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This is a bit concerning ; it is feeling a lot like 1972 again when my mother and sisters took a special trip to D.C. for a special meeting and event.


When I moved to the Bay Area in 2007 to run the Wikimedia Foundation, the first thing that struck me was the eerie absence of women. I’d spent most of my working life at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where we used to joke that women took power when the men went off to war in 1939, and afterward refused to give it back. At the CBC, easily half my colleagues, regardless of their gender, were overt, confident, unashamed feminists.

The Bay Area tech community was different. In my first three months I had dozens of meetings with tech executives, entrepreneurs and investors, and the only women I met were scheduling the meetings and bringing drinks to the boardrooms. I started asking myself what year it was in Silicon Valley for women. Had we reached the point where we could wear pantsuits and play golf, or was it still the Mad Men era?

Women make up a tiny fraction, roughly 15%, of people working in technical roles in the tech industry. And amazingly, that percentage is dropping, not rising. Multiple studies have found that the proportion of women in the tech workforce peaked in about 1989 and has been steadily dropping ever since.

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DoD spending $12 to $15 billion of its FY17 budget on small bets that includes NextGen tech improvements — WOW. Given the DARPA new Neural Engineering System Design (NESD); guessing we may finally have a Brain Mind Interface (BMI) soldier in the future.


The Defense Department will invest the $12 billion to $15 billion from its Fiscal Year 2017 budget slotted for developing a Third Offset Strategy on several relatively small bets, hoping to produce game-changing technology, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

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“According to many industry observers, we are today on the cusp of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D printing and genetics and biotechnology are all building on and amplifying one another…”


The World Economic Forum (WEF) published an analysis today on the technological and sociological drivers of employment.

The report, titled The Future of Jobs, validates the accelerating impact of technology on global employment trends, and also highlights serious concerns that job growth in certain industries is still very much outpaced by large scale declines in other industries.

The report surveyed senior executives and chief human resources officers of various companies “representing more than 13 million employees across 9 broad industry sectors in 15 major developed and emerging economies and regional economic areas.”

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“We have managed to develop a software product that will use artificial intelligence to analyze the situation in interethnic relations. This system has already been created and we are now introducing it in the regions,” Barinov told an interregional forum of the Russian National Front in Stavropol on Sunday.

However, this program is “not a cure-all”, but the first results of its work are quite promising, he added.

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Essentially, the jobs being replaced will give rise to new roles that people can take up.

“There are new classes of jobs that we haven’t thought of yet. Those who can curate and manage the full rich data lifecycle will be a new class of professional,” Shadbolt added.


Whether you like it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are going to be a big part of the future workforce.

Amid warnings about “killer robots” from the likes of Tesla boss Elon Musk and the way in which they could take over your job, businesses are bracing for changes to the workforce over the next few years.

In a report published Monday, the World Economic Forum estimated that up to 5.1 million jobs could be lost over the next five years in the 15 global leading economies from disruptive labor market changes such as robots and artificial intelligence.

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People with a family history of some inheritable diseases like cystic fibrosis can now be tested to see if they carry the genes for the condition. If neither parent has the disease, but both carry the corresponding gene or genes, the odds of having a child with the condition are higher.


Cambridge diagnostics company Good Start Genetics has partnered with Helix, a startup in California, to bring its genetic tests to a bigger market.

People with a family history of some inheritable diseases like cystic fibrosis can now be tested to see if they carry the genes for the condition. If neither parent has the disease, but both carry the corresponding gene or genes, the odds of having a child with the condition are higher.

Good Start is among the companies that specializes in such “carrier testing” and sells tests for 23 diseases, including cystic fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy.

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Dear readers,

I had the honor of speaking on the future of technology at the Nobel Prize gatherings in Gothenburg, Sweden. Every year, the Nobel Prize picks a theme of interest to the world on the state of sciences in different arenas. This year’s theme was the future of intelligence, with a focus on different technologies that are changing our ability to see and understand large sets of information and create computer systems that might reach human level thinking — I believe that progress is accelerating.

I enjoyed giving the keynote and participating in panel discussions with interesting colleagues during the day long event called Nobel Week Dialog, which takes place the week of the Nobel Prize awards. The day is open to the public and hosts top scientific thinkers presenting on the future of innovation and knowledge. I also attended the gala and awards ceremony — a spectacular display of the power of ideas and research helping the world to progress and solve serious challenges.

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