Artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, cognitive computing — whatever you want to call machines that are capable of understanding and acting upon their environment — is no longer solely the purview of highly credentialed lab directors and deep-thinking computer scientists. It has entered mainstream consciousness, and the public expects IT to play a leadership role as machine learning enters our workplaces, our living spaces and our lives. Will you be ready?

Chances are that you are not. Most executives, in the opinion of New York Times technology columnist John Markoff, are “ill prepared for this new world in the making.”

This is unacceptable. People have been thinking about automated work forever. The first reference in literature (and consistent with the historical theme that the benefits of automation accrue to the elite of society) is probably the mention of automatai —devices that opened and closed the gates of Olympus so that the gods in their chariots could go in and out — in Book 5 of The Illiad. (As Daniel Mendelsohn noted in The New York Review of Books, this was some 30 centuries before the first automatic garage door opener.) And a close reading of the Odyssey reveals the hero visiting a king who has gold and silver watchdogs. People have been thinking about using technology to get work done since there was work to be done.

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