. Doctors/Surgeons – Fully autonomous and remote controlled robotic surgeons will diagnose, treat, and operate on patients in areas where there are no physical human medics available. Humans might monitor or control these robo-docs via video from central hub hospital facilities in bigger towns and cities. As a public good, the sanctity of software and computer systems upon which medical AI is based cannot be emphasised enough. Should doctors truly be replaced by Dr. Watson, AI of IBM fame, technology would literally wield power over life-or-death situations. Aside from protection from hackers, there may be special preparation companies would take to support employees working with medical tech, similar to how medical school trains doctors to deal with grave situations.
2. Policing – Robots could perform tasks like crowd control, and police drones could track and intercept criminals escaping from crime scenes. In a future where policing is automated, IT support would be a critical public service. Would the staff running the software support be considered peace officers? What other authority might be given to tech staff should their work coincide so closely with law enforcement? Helping municipalities secure a Robocop could become reality for software testers by 2030. Automated policing would put technology at the forefront of criminal justice and community safety—how is the industry preparing for growing responsibilities to the public sector?
3. Lawyers – A range of search, analysis, and contract drafting tasks are already being automated. Robot-lawyers are already overturning parking tickets in the UK and US. Additionally, smart policing devices and an expanding blanket of sensors will feed into AI judges where there would be little to no room for debate. Moral and ethical issues related to technology advances may become the next legal growth arena. As law becomes increasingly automated, software and security has gained emphasis in the law firm as well as in the public safety arena. Legal tech is likely to continue to grow as a subsector of law as well as IT.
4. Life Coaches/Therapists ¬– Automation forecasts today are already causing anxiety and stress among perfectly healthy professionals. Should mass layoffs start, society could see mental health issues rise to crisis level. There are already strong provisions in place in most modern societies to protect medical information online. It may be possible that software and security experts will have requests in the future for new products and services to protect personal coaching and psychotherapy data from sessions conducted online. Also, with the continuous existential threat in terms of terrorist use of cyberattacks, anxiety solutions might be one of the future niches software vendors could fill.
5. Drivers/Mechanics – From taxis to buses, trucks and rescue services, automated vehicles hold the promise of being inherently safer, more fuel efficient, and productive—freeing up drivers’ time. As a vehicle becomes a digitally immersed experience for the passenger, software and IT is critical to its smooth functioning and enjoyment. By 2030, hacking could be a bigger threat to personal mobility than engine problems. Certainly more so than running out of fuel!
6. Personal Assistants (PAs) – Future generations of Siri, Cortana, and Alexa should be able to undertake personal shopping, screen incoming calls, and determine which news to show us, even determine where we dine. To be able to instill full trust in the personal services provided by AI, consumers will require robust computer security and software. Unless there is a strong basis for protecting private data, personal assistant AIs won’t overtake real-life, flesh-and-blood PAs. However, if the market presents a demand for PA services for the masses, writing the software and securing such systems could be a lucrative area in which to establish an early presence.
In addition to this list, there are a number of ways computer security firms and vendors could evolve in response to the growing use of AI in other professions. Ultimately, today’s business leaders in every sector acknowledge that the robots are coming; it is just that we don’t know where they may have their biggest impacts.
The article originally appeared in Software Testing News.
Author Bios
The authors are futurists with Fast Future — a professional foresight firm specializing in delivering keynote speeches, executive education, research, and consulting on the emerging future and the impacts of change for global clients. Fast Future publishes books from leading future thinkers around the world, exploring how developments such as AI, robotics, exponential technologies, and disruptive thinking could impact individuals, societies, businesses, and governments and create the trillion-dollar sectors of the future. Fast Future has a particular focus on ensuring these advances are harnessed to unleash individual potential and enable a very human future. See: www.fastfuture.com
Rohit Talwar is a global futurist, award-winning keynote speaker, author, and the CEO of Fast Future. His prime focus is on helping clients understand and shape the emerging future by putting people at the center of the agenda. Rohit is the co-author of Designing Your Future, lead editor and a contributing author for The Future of Business, and editor of Technology vs. Humanity. He is a co-editor and contributor for the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity, and three forthcoming books –Future Transformations – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business, Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.
Steve Wells is an experienced strategist, keynote speaker, futures analyst, partnership working practitioner, and the COO of Fast Future. He has a particular interest in helping clients anticipate and respond to the disruptive bursts of technological possibility that are shaping the emerging future. Steve is a contributor to the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity, and co-editor of The Future of Business and Technology vs. Humanity. He is a co-editor and contributor to two forthcoming books on Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.
Alexandra Whittington is a futurist, writer, Foresight Director of Fast Future, and a faculty member on the Futures program at the University of Houston. She has a particular expertise in future visioning and scenario planning. Alexandra is a contributor to The Future of Business and the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity. She is also a co-editor and contributor for forthcoming books on Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.
Maria Romero is a futurist and foresight researcher at Fast Future. She has worked on a range of foresight initiatives including a project for NASA’s Langley Research Center and the publication of “The Future of Student Life: Living” in On the Horizon. Maria is a co-editor and contributor for the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity and of the forthcoming book Future Transformations – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business. She is also a contributor to Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business.
Human skin is a fascinating multifunctional organ with unique properties originating from its flexible and compliant nature. It allows for interfacing with external physical environment through numerous receptors interconnected with the nervous system. Scientists have been trying to transfer these features to artificial skin for a long time, aiming at robotic applications.
Robotic systems heavily rely on electronic and magnetic field sensing functionalities required for positioning and orientation in space. Much research has been devoted to implementation of these functionalities in a flexible, compliant form. Recent advancements in flexible sensors and organic electronics have provided important prerequisites. These devices can operate on soft and elastic surfaces, whereas sensors perceive various physical properties and transmit them via readout circuits.
To closely replicate natural skin, it is necessary to interconnect a large number of individual sensors. This challenging task became a major obstacle in realizing electronic skin. First demonstrations were based on an array of individual sensors addressed separately, which unavoidably resulted in a tremendous number of electronic connections. In order to reduce the necessary wiring, important technology had to be developed—namely, complex electronic circuits, current sources and switches had to be combined with individual magnetic sensors to achieve fully integrated devices.
In response, a number of Japanese tech companies are building exoskeleton suits to give the elderly a leg — or arm — up. One such company, Innophys, developed a backpack-like suit that can be ‘charged’ by squeezing a hand pump 30 times to fill pressurized air-powered “muscles.”
The suit can allow people to lift up to 55 pounds, costs the equivalent of about $1,300.
“One client is a family-owned company which makes and sells pickled radish and uses heavy weights in the process of production,” Innophys spokesperson Daigo Orihara told New Scientist. “The father is in his 70s and was supposed to retire but is still working with our muscle suit.”
How can we tackle gender imbalance in the personalities of AI learning tools?
The Gendering of AI
The expected growth in use of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning applications is raising concerns about both the potential gendering of these tools and the risk that they will display the inherent biases of their developers. Why the concern? Well, to make it easier for us to integrate AI tools and chatbots into our lives, designers often give them human attributes. For example, applications and robots are often given a personality and gender. Unfortunately, in many cases, gender stereotypes are being perpetuated. The type of roles robots are designed to perform usually reflect gendered over generalizations of feminine or masculine attributes.
Feminine personalities in AI tools such as chatbots and consumer devices like Amazon’s Alexa are often designed to have sympathetic features and perform tasks related to care giving, assistantship, or service. Many of these applications have been created to work as personal assistants, in customer service or teaching. Examples include Emma the floor cleaning robot and Apple’s Siri your personal iPhone assistant. Conversely, male robots are usually designed as strong, intelligent and able to perform “dirty jobs”. They typically work in analytical roles, logistics, and security. Examples include Ross the legal researcher, Stan the robotic parking valet and Leo the airport luggage porter.
Gendering of technology is problematic because it perpetuates stereotypes and struggles present in society today. It can also help reinforce the inequality of opportunities between genders. These stereotypes aren´t beneficial for either males or females as they can limit a person´s possibilities and polarize personalities with artificial boundaries.
Response Strategies
We propose four strategies to help tackle this issue at different stages of the problem:
A version of this article originally appeared in Training Journal.
Image https://pixabay.com/images/id-3950719/ by john hain
Author Bios
The authors are futurists with Fast Future — a professional foresight firm specializing in delivering keynote speeches, executive education, research, and consulting on the emerging future and the impacts of change for global clients. Fast Future publishes books from leading future thinkers around the world, exploring how developments such as AI, robotics, exponential technologies, and disruptive thinking could impact individuals, societies, businesses, and governments and create the trillion-dollar sectors of the future. Fast Future has a particular focus on ensuring these advances are harnessed to unleash individual potential and enable a very human future. See: www.fastfuture.com
Rohit Talwar is a global futurist, award-winning keynote speaker, author, and the CEO of Fast Future. His prime focus is on helping clients understand and shape the emerging future by putting people at the center of the agenda. Rohit is the co-author of Designing Your Future, lead editor and a contributing author for The Future of Business, and editor of Technology vs. Humanity. He is a co-editor and contributor for the recently published Beyond Genuine Stupidity – Ensuring AI Serves Humanity and The Future Reinvented – Reimagining Life, Society, and Business, and two forthcoming books — Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business, and 50:50 – Scenarios for the Next 50 Years.
Helena Calle is a researcher at Fast Future. She is a recent graduate from the MSc. program in Educational Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, and has eight years of international experience as a teacher, teacher trainer, pedagogic coordinator, and education consultant. Helena coordinates Fast Future’s research on the future of learning.
Shaking hands with BrainCo’s artificial intelligence-powered prosthetic hand is like shaking hands with an exciting, optimistic version of the future. Here’s what this amazing prosthesis is able to do, and how it promises to transform life for amputees all around the world.
This special issue of ‘Sophia’ aims to reflect upon future evolutions of religions and their related narratives and imaginaries from a critical and generative understanding of our ancient sources. Bodies are locations of creative power and symbolic proliferation. Cyborgian, transhuman, and posthuman embodiments are going to generate visions of the divine in tune with such an epistemic shift, by addressing questions such as: can God be represented as a cyborg? Could robots and avatars be prophets? Is internet a suitable setting for a posthuman theophany? This special issue articulates within the frame of a relational ontological perspective, according to which the notion of the divine evolves, as much as human and non-human persons do. In this evolutionary scenario, the representation of the divine realm may shift from era to era, adapting to new natural-cultural formations. This special issue argues that the posthuman paradigm shift will be followed by a symbolic turn in religious imaginaries as well.
In a posthuman future, human and non-human beings, plants, and minerals will most likely co-exist with advanced artificial intelligence, sentient robots, and conscious humanoids. As futurist Ray Kurzweil affirms: ‘The introduction of technology is not merely the private affair of one of the Earth’s innumerable species. It is a pivotal event in the history of the planet’ ( 1999, p. 35). Religions will need to re-think their theological approaches in order to allow for different types of subjectivities and embodied entities to partake in the religious quest. Religions themselves are material as well as symbolic networks, actualized through words, prayers, metaphors, rhythms, images, and symbols, among many other expressions. The physical, the virtual, and the symbolic are inextricably intertwined. In the era of the cyborg, God is not only human; in the era of the post-human, humans are not the only prophets.
Sarcos sprinkled the flavor of the future on last year’s CES show when it revealed the latest evolution of its robotic exoskeleton technology, the Guardian XO. At this year’s CES, the Salt Lake City-based robotics specialist and Delta Airlines announced pilot trials, with Delta employees set to be among the first workers to suit up in the battery-powered, force-multiplying wearable robots, enjoying superhuman strength and endurance without body wear and tear.
Few things make us want to trade a cushy gig of rambling away about gadgets semi-coherently on the Web for a life of physical labor like the Guardian XO. A full-body robotic suit that turns its wearer into something of a near-cyborg superhero, the XO looks straight out of a dystopian sci-fi thriller and brings the capabilities to match. It bears its own substantial weight, along with 200 additional pounds (91 kg) of payload, letting the wearer lift heavy objects for hours without physical strain or fatigue.
Sarcos says the Guardian XO takes under 30 seconds to put on or take off, responds in milliseconds to the operator’s movements, and amplifies his or her strength by up to 20 times. It offers eight hours of battery power, and a hot-swapping battery system allows users to extend that operational time. All in all, it’s a highly impressive machine meant to help humans complete obligatory lifting tasks that would be difficult or impossible to tackle with more conventional lifting machinery.
Your brain is the orchestra that plays the symphony of your mental experience and your awareness, and that experience is your window on existence and on the universe. Our aim is to preserve, restore, and even improve your mental experience beyond the limits of biology. With dedication, scientific advances within our lifetimes may allow us to record the unique arrangement and responses of neurons and synapses that encode your memories, their active behavior, and ultimately to restore all of that in a neural prosthesis that seamlessly repairs a brain function, or a complete artificial brain. Some of this is still reminiscent of science fiction, but each challenge is well on its way to being a tractable technology problem supported by scientific evidence and understanding.
STEM Bootstrapping in Bio-Medicine! — On this recent ideaXme (https://radioideaxme.com/) episode, I was joined by 24 year old Malawian inventor, Sanga Marcarios Kanthema, founder and CEO of two companies, Dolphin Health Innovations and QubiX Robotics, who’s bringing health tech innovations to one of the world’s poorest countries — #Ideaxme #Malawi #Robotics #EKG #Stethoscope #Prosthetics #MobileHealth #SmartPhones #Telemedicine #MedicalDrones #Health #Wellness #Longevity #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage
Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Sanga Kanthema, 24 year old electronics specialist and founder and CEO of two Malawi-based companies, Dolphin Health Innovations and QubiX Robotics.
Ira Pastor Comments:
On today’s show we are going to continue our “virtual global road trip” and our discussions about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) initiatives, and about ways they are disrupting the status quo. In doing so, we are heading back to the continent of Africa.
But first, we are going to start with some disconcerting statistics on the healthcare front.
It estimated that there are only 25 consultant oncologists to service all 160 million Nigerians; only 1 pathologist per 700,000 Sudanese; only 1 pathologist per 1.5 million Ugandans; Niger only has 288 doctors for 14 million people; and Mozambique only has 548 doctors for 26 million people.
Needless to say, mobile health technologies (smart phones, telemedicine, medical drones, etc.) all offer the potential for disruptive solutions, especially in conditions when instead of relying on traditional infrastructure and healthcare models, populations need access to inexpensive, easily accessible, problem solving technologies, especially when the nearest doctor is a couple hundred miles away.
Malawi.
