What are the 3 things you need to do to survive in the future work economy

Written by

Simon T. Bailey, MA, CSP, CPAEExecutive Advisor, Career Mentor, and Keynote Speaker

85% of your financial success is due to your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate,and lead. Shockingly, only 15% is due to technical knowledge.” -Carnegie Institute of Technology

1. Be an early adopter when it comes to technology. When I created the Building Business Relationshipscourse back in 2013, the boomers who were advising me said, “Don’t do it. And they said don’t do it because the young company, Lynda.com (and now #LinkedInLearning), would own the content into perpetuity. However, when I visited the facility, I saw 500 22-year-old young people running around there, and something in my gut said, “I’ve got to be a part of this.” I threw caution to the wind, said no to traditional advice, and said “yes” to what I felt in my gut. Today, Building Business Relationships has been viewed over 400,000 times by people in 100 countries.

While online learning and teleconferencing has taken over, virtual reality will soon be much more accessible and will again change the way that business is done. For example, a company called Doghead Simulations is racing to be the first to marry Virtual Reality and teleconferencing. Instead of GoToMeeting, you’ll be able to see an entire conference room as if you were really there. Soon, keynote speakers will be piped in using VR. Teachers will give lectures remotely. The way we communicate and build relationships will never be the same.

2. Discernment will be the most important soft skill. So many times, business is done in what I call the unspoken word; the intangibles; the ability to intuitively and instinctively evaluate what to do next. Business is not black and white--it is totally shades of grey.

For this reason, I have to agree with Mark Cuban when he suggests liberal arts degrees will be prioritized over technical degrees in the future work economy. His argument is that these degrees will cultivate the soft skills that cannot be replaced by technology.

The greatest soft skill to cultivate in the future work economy is discernment -- the ability to read a situation or person properly and then react or respond accordingly.

Individuals who have a high level of discernment can understand “big picture” thinking--being able to connect the dots all the way from how the top of the c-suite is thinking about the vision to what execution looks like when you go to market. Employees in the future work economy will be expected to go far above the technical skill they are hired to do and will need to demonstrate that they understand how all the moving pieces connect in order to succeed.

When you practice effect discernment, you are able to build fluid relationships and mobilize networks quickly to get things done. Fluid relationships means understanding that different people think, work, and respond differently. You’ll need to be flexible and adapt on a dime.

So how can you tell if discernment is in your toolbox?

●     Can you go and connect with a person based on where they are, how they think, and how they process?

●     Do you understand how to read and adjust based on different personality types?

●     Do you know how to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish and build a bridge from where you are and where you want to go to what others are trying to do for the greater good of the company, the business, or the cause?

3. Just-in-time learning will also be critically needed. You gotta learn on the fly. You’ve got to be able to say, “I learned this right now. I apply it right now.” It’s like microwave learning. This is a learn-as-you-go society, and it’s moving.

Recently, a construction company brought me in to speak to about 450 of their sales representatives who are not into fluff, but they know that they need to get sharper when it comes to customer experience. These were meat and potatoes guys who weren’t into pixie dust, but they wanted to know how to add soft skills into the construction space.

To understand the needs of my audience, I spent a day with one of their sales representatives in St. Petersburg, Florida. I learned about their industry by spending almost 8 hours learning how they go about doing bids, sitting in on meetings, and riding around in the truck meeting clients. In order to effectively teach to this audience, I had to learn their industry on the fly and turn around and apply that learning to create a product that worked for that company.

The future work economy will be an environment that rewards strategic thinkers who see into the future, are quick to mobilize, and know when and how to change direction. It’s time to quit your job and go to work. 

What are you doing to prepare for the new work economy? Join the conversation. #LinkedInLearning

The importance of play in innovation

 

Visit any major technology, creative or marketing office around the world right now and you will find something very different from the traditional executive environment of marble tables, wood paneling and immaculately pressed suits. You’re far more likely to find bright coloured furniture, a foosball table, some bean bags, and a slide. For the traditional executive, it may seem like you’ve entered a giant childcare facility or organised chaos, but these office environments have been quite deliberately designed.

You see, these companies recognise the profound importance of play.

The research is in. Play is essential for us all. From young children to adults, play is essential in developing creative thinking, as well as improving reasoning and problem solving skills.

Key in this research is the notion that imagination can help drive innovation. And in an age where innovation is the new competitive advantage, fostering imagination should be seen as a crucial aspect of learning and development. Psychologist, Dr Peter Gray said it best way back in 2008:

One of the main purposes of play in our species, I think, is to promote our use of imagination to solve problems. … Imagination provides the foundation for our inventiveness, our creativity, and our ability to plan for the future. ...When we allow ourselves to take a playful attitude ... we are providing ourselves with a context for solving problems that might otherwise be intractable.

The tools of play have changed, but the purpose of play has not. From collectibles to competitive video games, children can imagine storylines and seek out solutions to problems through the lens of the characters they adopt. This is really important: scenario mapping and imagining new powers or new ways of behaving is the very basis of innovation. So these instruments of play are a form of imagination seeding.

Scenario mapping and imagining new powers or new ways of behaving is the very basis of innovation

There is also growing evidence that play - at any age - is important to our happiness. Those businesses with the brightly coloured furniture and slides in the office also understand that to keep your workforce, you need to keep your team feeling good about their jobs and their workplaces. This seeding of playful environments impacts on both productivity and hcreative thinking, so it helps with staff retention and innovation, simultaneously. And it turns out that children’s happiness is influenced by their play environment, too. As the saying goes, money can’t buy happiness. Instead, for children, happiness comes from the chance to develop relationships, and to exercise imagination.

The media backlash against new forms of play (video games, or immersive experiences such as virtual reality storytelling) is as unwarranted as it has been disproven. There is ample evidence now that these technologies and experiences can have positive effects on children. In fact they are so widely accepted in universities, that they are supported as a sport.

What is useful is to ensure that time spent with these immersive experiences is supplemented by play with physical, tangible toys and equipment. 

Again, the evidence is that children who can project from their experiences in screen environments onto representative figurines, or into lived environments, are better able to solve problems than those who live entirely in the digital world.

We need to embrace the concept of play as the best chance we have as a society 

As marketers and parents, we need to take a step back from the tendency to assume that all toys and screen time are wasteful or dangerous to social development in children in particular. If these new instruments of play allow kids to think differently, take on a part as a character in a storyline, develop new relationships and find new ways to solve problems, they are actually helping their own social development.

We need to embrace the concept of play as the best chance we have as a society, to solve some of the biggest problems facing the world today. It may seem that a 'construction toy consisting of interlocking plastic building blocks' is a long way from a solution to climate change. But the kids who learn about the world from playing and thinking about how they can save the world, might just one day save our world.

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Anthony J James was awarded LinkedIn's 'Agency Publisher of the Year' for Asia Pacific. Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post maybe try one of these as well - see other posts.

Written by

Anthony J James - Innovation - Digital - Engagement LeadGlobal Head of #Digital, #Innovation, #Strategy and #Engagement, LinkedIn Agency Publisher of the Year - Asia Pacific

The importance of EQ and collaboration in innovation

Greg Satell

Posted on 23/02/2017 by Idea Spies

 

In the late 1960’s, Gary Starkweather had a serious spat with his boss.  As an engineer in Xerox’s long-range xerography unit, he saw that laser printing could be a huge business opportunity. His manager, however, was focused on improving the efficiency of the current product line, not looking to start another one.

The argument got so heated that Starkweather’s job came to be in jeopardy. Fortunately, his rabble rousing caught the attention of another division within the company, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which wasn’t interested in efficiency, but inventing a new future and they eagerly welcomed Starkweather into their ranks.

Within a decade, Xerox’s copying business declined sharply, but the laser printer took off and soon became the firm’s main source of revenue. In effect, the work that was squelched in one culture, thrived in another and saved the company. We tend to think innovation is about ideas, but it depends on people even more. Here’s how you create an innovative culture.

1. A Focus On Problem Solving

When you think about an innovative culture what probably first comes to mind is a bunch of fast moving hipsters guzzling down energy drinks and pulling all-nighters, pausing only to play a quick game of foosball or frisbee. Or maybe Steve Jobs on stage with a devilish grin just before he wows the audience with “one more thing…”

Yet in researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that very few of the organizations I studied looked like that. Some were fast moving startups, but most of the successful ones were led by executives that were mature and thoughtful, not brash or erratic. Others were large corporations and world class labs that tended to be fairly conservative.

The one thing I found in common in every fantastically innovative place I looked at was a disciplined passion for identifying new problems. Unlike most organizations, which are content to struggle with everyday issues, the enterprises I studied had a systematic method of finding new problems to work on that would take them in new directions.

The approaches vary considerably. IBM creates grand challenges, like building a computer that can beat humans at Jeopardy. Experian set up a Datalabs division to find out what’s giving its customers “agita” and launch new business off the solutions they build. Google’s “20% time acts as a human-powered search engine for new problems.

We tend to think of innovation as fast moving, but the truth is that it usually takes 30 yearsto go from an initial discovery to a measurable impact. So the “next big thing” is usually about 29 years old. If you want to innovate effectively, don’t chase the latest trend, find a problem your customers will care about and solve it for them.

2. Create Safe Spaces

In 2012, Google embarked on an enormous research project. Code-named “Project Aristotle,” the aim was to see what made successful teams tick. They combed through every conceivable aspect of how teams worked together — how they were led, how frequently they met outside of work, the personality types of the team members — no stone was left unturned.

However, despite Google’s nearly unparalleled ability to find patterns in complex data, none of the conventional criteria seemed to predict performance. In fact, what they found mattered most to team performance was psychological safety, or the ability of each team member to be able to give voice to their ideas without fear of reprisal or rebuke.

Interestingly,  highly innovative teams can be safe for some ideas, but not for others. For example, two of the scientists at PARC, Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith, developed on a revolutionary new graphics technology called SuperPaint. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in with the PARC’s vision of personal computing, the two were ostracized and eventually both left.

Smith would team up with another graphics pioneer, Ed Catmull, at the New York Institute of Technology. Later they joined George Lucas, who saw the potential for computer graphics to create a new paradigm for special effects. Eventually, the operation was spun out and bought by Steve Jobs. That company, Pixar, was sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion.

Xerox PARC is now a shadow of its former self. As it turned out, anything that didn’t have to do with the researchers’ vision for the future had no home there. So if you want to innovate consistently for the long term, you need to create a “safe space” for all ideas, not just the ones that fit with your initial mission.

3. Foster Informal Networks

In 2005, a team of researchers decided to study why some Broadway plays become hits and others flop. They looked at all the usual factors, such as production budget, marketing budget and the track record of the director, but what they found was that what was most important was informal networks of relationships among the cast and crew.

If no one had ever worked together before, both financial and creative results tended to be poor. However, if the networks among the cast and crew became too dense, performance also suffered. It was the teams that had elements of both — strong ties and new blood — that had the greatest success.

The same effect has been found elsewhere. In studies of star engineers at Bell Labs, the German automotive industry and currency traders it has been shown that tightly clustered groups, combined with long range “weak ties” that allow information to flow freely among disparate clusters of activity results in better innovation.

So before you embark on your next reorganization designed to “break down silos” you might want to think about how informal relationships develop within your enterprise. The truth is that innovation is never about nodes. It’s always about networks.

4. Promote Collaboration

All too often, we think of innovation as the work of lone geniuses who, in a flash of inspiration, arrive at a eureka moment. Yet the truth is that research shows that the high value work is done in teams, those teams are increasing in size, are far more interdisciplinary than in the past and the work is done at greater distances.

Just as importantly, there is growing evidence that it is crucial how these teams function. A study done by the CIA performed after 9/11 to determine what attributes made for the most effective analyst teams found that what made teams successful was not the attributes of their members, or even the coaching they got from their leaders, but the interactions within the team itself.

In another, more wide ranging study, scientists at MIT and Carnegie Mellon found that high performing teams are made up with people who have high social sensitivity, take turns when speaking and, surprisingly, the number of women in the group. There is also a wealth of research that shows diverse teams outperform more homogenous units.

So the evidence is both abundant and clear, if you want to make your organization more innovative, don’t go searching for hard driving “A” personalities spouting off big ideas and interrupting others, but rather seek diversity, empathy and to network your organization so that teams interact more effectively.

As MIT’s Sandy Pentland has put it, “We teach people that everything that matters happens between your ears, when in fact it actually happens between people.”

by Greg Satell

Innovation Advisor, Author and Speaker

 DigitalTonto

An earlier version of this article first appeared in Inc.com

Google has shipped 10M Cardboard VR viewers, 160M Cardboard app downloads

BY INGRID LUNDEN

Feb 28, 2017

Google is putting a lot of its virtual reality focus right now on its Daydream VR framework, but today Amit Singh, the company’s VP of VR, also gave an update on its earlier (and still active) effort in the area, Google Cardboard. He said that to date the company has shipped 10 million Cardboard VR sets, and it has seen 160 million downloads of Cardboard apps, with 30 individual Cardboard apps downloaded at least 1 million times each.

The comments were made on stage at Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, where Singh is speaking today (see picture above).

It’s an interesting milestone and shows that even while Google is pushing the next iteration of its VR efforts with Daydream to hit a wider range of devices and users — Daydream-compatible mobile handsets can be turned into VR headsets (when inserted into an accessory to mount it on your head) — the very pared-down, free first version Cardboard continues to show momentum. It was only in July of last year that Google said it had hit 5 million headsetsshipped since it first launched in 2014.

He also gave an update on Daydream, which Singh described as a “more immersive” experience than Cardboard and the result of what Google has learned from the first product. He said people using Daydream-ready phones/headsets are watching about 40 minutes per week. There are now six phones and 100 Daydream apps to explore on the market, he noted.

Well over 50% of all content consumption on Daydream is of YouTube content, Singh said, and it’s going to put more focus now on providing more premium (professional not necessarily paid) content on the platform in the form of series.

“You will start to see significant series coming out this year,” Singh said. He said that there have been over 1 million views of an NFL series in the U.S. Now in Europe Google has partnered with Sky VR, he announced today, a VR initiative from Europe’s dominant pay-TV provider.

“Sky VR is coming to Daydream,” he said. Initial content will include both primary films and original series, as well as supplementary programs, Singh noted. Some will be a red carpet show for Star Wars, clips from the Jungle Book, and Sky Sports experiences with personalities like David Beckham and sports like Formula One. Other premium content partners on the Daydream platform include Hulu, Netflix and HBO.

In a separate blog post published after Singh’s stage appearance, Google also noted some new content for Tango, Google’s augmented reality platform. The Sims app now will let you travel around the Sims house; the Chelsea Kicker app will make a Chelsea football player appear in front of you for a selfie or to show you a trick with the ball; and (perhaps less exciting and more Minority Report) an AR app from the WSJ will let you visualise stock trends in midair.

I’ll be speaking to Singh later today and will update this post with more of his thoughts.

Updated with AR detail from blog post made public after initial story was published.

10 Personal Innovation Lessons of Gijs van Wulfen

 

Written by

Gijs van WulfenInspiring you to master innovation 

Yes, innovation is extremely difficult. That's why I love it actually. My personal mission is to simplify innovation so you, your colleagues and/or clients will be able to master innovation yourself.

"How can I become a successful innovator?" is the most asked question to me offstage, after a keynote on innovation. Most people are well aware that their organisations are not able to stand still in this fast paced business environment. But a lot of people don't know how to start innovation. Most of them are afraid to fail, ending up by doing nothing, until doing nothing is a bigger risk.

That's why I like to share with you ten personal innovation lessons to inspire you to become a successful innovator.

Lesson 1: "Organisations frustrate their most innovative employees." - Organisations are rules by best practices, procedures and regulations, which is completely understandable as they want to be the best in class in their current product-market combinations. As innovator you are continuously tweaking present offerings and coming up with completely new concepts. The unfortunate thing is that they hardly ever fit present best practices, procedures and regulations. Sometimes you get the impression that everybody within the company tries to stop you, instead of giving you a helping hand. Companies really know how to frustrate their most innovative employees. Innovation is always a struggle. My personal lessons learned was that I just needed 'to learn to love the struggle'. That helped a lot.

Lesson 2: "Most Managers behave like dogs. They bark at what they do not know." - Or should I say "Most people...."? How do you behave yourself when someone reaches out to you to tell a great new idea? Do you really listen? Do you ask questions to understand what it's really about? Do you postpone your own judgement? No. Most of us don't. Something new never fits in our known patterns and routines. When dogs see something they don't know the get frightened and start to bark. We humans are so alike :-).

Lesson 3:"Managers say yes to innovation only if doing nothing is a bigger risk." - The chance that a front-end innovation project actually becomes a success on the market is one out of seven. Why should a top manager say yes to innovations with a high risk as long as low-risk line/brand extensions will still do the job? He or she won't. No, most managers say yes to innovation if doing nothing is a bigger risk.

Lessons 4: "A manager want to control innovation and that's where it ends. A leader leads innovation and that's where it starts." - Managing innovation in a controlling way will never work, because per definition real innovation is a high risk venture with many uncertainties. If you manage real innovations like 'a normal project', it will never work. Getting an idea to the market takes a long time and the process is full of iterations. Trying to control it, in a conventional PRINCE-like structure will kill it for sure.

Lesson 5: "Real innovative leaders give both focus and freedom." - Leading innovation by giving both focus and freedom works much better. As leader make sure that your teams focus on the right strategic priorities and know what you expect from them. On the other hand, to be effective, you must give them freedom. Freedom to do it in an unorthodox way, with unorthodox partners, which keeps the passion of your innovators high.

Lesson 6: Innovation is not a person or a department. It's a mindset." - When you outsource innovation to a person or to a department most of the times nothing materialises. Innovation affects the total internal value chain, and everybody involved. It's all about creating an innovative mindset: an way of thinking open to the world around you, which sparks new ideas and gives you energy to to take action.

Lesson 7: "You can invent alone, but you can't innovate alone." - How many people do you need in your organization to get a new concept from idea to market launch? Right. A lot of people. You can come up with an idea on your own. but you need a lotto colleagues to develop it, to produce it, to do the logistics, to do the sales and of course do the invoicing for it. So connect your colleagues in your innovation project from the start. We they are co-creators they will be the strongest supporters.

Lesson 8: "The best innovators are need seekers." - Need Seekers, such as Apple and Procter & Gamble, make a point of engaging customers directly to generate new ideas. They develop new products and services based on superior end-user understanding. Studies confirm that following a Need Seekers strategy offers the greatest potential for superior performance in the long term. Need seeking is essential, because a good innovation is a simple solution to a relevant customer need.

Lesson 9: "Think outside the box and present your idea inside the box otherwise nothing happens." - Of course you are expected to break patterns. And originality helps. But when you present your idea it is wise to keep in mind that the rest of the organization is still as conservative as ever. Your senior management might praise you for your creativity. But, will they buy the idea and give you the resources to develop it after seeing a movie, a mock up or a flash mob? I have my doubts. Don't bring them ideas, bring them business and growth potential!

Lesson 10: "If there's no urgency, innovation is considered as playtime." - Most people in your organisation focus on the business of today. As, innovation will only pay off tomorrow. A lot of companies consider innovation as 'nice to have', although they will hesitate to said this out loud. it's considered by many executives as playtime, as long as there's no urgency. That's why in cost cutting programmes innovation will be one of the first activities to be killed.

I wish you lots of success on your personal innovation journey. Please share your own innovation lessons below, as a comment.

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Do you want to improve your personal innovation skills? Check out this hands-on training April 2017 in the proven FORTH innovation method. http://www.forth-innovation.com/training/ 

To read more from Gijs on LinkedIn, please click the FOLLOW button above or below.

picture credits: flickr.com - creative commons. Thanks you: Suncop8ted, Christopher Lance, Dermot O Halloran, Tom Conger, remi DU, David, Wiedz, Mobile Engineers, Hilde Sjkolberg, Gem66, Garett LeSage, Petras Gagilas, Adam Swank, Sarah G, Thomas Hawk for all your wonderful pictures.

Written by

Gijs van WulfenInspiring you to master innovation 

The Robots are coming - are our jobs safe?

 

Oxford University researchers have estimated that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated within the next two decades. But which white-collar jobs will robots take first?

First, we should define “robots” (for this article only) as technologies, such as machine learning algorithms running on purpose-built computer platforms, that have been trained to perform tasks that currently require humans to perform. With this in mind, let’s think about what you’ll do after white-collar work. Oh, and I do have a solution for the short term that will make you the last to lose your job to a robot, but I’m saving it for the end of the article.

1 – Middle Management

If your main job function is taking a number from one box in Excel and putting it in another box in Excel and writing a narrative about how the number got from place to place, robots are knocking at your door. Any job where your “special and unique” knowledge of the industry is applied to divine a causal relationship between numbers in a matrix is going to be replaced first. Be ready.

2 – Commodity Salespeople (Ad Sales, Supplies, etc.)

Unless you sell dreams or magic or negotiate using special perks, bribes or other valuable add-ons that have nothing to do with specifications, price and availability, start thinking about your next gig. Machines can take so much cost out of any sales process (request for proposal, quotation, order and fulfillment system), it is the fiduciary responsibility of your CEO and the board to hire robots. You’re fighting gravity … get out!

3 – Report Writers, Journalists, Authors & Announcers

Writing is tough. But not report writing. Machines can be taught to read data, pattern match images or video, or analyze almost any kind of research materials and create a very readable (or announceable) writing. Text-to-speech systems are evolving so quickly and sound so realistic, I expect both play-by-play and color commentators to be put out of work relatively soon – to say nothing about the numbered days of sports or financial writers. You know that great American novel you’ve been planning to write? Start now, before the machines take a creative writing class.

4 – Accountants & Bookkeepers

Data processing probably created more jobs than it eliminated, but machine learning–based accountants and bookkeepers will be so much better than their human counterparts, you’re going to want to use the machines. Robo-accounting is in its infancy, but it’s awesome at dealing with accounts payable and receivable, inventory control, auditing and several other accounting functions that humans used to be needed to do. Big Four auditing is in for a big shake-up, very soon.

5 – Doctors

This may be one of the only guaranteed positive outcomes of robots’ taking human jobs. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100, according to a new UN DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) report. In practice, if everyone who ever wanted to be a doctor became one, we still would not have enough doctors.

The good news is that robots make amazing doctors, diagnosticians and surgeons. According to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, IBM’s Watson is teaming up with a dozen US hospitals to offer advice on the best treatments for a range of cancer, and also helping to spot early-stage skin cancers. And ultra-precise robo-surgeons are currently used for everything from knee replacement surgery to vision correction. This trend is continuing at an incredible pace. I’m not sure how robodoc bedside manner will be, but you could program a “Be warm and fuzzy” algorithm and the robodoc would act warm and fuzzy. (Maybe I can get someone to program my human doctors with a warm and fuzzy algorithm?)

But Very Few Jobs Are Safe

During the Obama administration, a report of the president was published (it is no longer available at whitehouse.gov, but here’s the original link) that included a very dire prediction: “There is an 83% chance that workers who earn $20 an hour or less could have their jobs replaced by robots in the next five years. Those in the $40 an hour pay range face a 31% chance of having their jobs taken over by the machines.” Clearly, the robots are coming.

What to Do About It

In What Will You Do After White-Collar Work?, I propose, “First, technological progress is neither good nor bad; it just is. There’s no point in worrying about it, and there is certainly no point trying to add some narrative about the “good ol’ days.” It won’t help anyone. The good news is that we know what’s coming. All we have to do is adapt.

Adapting to this change is going to require us to understand how man-machine partnerships are going to evolve. This is tricky, but not impossible. We know that machine learning is going to be used to automate many, if not most, low-level cognitive tasks. Our goal is to use our high-level cognitive ability to anticipate what parts of our work will be fully automated and what parts of our work will be so hard for machines to do that man-machine partnership is the most practical approach.

With that strategy, we can work on adapting our skills to become better than our peers at leveraging man-machine partnerships. We’ve always been tool-users; now we will become tool-partners.”

Becoming a great man-machine partner team will not save every job, but it is a clear pathway to prolonging your current career while you figure out what your job must evolve into in order to continue to transfer the value of your personal intellectual property into wealth.

About Shelly Palmer

Named one of LinkedIn’s Top 10 Voices in Technology, Shelly Palmer is CEO of The Palmer Group, a strategic advisory, technology solutions and business development practice focused at the nexus of media and marketing with a special emphasis on machine learning and data-driven decision-making. He is Fox 5 New York's on-air tech and digital media expert, writes a weekly column for AdAge, and is a regular commentator on CNBC and CNN. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com or subscribe to our daily email http://ow.ly/WsHcb

Facial Recognition is becoming a game changer

Fmgfear srticle from Bob Pritchard 

Facial recognition systems that can verify a person’s identity have been around for several years now with security cameras and criminal databases. 

Now with the rapid improvements to big data analytics and artificial intelligence, facial recognition software is about to become commonplace and change the way we live and interact with the world.

 

Consumers will be able to use facial recognition  to make purchases, book tickets and unlock doors simply by looking into a camera lens and letting the software make rapid simultaneous measurements of the face that’s as distinct as a fingerprint. 

This AI-powered facial recognition software will be more convenient, far more secure, and create new exciting apps and hardware.   

At a time of uncertainty it will also allow security forces to track and identify people with far more precision.

The latest facial recognition software from Baidu, China’s version of Google is currently being used by Didi, China’s equivalent to Uber, to allow customers to confirm the identities of their drivers and is being deployed in high tourism cities to provide ticketless access to attractions. And Chinese security officials are deploying the technology to hunt down criminal suspects by drawing from its national ID database as well as images collected from public security cameras that dot the country.

 It is the new applications that facial recognition is making possible that is exciting. When you combine facial recognition technology with deep learning, the AI technique that’s emerged over the last few years, what you get is facial recognition that’s good enough to identify people even when video of them is grainy,  if the video is shot at an odd angle or even pick one person in a crowd of a million people in times Square on New Years Eve.

This is one of the profound advancements and also the most disconcerting. With extreme accuracy, the new technology can take a blurry image and identify what parts of the image should be used to create the fingerprint-like facial profile. The results have been extremely accurate.

Deep learning is a relatively new form of artificial intelligence involving a network of complex algorithms that are loosely based on the neural networks of a human brain. It’s basically a very potent pattern recognizer that draws from an immense amount of data that enables computers to do things like automatically add accurate colors to black-and-white photos or visually translate the text of a restaurant menu snapped by a smartphone camera.

This technology has the potential to make consumer life easier with ticketless train rides and transactions that don’t require a form of laminated identification, it will have increasingly significant ramifications for privacy and state surveillance.

The risks to privacy and civil liberties are substantial with technologies like facial recognition that can be used to identify and track people covertly, even remotely, and on a mass scale, for example, identifying individuals at lawful protests. The public should be skeptical of any surveillance technology implemented for consumer convenience that builds a mass surveillance network the government can appropriate for intentions beyond the scope of the original purpose.

As facial recognition technology grows more powerful, it will also heighten privacy concerns. Like many emerging technologies that rely on collecting massive amounts of data, it will be up to the public and lawmakers to decide how far they want to compromise privacy in exchange for convenience.  

To be really effective, the government must have the trust of the public.   Unfortunately, we have people in some parts of the US who are stocking up on guns and ammunition to protect themselves from the government, as crazy as that sounds.   So we are a hell of a long way from trust.

So it all comes down to the core value of TRUST