Kevin Benedict is a TCS futurist, humorist and lecturer focused on the signals and foresight that emerge as society, geopolitics, economies, science, technology, environment, and philosophy converge.
Manufacturing Strategies of the Future with Siemens’ Zvi Feuer
How AI is Influencing Manufacturing with Schneider Electric Expert Helenio Gilabert
Competitiveness and Strengthening Our Future
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Understanding the Divide
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Deindustrialization and Economic Decline:
- Manufacturing jobs, once the foundation of American middle-class prosperity, have significantly declined. Between 2001 and 2007, 3.4 million manufacturing jobs were lost, followed by another 2.3 million during the Great Recession. Globalized trade and foreign competition, particularly with China, decimated industries like textiles, apparel, and furniture, leaving non-metropolitan areas economically vulnerable.
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Technological Disruption:
- Technological innovation, while driving significant productivity gains, has disproportionately replaced low-skilled jobs in industries such as manufacturing, logistics, and clerical work. This has resulted in stagnant wages and widespread job displacement, exacerbating income inequality. Meanwhile, high-skilled workers benefit from increased demand and income growth, widening the economic gap.
Breaking the Human Thinking Sound Barrier
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The Modern Pilot: A Case Study in Cognitive Overload
Consider the evolution of military aviation. In World War I, pilots operated rudimentary aircraft with only a handful of gauges, their primary focus on navigation and observation. Fast forward to today, and modern fighter jets like the F-35 are so data-intensive that they are unflyable without AI assistance. These aircraft generate vast rivers of data through advanced sensors, requiring 8.6 million lines of code to process and present actionable insights to pilots. Even with highly optimized interfaces, pilots report struggling with information overload, forcing a redefinition of their role from flying the aircraft to managing a flying command center.
AI, Eldercare and Innovation with TCS Expert Ved Sen
Mastering the Art of Decision-Making:Navigating Complexity and Speed in Modern Leadership
Transferring Human Vulnerabilities to Artificial Intelligence
The Next Big Think Podcast: Why Industry 4.0 is About Industrial Automation
Speed and a Doctrine for the Future
"Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the latter than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never." -- Napoleon Bonaparte
Must We be Good to Have a Good Future?
Will You Trust a Robot?
The Latest Developments in Artificial Intelligence and Digital Assistants at Oracle
The Future of Managers
- Reduced human errors
- Is available 24x7x365
- Can complete mundane, repetitive and routine administrative work without distraction
- Can scale
- Can make faster decisions, and take faster actions based upon established business processes
- Can find solutions and innovations faster by analyzing patterns within oceans of data
- Leave administration to AI
- Focus on judgement work
- Treat intelligent machines/agents as colleagues
- Work like a designer
- Develop your social skills and networks
Redemptive AI, Biases and the American Dream
Future of Warfare and Its Gamification
In the future, warfare will be fought increasingly by engineers, software developers, scientists, accountants and politicians, which is a historical anomaly and worth some consideration.Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before - or to self destruct. ~ Future of Life Institute
Robots that Create Jobs and Construct Apartment Buildings
Facebook's Infodemic on the Pandemic
- Twenty-One People Who Control the World
- The Utility of Truth
- Selling Beans During Boycotts, Buy-cotts and Disinformation
- Mixing Business and Politics Requires a Strategy
- Swarming and the Requirement for a Chief Values Officer
- We Can be Silent No More - Influencer Strategies and Responsibilities
- Our Minds on Facebook Algorithms
- Secrets, Brands and Global Swarming
- Facebook's Infodemic on the Pandemic
Digital Anthropology, Covid-19 and the Future of Work
Digital Transformation for the Greater Good
I believe most of us would agree that replacing large numbers of humans with machines that result in wide scale unemployment and suffering is not in our rational self-interest or the greater good. Having massive numbers of jobs terminated by the Terminator does not result in a safer, healthier, happier civilization or vibrant economy. So what is the greater good that we, out of rational self-interest, can strive for?
Just because something is possible, and VCs will fund it, does not mean it supports the greater good. Technology that takes all meaningful jobs away from humans resulting in their suffering will soon become a target for their wrath. I can already imagine brands placing badges on their products that certify "Human-Made" to gain a competitive advantage over machine-made production.
At the macro level, if businesses increasingly replace human workers with machines, they will soon have difficulty finding employed customers that can pay for their products. At what point do businesses seek to expand employment opportunities out of a rational self-interest rather than decrease them through automation? Is it even realistic to expect profit maximizing businesses to seek the greater good of the societies they operate in? We must seriously ponder these issues as gathered humans.
I think there is value in playing out future scenarios:
- In the short-term, manufacturers want to automate faster than their competition in order to gain economic advantages while there are sufficient numbers of consumers employed elsewhere to provide a market for their goods.
- In the mid-term, entire industries will automate and terminate large numbers of jobs, but hope other, slower-to-automate industries will employ their customer base so there is money to spend.
- In the long-term, however, when digital transformation has swept through all industries, who is left to employ the consumers and provide them with living wages so goods can be purchased?
There are plenty of problems left on this planet to be solved, and solving these problems could employ many. Today, however, not all of these problems have economic and greater good values assigned to them. Fresh water sources, clean air, litter removal, forestation, sustainable farming, peace, better health and wellness, improved education, beautification of public spaces, etc. All of these areas have the potential to generate enormous benefits for the greater good, but they need society to place a value on them and fund employment in these areas which are not always profit generating but support the greater good.
A vibrant economy, and a safe and secure society depends on healthy employment numbers, adequate wages, property ownership, human and property rights, hope, peace and purpose. Digital transformation must add to the greater good, or it risks accelerating a break down in our society and economy.
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A Digital Leader's Playbook
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Digital Strategies |
What follows is a list of key strategies, concepts and mindsets that will help your enterprise win:
Interviews with Kevin Benedict
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In this interview, we sit down with Gartner’s Deepak Seth to explore the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its far-re...
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In this episode of FOBtv, Jasen Williams, the Global VP of Corporate Marketing at Verint, shares his insights on the evolving landscape of c...