Poll responses received on or before February 14/19 have been included in the results, which you can find by clicking here!

I’ve been writing and asking readers about your experiences with digital innovation and disruption for some time now, and think it important for us to stay on top of such matters.

I assembled my first international panel on Digital Disruption and Your Career back in 2017. In that series, I posed questions to Real Careers alumni Sofie Koark, MistiLynn Lokken, Janice Parker, Helen Rees and Julia Schmidt, and also shared insights from John Shaw.

“I haven’t really known life without a smartphone since I entered university” – Janice Parker, Australia/England

I’ve written here about congressional hearings in the US, about the rise of AI bots and esports. The International DOTA 2 Championships are gamers’ equivalents of a major sporting event. As audiences in the UK already know, I also speak on these advances as part of my presentations on IR4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

I’ll be sharing some of the results of this poll in presentations and in my upcoming book

Shelagh’s articles on AI and digital disruption

Want to review how our thinking on digital disruption and AI has been progressing? Have a look at any of my past articles and Weekend Polls via the links below.

• Digital Disruption and Your Career
• May 10/17 Weekend Poll: Digitization in the Workplace
• Weekend Poll Results: The Digitized Workplace
• May 17/17 Weekend Poll: Apps and Social Media as Part of Your Daily Life
• Weekend Poll Results: Apps and Social Media
• Using Technology to Digitize Your Workplace
• May 25/17 Weekend Poll: Web Publishing and Social Media
• Weekend Poll Results: Web Publishing and Social Media are Part of the Job
• Digitization’s Impact on Meetings
• June 1/17 Weekend Poll: Could You Walk Away from Social Media for a Week?
• Weekend Poll Results: My Name is “X” and I’m Addicted to Social Media
• Digital Disruption: Evolution of Responsibilities
• Apps as Today’s Go-To Resources
• Digital Disruption: Working Remotely
• Digital Disruption: Off-Site Hardware Expedites Business
• Digital Disruption: Adapting to Change
• Digital Disruption: Do You Need A Mentor?

“It is hard to understand how I used to work before” – Sofie Koark, Sweden

 The field of AI is moving faster than we realise

OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company with the published goal of discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence (AGI).

OpenAI’s CTO and co-founder Greg Brockman was one of four witnesses to testify before Congress in June 2018 and he gave BNN Bloomberg an interview following those hearings. Here are just some of his comments: “We’re starting to be able to build faster and faster computers, at a rate that is a lot faster than anything we’ve seen – and so we don’t know, five years from now, what we will be capable of building.”

2018: “The amount of compute thrown at the largest AI systems has been growing at a rate of doubling every three and a half months for the past six years”

Brockman explained that OpenAI recently studied the growth of computation in the field, and “found that the amount of compute thrown at the largest AI systems has been growing at a rate of doubling every three and a half months for the past six years.”

“That’s a total growth of 300,000 times and we project the same thing for the next five years, which means that, to put that in perspective, if would be like if your phone battery went from having one day of battery life to having 800 years of battery life, and then five years from now and (having) 100 million years of battery life.”

How are you feeling about all this?

I know that many assistants don’t see AI impacting their current roles, and understand that. It’s worth noting, though, Brockman’s comments about potential AI applications that can operate in areas of high responsibility. When asked about the impacts of AI in the short and long terms, Brockman offered his take: people overestimate the immediate (short term) impacts of technologies, but underestimate the long term impacts.

All this leads to my latest Weekend Poll, in which I’m asking:

How are you feeling about AI and Digitization?

Please take a couple of minutes to complete the poll below. As always, I look forward to hearing what you have to say and will publish results early next week.