At IGNITION 2018, Andy Main,  head of Deloitte Digital, spoke with John Heggestuen, vice president of research for Business Insider Intelligence. They cover the biggest tech themes of the year: AI, blockchain, data, and consumer trust. 

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• Salesforce will hire Paula Goldman as its first Chief Ethical and Humane Use officer.
• Goldman will spearhead a new Office of Ethical and Humane Use, which focuses on developing strategies to use technology in an ethical and humane way at the company.
• This announcement comes during a year of protests in Silicon Valley over how companies — including Salesforce — put its technology to use, as tech workers protest deals with the U.S. military and immigration authorities. 

In the midst of the ongoing controversies over how tech companies can use artificial intelligence for no good, Salesforce is about to hire its first Chief Ethical and Humane Use officer.

On Monday, Salesforce announced it would hire Paula Goldman to lead its new Office of Ethical and Humane Use, and she will officially start on Jan. 7. This office will focus on developing strategies to use technology in an ethical and humane way at Salesforce. 

"For years, I've admired Salesforce as a leader in ethical business,” Goldman said in a statement. “We're at an important inflection point as an industry, and I'm excited to work with this team to chart a path forward."

With the development of the new Office of Ethical and Humane Use, Salesforce plans to merge law, policy and ethics to develop products in an ethical manner. That's especially notable, as Salesforce itself has come under fire from its own employees for a contract it holds with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

"We understand that we have a broader responsibility to society, and aspire to create technology that not only drives the success of our customers, but also drives positive social change and benefits humanity," Salesforce's Office of Ethical and Humane Use says.

Read more: Military work is a lightning rod in Silicon Valley, but Microsoft will sell the Pentagon all the AI it needs

Goldman will report to chief equality officer Tony Prophet. Before Salesforce, Goldman served as Vice President, Global Lead, Tech and Society Solutions Lab at Omidyar Network, a social impact investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

She has also served on Salesforce's Advisory Council for the Office of Ethical and Humane Use, which includes industry experts and academics. This council focuses on how to build technology in an ethical fashion.

“Working with Paula as a member of the Advisory Council, I was immediately impressed by her exceptional leadership and thoughtful approach to truly complex issues,” Tony Prophet, Salesforce Chief Equality Officer, sad in a statement. “I'm confident Paula is the right person to lead us into this next chapter at Salesforce."

Goldman is also the founder and director of Imagining Ourselves, a project of the International Museum of Women. She has received the Social Impact Award from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and a Muse Award from the American Association of Museums.

However, she'll have a tough challenge ahead, as she navigates the increasingly murky world of Silicon Valley ethics, as Salesforce itself gets drawn into the debate around right and wrong ways to use technology. 

Salesforce has come under fire

In Silicon Valley, employees and activists continue to protest tech giants' use of artificial intelligence and other technologies that could potentially be used for unethical ends.

For example, at Google, thousands of employees signed a petition — and some even resigned— over Project Maven, a contract with the Department of Defense that would see the company's AI used to analyze drone footage.

Following the internal backlash, Google CEO Sundar Pichai published a set of ethical principles on how it will use AI. Google also decided not to renew its contract with the Department of Defense, and later, decided to drop out of a bid for a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon. Still, there is ongoing controversy internally and externally at Google over Project Dragonfly, a project to build a censored search engine for China.

This controversy has touched Salesforce, too. More than 650 Salesforce employees wrote a letter to CEO Marc Benioff to protest the company's work with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in light of President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policies. 

Weeks later, tech workers and activists demonstrated in front of Salesforce Tower, the company's San Francisco headquarters. Also, a non-profit group that provides legal services to immigrants rejected a $250,000 donation from Salesforce, saying that it couldn't accept the money unless the company canceled the contract.

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NOW WATCH: 7 things you shouldn't buy on Black Friday

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most commonly referenced terms by financial institutions (FIs) and payments firms when describing their vision for the future of financial services. 

AI can be applied in almost every area of financial services, but the combination of its potential and complexity has made AI a buzzword, and led to its inclusion in many descriptions of new software, solutions, and systems.

This report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, cuts through the hype to offer an overview of different types of AI, and where they have potential applications within banking and payments. It also emphasizes which applications are most mature, provides recommendations of how FIs should approach using the technology, and offers examples of where FIs and payments firms are already leveraging AI. The report draws on executive interviews Business Insider Intelligence conducted with leading financial services providers, such as Bank of America, Capital One, and Mastercard, as well as top AI vendors like Feedzai, Expert System, and Kasisto.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• AI, or technologies that simulate human intelligence, is a trending topic in banking and payments circles. It comes in many different forms, and is lauded by many CEOs, CTOs, and strategy teams as their saving grace in a rapidly changing financial ecosystem.
• Banks are using AI on the front end to secure customer identities, mimic bank employees, deepen digital interactions, and engage customers across channels.
• Banks are also using AI on the back end to aid employees, automate processes, and preempt problems.
• In payments, AI is being used in fraud prevention and detection, anti-money laundering (AML), and to grow conversational payments volume.

 In full, the report:

• Offers an overview of different types of AI and their applications in payments and banking. 
• Highlights which of these applications are most mature.
• Offers examples where FIs and payments firms are already using the technology. 
• Provides descriptions of vendors of different AI-based solutions that FIs may want to consider using.
• Gives recommendations of how FIs and payments firms should approach using the technology.

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• Amazon executives appeared in front of New York City's council to answer questions about its headquarters that are heading to Long Island City in New York's borough of Queens.
• In response to a question about Amazon's relationship with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, VP Brian Huseman said: "We believe the government should have the best available technology."
• Amazon has faced sharp criticism from the public — and employees as well — for selling its facial recognition software to law enforcement, including to immigration officials who could use it to further their deportation program.

Amazon faced tough questions Wednesday about the extent of the company's business providing technology such as facial recognition to federal immigration officials.

Executives from the tech giant appeared Wednesday in front of New York City council members to answer local lawmakers' questions about Amazon's newest headquarters, dubbed HQ2, that's coming to the city's Queens neighborhood. But Amazon representatives faced a slew of questions about not only about HQ2's impact on Long Island City, but also on Amazon's relationship with law enforcement agencies.

Corey Johnson, the city council speaker, asked specifically about Amazon's dealings with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"We believe the government should have the best available technology," said Brian Huseman, Amazon's vice president of public policy.

Huseman's answer was met with a chorus of boo's from protestors, who filled the council meeting and often interrupted proceedings with chants and feedback. 

Read more: 'I was not elected to be a cheerleader for Amazon': New York officials rail against Amazon's HQ2 deal amid shouts of protesters in a wild hearing

Amazon's facial recognition software, called Rekognition, has been met with much criticism since the company's partnership with police and government agencies was revealed. The backlash grew after it was reported Amazon had met with ICE, raising further concerns the AI face-scanning ID software would be used to aid the immigration agency's deportation and tracking program.

Amazon declined to comment on any further on Huseman's comments on Tuesday, but did say that it "wasn't the intent" of Huseman's response to confirm ICE's use of Amazon software.

"We have not been able to replicate the findings"

Criticism has been leveled from employees inside Amazon as well. Hundreds of Amazon employees have called on CEO Jeff Bezos to halt the sale of facial recognition to government agencies. Employees geared up to confront Bezos at a company meeting in November, but Amazon's cloud CEO, Andy Jassy, reportedly dismissed the feedback as an unpopular opinion only shared by a small group in the company.

Huseman was also pressed Wednesday about an experiment from the American Civil Liberties Union that found that Amazon's Rekognition software incorrectly ID'd members of Congress as people who had been arrested in the past.

"We have not been able to replicate the findings of that," Huseman said. 

"I think that will come as cold comfort to people who are picked up as a result of your facial recognition," NYC council member Brad Lander responded.

SEE ALSO: The 18 biggest tech scandals of 2018

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NOW WATCH: Why it's so difficult to land a spacecraft on Mars

With 2018 rapidly winding down, Zapier has released its annual report of the year's fastest-growing workplace apps.

Zapier — which rhymes with "happier"— connects apps through simple integrations that help users automate their work and be more productive. That means it gets good insight on the fastest-growing apps just by watching which pieces of software its users are looking for.

Placing highly on the list, oddly enough, is Facebook, as well as a tool for managing chatbots — something that some in Silicon Valley had written off as a fad but is still finding an audience.

This year's list points to some general trends in productivity tools. First of all, many of the trendiest tools allow users to customize the way they work. Many of the apps on the report allow users to customize their team's communication tools, their websites, and how they manage projects.

"They really let you customize what you're doing,"Zapier CEO Wade Foster told Business Insider. "I think that's interesting, as you see early adopters get more comfortable with technology. … We're going to see even more of that in 2019."

The report also includes software suites that put lots of tools in one place, and it indicates that users are relying on productivity tools that automate work routines, so that they get more done and can focus on tasks that only humans can do.

Here are the 10 fastest-growing apps of 2018, according to Zapier:

10. Zoho Forms

This tool, part of the Zoho cloud suite, lets users make web forms for users and customers to fill out — for instance, an order form for a catering gig or feedback for a conference session.

9. Mailshake

Mailshake is used for email marketing. It allows users to customize these emails using tools like templates, bulk email, auto follow-ups, and tracking for clicks and replies.

8. WPForms

This is a plugin for the WordPress content-management system that lets users make their own web forms.

• Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, this week defended Google's work on Project Maven — its controversial pilot program with the Pentagon. 
• Employee objections to the work, which involved developing artificial-intelligence technologies for use by the Defense Department, were based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the work, said Cerf, who is Google's chief internet evangelist.
• But the company could have been more transparent about what it was doing, he acknowledged.

If you ask Vint Cerf, the protests at Google about its contract to help develop artificial-intelligence technologies for the military can be chalked up to a misunderstanding.

Employees that objected to the company's work for the Defense Department didn't really understand the nature of the work or its benefits, Cerf, a vice president at the search giant and its chief internet evangelist, told Business Insider this week at the "Our People-Centered Digital Future" conference in San Jose.

Although some Google employees expressed concern that the technology could be used by the military to kill people, that's not what the project was about, he said. 

"People were leaping to conclusions about the purpose of those contracts and the objectives of the contracts that I don't think were justifiable," said Cerf, chairman of the People Centered Internet coalition, which helped organize the conference. PCI is an international group dedicated to ensuring "that the Internet continues to improve people's lives and livelihoods and that the Internet is a positive force for good." 

A quiet contract led to mass protests

Google quietly signed a contract to provide its AI technology to the military as part of the latter's Project Maven effort in September 2017. Under the contract, the company was due to help the Defense Deparment use machine-learning algorithms to analyze drone footage.

When employees learned of the effort in February, many of them were outraged. Many expressed concern that even if the technology wasn't initially developed for lethal purposes, it could eventually be used for that. More than 4,000 signed a letter demanding that the company cancel the contract and promise to never build "warfare technology." About a dozen also resigned from the company in protest over it. 

The company announced in June that it wouldn't renew the contract when it expires next year, and company CEO Sundar Pichai announced a set of principles that would guide its AI development and applications. Among other things, he said the company wouldn't "design or deploy" AI that would be used for weapons or for illegitimate surveillance.

Read this:Google just released a set of ethical principles about how it will use AI technology

Cerf said the contract was about "situational awareness"

To Cerf, though, the brouhaha was overblown. Employee concerns about the use of Google's AI technology by the military were generally unfounded, he said.

As he understands it, the purpose of the contract was to develop technology to automatically detect things that might be harmful, such as people putting in place improvised explosive devices. It wasn't designed to automatically detect and target individuals, he said.

"That particular project, as far as I know, was not to do that. It was a situational awareness application," said Cerf, who's widely considered to be one of the fathers of the internet, because he helped develop its underlying data transfer protocols. "How can I recognize what's going on around me in order to protect against [it] ... Can I automatically discover things going on in my environment that might be harmful?"

But according to Gizmodo, which broke the initial report on Google's Project Maven contract, the company had hoped the effort would lead to much more work for it with the military and with US intelligence agencies. As part of the project, it was already developing a system for the military that could be used to surveil entire cities, Gizmodo reported. 

The military does more than fight wars

More broadly, Cerf said, employees misunderstood the breadth of the military's mission and technology efforts. The Defense Department does more than just fight wars, he noted. Among other things, the military has helped develop technologies that have proven to be invaluable in the private sector, he said, noting his own work in the 1970s and 1980s developing internet technology on behalf of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.

"There is a lot of misunderstanding about the positive benefits of working with [and] in the public sector, the military being a part of that," he said. 

Google declined to publicize its work on Project Maven and, when it came to light, downplayed its involvement, according to published reports. The company initially told Gizmodo that its work on the project only consisted of providing the military access to the same kind of open source machine-learning tools it provides to other corporate and institutional customers of its cloud services. But the company had actually assigned more than 10 employees to the project and was actively working to customize its AI technology for the military, according to Gizmodo.

Cerf acknowledged Google may have some responsibility for the misapprehension of its employees.

"There probably was not enough transparency" regarding its Project Maven work, he said.

• Read more about the Google and the ethical issues surrounding AI:
• Amazon's cloud CEO just pooh-poohed employee concerns about selling its facial-recognition software to ICE and law enforcement
• It's become increasingly clear that Alphabet, Google's parent company, needs new leadership
• Most companies using AI say their No.1 fear is hackers hijacking the technology, according to a new survey that found attacks are already happening
• Google’s recent behavior shows the troubling reality of an internet superpower that abandoned its vow to not 'be evil'

SEE ALSO: The best way to avoid killer robots and other dystopian uses for AI is to focus on all the good it can do for us, says tech guru Phil Libin

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This is a preview of a research report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.

Major logistics providers have long relied on analytics and research teams to make sense of the data they generate from their operations.

But with volumes of data growing, and the insights that can be gleaned becoming increasingly varied and granular, these companies are starting to turn to artificial intelligence (AI) computing techniques, like machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing, to streamline and automate various processes. These techniques teach computers to parse data in a contextual manner to provide requested information, supply analysis, or trigger an event based on their findings. They are also uniquely well suited to rapidly analyzing huge data sets, and have a wide array of applications in different aspects of supply chain and logistics operations.

AI’s ability to streamline so many supply chain and logistics functions is already delivering a competitive advantage for early adopters by cutting shipping times and costs. A cross-industry study on AI adoption conducted in early 2017 by McKinsey found that early adopters with a proactive AI strategy in the transportation and logistics sector enjoyed profit margins greater than 5%. Meanwhile, respondents in the sector that had not adopted AI were in the red.

However, these crucial benefits have yet to drive widespread adoption. Only 21% of the transportation and logistics firms in McKinsey’s survey had moved beyond the initial testing phase to deploy AI solutions at scale or in a core part of their business. The challenges to AI adoption in the field of supply chain and logistics are numerous and require major capital investments and organizational changes to overcome.

In a new report, BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, explores the vast impact that AI techniques like machine learning will have on the supply chain and logistics space. We detail the myriad applications for these computational techniques in the industry, and the adoption of those different applications. We also share some examples of companies that have demonstrated success with AI in their supply chain and logistics operations. Lastly, we break down the many factors that are holding organizations back from implementing AI projects and gaining the full benefits of this disruptive technology.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• The current interest in and early adoption of AI systems is being driven by several key factors, including increased demands from shippers, recent technological breakthroughs, and significant investments in data visibility by the industry’s largest players.
• AI can deliver enormous benefits to supply chain and logistics operations, including cost reductions through reduced redundancies and risk mitigation, improved forecasting, faster deliveries through more optimized routes, improved customer service, and more.
• Legacy players face many substantial obstacles to deploying and reaping the benefits of AI systems, though, including data accessibility and workforce challenges.
• AI adoption in the logistics industry is strongly skewed toward the biggest players, because overcoming these major challenges requires costly investments in updating IT systems and breaking down data silos, as well as hiring expensive teams of data scientists.
• Although AI implementations are unlikely to result in large-scale workforce reductions in the near term, companies still need to develop strategies to address how workers' roles will change as AI systems automate specific functions.

 In full, the report:

• Details the factors driving adoption of AI systems in the supply chain and logistics field.
• Examines the benefits that AI can deliver in reducing costs and shipping times for supply chain and logistics operations.
• Explains the many challenges companies face in implementing AI in their supply chain and logistics operations to reap the benefits of this transformational technology.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >>Learn More Now
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• Vint Cerf, an internet pioneer who works at Google, said he supports employees who staged a walkout last month. 
• The walkout, which was to protest Google's handing of sexual misconduct allegations, sent the right message, Cerf said told Business Insider.

The Google workers who took part in a walkout last month to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment claims have a high-profile supporter in its executive ranks.

The demonstrations delivered the "right message" to Google managers, said Vint Cerf, a vice president at the company and its chief internet evangelist.

"The people who said the company should feel accountable for the misbehavior of employees at all levels in the organization — that's the basic message that that walkout delivered — I think that is the right message for those of us in management at Google to hear," he said.

Read this: Google's famous Googleplex headquarters was the epicenter for its worldwide walkout over gender discrimination — here's what it was like on the scene

Cerf is perhaps best known for being one of the "fathers of the internet" and helped develop the technology underlying how data is transferred on the global network. He spoke to Business Insider this week during the "Our People-Centered Digital Future" conference in San Jose. 

Although Cerf supported the sexual harassment-related walkout, he was more critical of the protests inside the company over its work to develop artificial intelligence technology for the military as part of the latter's Project Maven. The objections raised about that effort were due to misunderstandings by employees of the work Google was doing and the benefits of working with the military, he said. 

• Read more:
• An executive with Google's parent company resigns with no severance after sexual misconduct allegations come to light
• The 'father of the internet' says that Google employee backlash to its defense work was just 'a lot of misunderstanding'
• It's become increasingly clear that Alphabet, Google's parent company, needs new leadership
• Google’s recent behavior shows the troubling reality of an internet superpower that abandoned its vow to not 'be evil'

SEE ALSO: Donald Trump is right about Google — but for the wrong reason

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NOW WATCH: Here's why virtual reality still hasn't taken off, despite being around for nearly 2 decades

• Google unveiled and launched a ton of exciting new technologies in 2018.
• With 2019 right around the corner, we looked back at the highlights — and some lowlights — from Google this year.

SEE ALSO: Apple's price hikes went way too far in 2018

DON'T MISS: These were the top YouTube videos of 2018, according to Google

Google introduced a ton of new hardware in 2018.

Google unveiled a $130 gadget called Google Home Hub, which controls all of your smart-home devices (no need to open a million different apps), and shows you information at a glance.

Read our review of Google's Home Hub.

Google also released its Pixel Slate tablet, which has a brilliant display, dual front-facing speakers, two 8-megapixel cameras, and a fingerprint sensor.

Like Apple and its iPad Pro, Google also made a special keyboard and stylus that work specifically with the Pixel Slate.

The Pixel Slate starts at $600, the Pixel Slate Keyboard costs $200, and the Pixelbook Pen costs $100.

• Citigroup is partnering with artificial-intelligence-powered fraud-detection startup Feedzai to bolster the bank's $8.5 billion Treasury and Trade Solutions business.
• As a first step, the companies are collaborating on a tool to better protect the $4 trillion in payments the bank's thousands of corporate and public-sector customers send every day.
• That fast-paced business is increasingly under threat from cyber crime.
• Employing Feedzai's machine-learning capabilities, Citi is souping up a tool that alerts customers to suspicious or aberrant payments.
• Citi expects this will cut down on costly and time-consuming false positives and make the tool applicable to more clients.

Citigroup has partnered with an artificial-intelligence-powered fraud-detection startup to help protect the trillions of dollars in payments the bank's customers send every day.

Citi on Wednesday announced a broad partnership with Feedzai, a fintech company the bank has previously invested in, and their initial collaboration involves adding firepower to a Citi tool that alerts companies to aberrant or suspicious payments.

Through its crucial Treasury and Trade Solutions business, which pulled in $8.5 billion in revenue last year, Citi processes $4 trillion in payments each day for thousands of corporations and public institutions across the world.

It's a rapidly evolving business that's increasingly coming under threat from sophisticated cyber crooks — a record 78% of organizations fell victim to payment fraud last year, according to a 2018 survey from the Association for Financial Professionals.

To safeguard its customers, Citi late last year piloted a tool with a limited number of customers to detect unusual or outlier payments — say, a $5 million transaction sent at an odd hour of the night or to an unexpected country.

That aberrant payment could have a number of explanations, some innocent — an employee made an error and fat-fingered a transaction — and some nefarious, such as an unfolding cyber attack.

"The underlying reasons could be many, but what the tool does is it uses our own channels to identify the payment and go back to our customers and say, 'Is this really you? Is this the payment you intended to do?" Manish Kohli, global head of payments and receivables in Citi's Treasury and Trade Solutions division, told Business Insider.

Read more: Citi is deploying robots to help the world's biggest companies collect cash from customers — boosting a key $8.5 billion business for the bank

The solution, called Citi Payment Outlier Detection, was popular with customers, Kohli said, but it wasn't perfect.

Alerts like this, based on broadly applied rules, don't account for the nuances and different behaviors of the thousands of organizations Citi manages money for. That can result in false positives that gum up a process that moves at a breakneck pace and is only getting faster amid the adoption of digital and automated-payment technology.

It can also numb the customer to the alerts, leading to them letting their guard down — the "crying wolf" dilemma, as Kohli put it.

"A broad-based, rules-based approach is not the right way to address and find outlier transactions," Kohli said. "If you have a significant number of false positives, that actually takes away the whole efficiency and value of a product and solution like this."

That's where Feedzai and its machine-learning and AI capabilities come in.

Citi Ventures invested in the startup, which was founded in 2009 and has raised $82 million, back in 2016, and the bank recognized that Feedzai's capabilities could solve a variety of problems and headaches.

An obvious place to start was enhancing Citi's payment-outlier-alert system.

Harnessing the power of machine learning, the alert system could adapt to the behaviors of individual customers, creating a profile for the client as a payment pattern took shape.

"We recognize with institutional clients, every client is different. And their payment pattern is different," Kohli said.

The souped up, AI-powered version of the tool should detect suspicious behavior with more precision and cut back on false positives, keeping business humming along at a fast clip until an actual threat or mistake is unearthed.

Payments are assessed a risk score, and the threshold that triggers an alert from Citi can be tailored to the customer's needs.

Kohli said this would allow Citi to roll out the Citi Payment Outlier Detection system to a broader set of companies starting in early 2019, when the enhanced version of the feature is expected to be released.

This is only the first phase of the partnership, and Citi will look to apply Feedzai's capabilities to other products and services in its business as well, Kohli said.

• Read more:
• Citi is deploying robots to help the world's biggest companies collect cash from customers — boosting a key $8.5 billion business for the bank
• For years, Chase and Citi credit cards offered a generous, under-the-radar benefit that protected customers. And then the bots arrived.
• Citigroup is reportedly staring down $180 million in losses from loans gone sour to an Asian hedge fund — and a senior exec is out

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The legendary economist who predicted the housing crisis says the US will win the trade war

• Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian talked to Business Insider at Ignition 2018 about what a future of artificial intelligence could look like.
• He says there will be "massive unemployment" during the transitional period, but thinks it will benefit us in the long-term.
• Watch the video above to hear more about Ohanian's take on which jobs will be replaced and which ones will survive.

Alyson Shontell: One of the things that you said you think is the biggest opportunity for people right now, is finding a solution for jobs that are being automated. What do you think that solution looks like? It's a huge problem to tackle.

Alexis Ohanian: It's a big one. Every 2020 presidential candidate I talk to, or aspiring one, this is the chart that I drill in. I've been tweeting about this a lot lately, but it's the one about routine work and non-routine work and how the non-routine work jobs are the ones that continue to grow, whether it's software engineer, you know, typically white collar or barber, typically blue collar. Those are the jobs robots aren't going to mess with. Cause trust me... There's no way a robot is replacing my barber. Between the creativity, the comedy, the therapy, like, T-800 is not doing that, alright?

Those are the skills that are really valuable for the next decade and beyond to come. And so I think part of it is branding. I think part of it is telling a generation maybe college isn't what you should be doing for that higher ed, maybe it's the trades. We have plumbing jobs and welding jobs that are in demand right now that are not going away that are actually great paying jobs. We've basically got a generation looking toward a ton of student loan debt and a history degree that won't necessarily get them a job when really we should be coaching them to say, "Hey, look. There are other fields where there are directly applicable skills that are gonna be valuable even in the AI future."

And then I think the other part is us thinking as a society, how we are... How we're gonna handle this transition, because I do think long term it will make our lives better, but in the short term it will be massive unemployment. All those jobs I was just talking about, retail, like I had a CompUSA that... Obviously CompUSA is gone, but the retail world is going to look very different in five and certainly in ten years when most of those jobs are automated, and that is a better shopping experience for all of us, but it means a ton of jobs are gone.

Food service is gonna look drastically different in five to ten years and that's a net positive, I do believe, for us, but we're talking about tens of millions of people in aggregate in the United States right now and I don't think we've got any real plan. So I think the private sector is still doing a great job. We're particularly interested in backing entrepreneurs, doing businesses that humans are uniquely good at, and then turning them into cyborgs. Basically augmenting them using software. So things that require empathy, things that require creativity.

There's a company called Papa, which is doing on demand grandkids. Loneliness is a real epidemic for the elderly and this is a way for, usually college students, it doesn't have to be, to make great money spending time just... conversing with or helping someone who is elderly do errands. And this is actually in tremendous demand because health plans realize how much value this provides to those people who are lonely, who need support. And that's another thing that robots are not easily, not gonna do anytime soon. I think that's where more innovation needs to happen and we're seeing it start but we need more of it.

Shontell: Yeah, I think so, maybe some day a robot will be able to have empathy like a human can but, that's at least farther off on the horizon.

Ohanian: Yeah, I, I'm also biased, my sister's a nurse, and the test I always run is could a robot actually do her job and the answer is always no. I still have, I have no belief that if a robot can get to the point of doing the kind of work that a nurse does, as well as put up with the bull--- a nurse does. Then that robot will make that decision at that point that, yes, it is now capable of enslaving us all. Because the work that professions like that do are things that I just don't believe a robot will ever do.

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• Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Initialized Capital and Reddit, is "not concerned about T-800 walking around here and enslaving us."
• Ohanian says technology like autonomous vehicles is designed to save lives.
• He also talks about the differences in facial recognition technology in China compared to those seen here in the West.

Alyson Shontell: So, lots to ask you about. Starting with, I wanna talk about a recent interview Elon Musk gave, where he is completely terrified of this thing called artificial intelligence. He basically thinks we are super unprepared for what's coming, artificial intelligence is going to be so much smarter than humans to the point where humans could actually be locked in cages and in zoos by these artificial intelligence creatures like we've done with gorillas. What are your thoughts on this artificial intelligence future? Are we screwed?

Alexis Ohanian: I think Elon is writing a great screenplay for like a "Black Mirror" episode. But I am not at all concerned about T-800 walking down, that's the terminator from "Terminator." Arnold Schwarzenegger's. I'm not concerned about a T-800 walking around here and enslaving us.

I do think AI machine learning, these technologies are having, right now, a profound impact on a lot of the things we're doing, and we've been investing in everything from autonomous vehicle companies, to culminate standard cognition, which is letting, basically replacing checkout at stores by using cameras to do real-time recognition so that you can just walk in, grab a Coke, and walk out, and get charged for it. But, this is still so, so far away from robot overlords. I'm just, I'm not particularly worried, because we still have, we have very real implications of the AI technology that right now is getting traction that we aren't even having conversations about, that we should be talking about right now because they are happening right now. As opposed to the T-800 scenario, which I just don't see on the horizon.

Shontell: And what are some of the things we should be talking about?

Ohanian: Well, right now, autonomous vehicles are something that's top of mind for everyone. Thinking about how we balance this technology, which in the long term is going to save lots of lives, with the short term of building the data set in a safe way that involves keeping people as safe as possible. Similarly, with the self-checkout technology I was telling you about, I mean this is existing right now. You can come back from a trip to China and have an amazing experience doing self-checkout, but also knowing that there is a database collecting all those images and a social credit score, and things that we here in the West, I think, would find pretty distasteful, you know, these conversations aren't really happening yet here.

We're proud that standard cognition that I come down and talk to you about, is deliberately not storing facial data, because they don't want to be responsible for it. They don't believe, they know it's not necessary to do the service, but we're not even equipped as a society to have that conversation yet and the technology is actually here and that's what we should be talking about.

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• The annual Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, kicks off in Las Vegas on January 8, 2019.
• Business Insider will be attending this year's showcase to see all of the latest cutting-edge technologies from companies around the world.
• We've rounded up all of the major tech we're expecting to see at CES 2019.

SEE ALSO: Here are the 10 tech gadgets you should buy this holiday season, according to Oprah

Artificial intelligence, everywhere

Artificial intelligence is the next big wave for tech. The biggest companies in the world — Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others — have already invested millions of dollars into creating robust systems that can solve complex problems, and in 2019, we'll see smaller players introduce even more "smart" gadgets. At CES, expect to see AI powering gadgets you would and wouldn't expect, everything from TVs to security cameras to even golf equipment.

5G is finally coming in 2019, and we'll learn what that means exactly

People have been talking about 5G as the successor to 4G LTE for years now. But in 2019, most carriers around the globe will be piloting 5G programs of their own, so at CES, many of those companies will be emphasizing the capabilities and potential impact of 5G.

Much of what 5G promises relates to speed, like being able to stream videos instantly with no buffering or lag, or download large files in seconds. But at CES 2019, most of the major carriers have either speakers or panelists at the show (including CEOs from Verizon and AT&T), so expect to hear more specific rollout plans and hopefully some more futuristic applications.

Bigger, better, and wilder displays

Every year at CES, display makers like Samsung and LG one-up each other with bigger and wilder new screen technologies.

Over the years, we've seen 4K and 8K televisions in all shapes and sizes. Last year, Samsung unveiled a 146-inch TV called "The Wall." LG, for its part, unveiled a display that can roll up like a poster — and LG plans to actually sell it! We're expecting these two rival companies, and plenty of others, to push the envelope of display technologies at CES 2019.

• The rise of artificial intelligence and innovative technologies will transform the way we work and live.
• Tech exec, founder, and investor, Scott Belsky, shares eight ways technology could develop in the coming future. 
• In addition to analog systems finally meeting their end, he forecasts manual driving will be archaic.
• Environmentally sound processes will become mainstream. We might find it ridiculous we ate meat from live animals, and we’ll see a boom in local produce.
• Diets, grocery apps, exercise routines, and education will become ultra-personalized, as personalization enters a new era.

Forecasting the future is a fun exercise.

I like to ask the question, "what about our work and lives today will feel ridiculous ten plus years from now?" What about the future will feel obvious in retrospect?

Future forecasts are not an investment thesis because innovations, no matter how exciting they are, won't happen until the present is ready for them (and this is why the best investors are more insightful about the present than they are about the future).

But if you're a product leader, entrepreneur, or very early-stage investor, future thinking tunes your attention and instincts. It also helps you determine whether a team is attempting to defy a likely outcome or make it happen in a better way.

This year I shared some early thoughts on Twitter and solicited other ideas, which I have incorporated and attributed across the 8 themes below.

I have also tried to connect some of my work and investments to these themes, which has been an interesting exercise.

1. Disruptive interfaces will wreak havoc across segments of e-commerce and on-demand services.

2. Local city transit will improve by a step-function as government takes over autonomous transportation.

3. A final death blow to analog ways of living as everyday actions are modernized and go mobile.

4. Efficiencies and environmentally-sound practices go mainstream as lower costs and ease of consumption align with environmental consciousness.

5. A new era of personalization that antiquates generalized products and services.

6. A "great awakening" from what we learn about ourselves that will transform our lives.

7. We'll want stronger relationships, fewer loose connections.

8. Artificial intelligence will protects us more than we ever expected.

Let's jump in.

1. Disruptive interfaces will wreak havoc across segments of e-commerce and on-demand services.

This is a trend I have been following for sometime and recently wrote about.

As modern interfaces like voice remove options, augmented reality overlays our physical world, and artificial intelligence gains our trust by transcending our own reasoning, defaults will rule our lives and interfaces will compete against one another.

I've come to call them disruptive interfaces — "drastically simpler and more accessible interfaces that ultimately commoditize everything underneath."

Consider some of the implications as modern interfaces like voice and AR go mainstream.

Today, we choose between brands like Uber and Lyft or Energizer and Duracell. But as modern interfaces emerge with powerful defaults, we'll simply request a ride or refill of batteries and get the (alleged) cheapest and fastest option by default.

In such a world, will we look back at the era of so many choices influenced by brand with disbelief?

In a world where we're experiencing our surroundings through the lens of our cameras (or special AR glasses), "in-camera" purchases (offers we receive during augmented reality experiences) will be the new "in-app" purchases.

Perhaps we'll look back 10+ years from now with disbelief that we purchased anything without examining it in 3D? This begs the question of whether hardware providers like Apple and Google will capture a percentage of these purchases?

Will we someday look back at the "raw world" before everything was "edited" by AR?

Imagine the benefits of augmented reality editing our daily lives to block ads and visibly discourage us from consuming too much sugar or carbs! Will the "raw world" we live in today look antiquated ten years from now? In such a world, will our "phones" simply be mobile battery packs that connect to cellular networks and provide some "local" storage for security and identity purposes only?

Other insights:

Responding to my thread on Twitter on the topic of AR, Cameron Cundiff noted how ridiculous it will feel "that we used two-dimensional, mostly visual maps for way-finding, without augmentation with virtual landmarks, tactile feedback, and spatial audio."

I agree. We'll become dependent on navigating life with an augmented layer of information over every person and place we encounter, and this three-dimensional experience will be animated and interactive in ways we can only imagine.

I've been pretty focused on the building blocks for this future in my role at Adobe. The AR world will require deep integrations between products for 3D rendering (like Dimension), animation (like After Effects), and new products for editing 3D assets and "placing them in the real world" (like Project Aero).

And voice-driven worlds will require new tools to design voice interfaces, like AdobeXD (free, check it out!), made possible by our recent acquisition of NYC-based Sayspring.

2. Local city transit will improve by a step-function as government takes over autonomous transportation.

I continue to believe that autonomous transportation, at least within city limits, will ultimately become a public utility, much like the subways, running water, and electricity.

As transportation data in cities becomes the ultimate asset for scheduling and managing autonomous vehicles, it is much more probable that cities will operate autonomous vehicles and restrict access to main roads than a world where tons of privately owned autonomous vehicles using independent data sets roam the public streets.

Of course, many people think that the idea of manual driving will be archaic.

My colleague Ed Albro suggested "Driving cars ourselves, except as recreation" will feel ridiculous in the 10+ year timeframe.

Ben Gilbert added how strange it will be "that we thought autonomous vehicles could be too dangerous."

And Julia DeWal clearly anticipates an evolution in the design of "streets" as we know them, remarking that we'll look back in disbelief "that riding a bike or scooter to get around the city was dangerous (manual driving cars, insufficient bike lanes)."

If transportation data becomes a public asset, I can see companies like Remix Software (a company I work with) that focus on bus/vehicle route planning, scheduling, and data management becoming more important players in urban transportation.

If autonomous transportation does become more of a public utility, what does this mean for today's ride-sharing companies like Uber (certainly thriving in the near-term, but will Uber need to build services on top of it's platform, like UberEats and other services like grocery delivery, to stay differentiated?).

3.A final death blow to analog ways of living as everyday actions are modernized and go mobile.

This one goes without saying, but the surprising thing is just how long it has taken for everyday life to be improved through readily accessible technology.

In ten years, what about today will we recall with disbelief?

"That we plugged in nearly every electronic device around us" — Blaine Sheldon.‏

It is amazing how dependent we are on outlets and wires these days. Will Apple's AirPower ship in 2019? Rumor is that the delays are due to the unique charging coil designs required to charge different types of products on the same array.

"Cables!" — Andrew Allen‏.

Let's hope so, my travel bag makes me feel like a cable salesman these days.

"That you needed physical keys to enter homes and exchanged pieces of paper called 'checks' as a meta representation of currency" — Antonio Altamirano‏.

Well, August (now acquired by Assa Abloy) among many other digital lock companies have allowed us to "go keyless," now it's just a matter of mass adoption. Companies like AirBnB could help accelerate this transition. As for "checks," what a striking remnant of the last century, huh?

Personally, I only use mobile deposits at this point and haven't deposited a check at the bank in years. I am surprised banks haven't offered a "digital check" service in their apps that essentially acts as a consumer interface for ACH. I'm sure there's an annoying reason why not.

"That you couldn't vote online." — jeffrey‏.

Amen, my friend. I would imagine the first step here is for a piece of legislation that sets a deadline for a digital voting overhaul. I would love to better understand the obstacles and potential paths.

"That IDs where made of fancy cardboard or plastic and that identity confirmation was so broken that personal records were stolen by the millions." — Antonio Altamirano‏.

Identity theft is common these days, and I agree the whole system is broken. I recall a rumor that Apple and Google were both pursuing some form of approval for mobile-hosted government-accepted IDs and Passports. That would be a start.

"That we had to type words (letter by letter) actively into a screen rather than speak our thoughts to an AI robot" — Antonio Altamirano‏.

No doubt, voice interfaces are here to stay. Brian Roemmele has been one of the earliest vocal visionaries and advocates for voice interfaces. I bet if you ask him, he'll convince you why we'll have more interactions with our voice than with our fingers.

Even for rather complex applications like Photoshop, the opportunity to engage via voice, coupled with artificial intelligence to further personalize the experience, will change the way we live and work.

My Adobe colleague Erik Natzke anticipates life with "no more hard drives, no more album releases (it will just be song by song), no more check-out counters, and no more time-based TV programming."

I agree with this last point, except when it comes to sports and gameshows. Sitting on the board of Cheddar, a post-cable news network that has developed new formats for news and new methods of distribution, I think "TV" as we know it will be entirely different five to 10 years from now.

4. Efficiencies and environmentally-sound practices go mainstream as lower costs and ease of consumption align with environmental consciousness.

The stars are finally aligning for environmentally-sound products, customer preferences, and distribution. As it becomes clear that factory farms are prone to bacterial outbreaks and so many foods and cosmetics contain questionable chemicals, we will crave more "natural" ways of living in every respect.

This will change what we buy, the food we eat, and unleash a ton of innovation in the form factor of consumer goods.

We'll find it ridiculous that the meat we ate came from actual live animals.

Meat alternatives are becoming more popular, but lab grown meat will change everything. Companies like Memphis Meats (not one of my investments, but I wish it was) are growing meat in the labs that is indistinguishable from a killed animal at a cellular level.

Once lab-grown meat becomes both safer, more reliable, cheaper, and perhaps even more delicious (not to mention, more humane), the tide will turn.

This will also be important for the environment, given that methane and waste runoff from factory farms are among the greatest contributors to environmental calamities.

There will be a boom in local produce from urban farms like Bowery Farms and Square Roots that provide a fresher, more reliable, affordable, and often times tastier harvest (achieved through a fully controlled environmental) than traditional farms that ship product far and wide.

A ton of venture capital has already been invested in this space, especially as it relates to the "operating systems" for these modern urban farms to function.

There will be a shift towards "shipping concentrates versus ready-to-use bottles that are 98% water," as Jonathan Bostock framed it.

I agree that the form factor for beverages (cans and bottles of water-heavy liquids that were made from concentrate before they left the factory) is inefficient. Some companies like Soda Stream have provided an alternative. But a mainstream shift from these "prepared beverages" to a simpler and cheaper concentrate/powder is imaginable.

One of my portfolio companies nearing launch tackles a number of common everyday items (like mouthwash, for example) that are currently distributed in plastic-heavy and expensive bottles but could be distributed in far more economized and concentrated ways.

We've long known about the concept of an individual's "carbon footprint," but the consumer-friendly options to manage it have been limited. This will change, as such products become cheaper and more desirable.

Within three to five years, the majority of the prepared food we order from delivery networks like UberEats and GrubHub, or modern food brands like sweetgreen, will come from commissaries, not actual restaurants.

The notion of fulfilling food orders at peak times from busy street-level restaurants optimized for hospitality not delivery is ridiculous, and yet it is today's status-quo.

In the not-so-distant future, most restaurants will consider their storefronts as flagship experiences for their brand, and will scale their higher-margin revenue from fulfilling and delivering orders out of commissaries, operated by third-parties or "collo-commissaries" shared with a few other restaurant brands.

These third-party brands will compete with "house brands" that the big delivery platforms create and fulfill on their own.

5. A new era of personalization that antiquates generalized products and services.

The ultimate promise of personalized experiences from artificial intelligence has, thus far, been mostly limited to advertising and ad-supported product experiences.

Sure, there are smattering of other applications in medicine and your Netflix queue, but I am surprised by how much of daily life is still generalized as opposed to personalized. Online stores still show us every category, restaurants give us menus despite our allergies and diets, and we still become enamored by mass brands.

How might artificial intelligence transform our everyday life experiences that would make today's way of living look utterly ridiculous?

Diets and health routines will become ultra personalized.

Clay Hebert‏ suggests we will will look back in disbelief "that we were all searching for the ideal one-size-fits-all diet vs. something individually customized.""Same for drugs and supplements," he adds. "You'll take a pill with your name on it, customized for you. We all will."

Whether it is vitamins, diets, medical treatments, workout routines, or your shampoo and soap, the era of personalization will render all of these mass market brands obsolete. With insights about what makes each of us unique, we'll opt for the personally tailored option of everything.

Your mobile food and grocery apps will only display personalized menus (excluding any ingredients you're allergic to, and taking diet into consideration).

One of my investments, Pinto has spent years analyzing and classifying every type of produce and packaged good you'd find in a grocery store, and has used this data to enable companies like Whole Foods to offer a personalized experience to patrons.

Imagine, as the interface of shopping changes through new mobile grocery apps or augmented reality, using this data combined with your own preference data to make the entire shopping experience tailored to you. If you're Gluten Free, every experience and menu you'll see will be Gluten Free.

Education will finally become tailored to the individual.

Brian Guenther‏ shared his conviction that we'll look back in disbelief "that a factory model of education, unpersonalized and based on static content, was an acceptable model for educating our children."

I hope he's right. If teachers could deliver a more personalized curriculum, where every digital "text book" adjusts using AI to accommodate each student's strengths and weaknesses, I think such tech would unleash entirely new (and more effective) forms of education.

More brands will emerge designed for micro audiences.

As some of you know, I've had a long-standing fascination in microbrands." I wrote about this back in March in a post called "Attack of the Micro Brands" and the topic has since been explored in the Wall Street Journal in an article called "Why You're Buying Products From Companies You've Never Heard Of" by Christopher Mims.

This is a major commerce trend that impacts the full "stack" of the design, production, marketing, and distribution of consumer products.

I've made a few bets in this space over the years like Warby Parker (glasses), Outdoor Voices (everyday athletic apparel), Roman (men's health care), Smalls For Smalls (pet food), FridaBaby (products for babies and moms), and have also been fascinated by the "picks and shovels" companies powering this trend like Assembled Brands (provides tailored financing), Lumi (packaging and logistics), among others.

I think we'll see a lot more of this in the year ahead.

6. A 'great awakening' from what we learn about ourselves that will transform our lives.

I think we'll look back at the next five to 10 years as a "great awakening" of sorts for our understanding of our bodies, psychology, and decisions. We'll realize how blind we were to ourselves, ignorant of caloric intake, nutrient absorption, chemical exposure, UV light exposure, and the list goes on.

Once we have accurate and real-time measurements, and understand the ramifications, we'll have a new level of awareness that will change how we live.

As we reflect, we'll find it ridiculous "that we were willing to accept the health risks of sleeping less than 7 hours every night" (Ben Gilbert‏ ), that "soda was legal for kids under 18" (Vitaly Gordon)‏, "that we had to go to a doctor/hospital to get our vitals" (Steve Kaliski‏ ), and that we "dieted without real-time body feedback (thinking blood/sugar/hormones)" (Andreas Klinger).

The media we consume, and the frequency in which we consume it, will become a more conscious choice.

We will also become hyper aware of how we spend our time and where we allocate attention. The fact that our devices now count minutes spent in apps (and proactively cut us off), coupled with the (long awaited) mainstream interest in "quantified self" will have a big impact on what sources of news/media/info/entertainment we seek, for what price, and under what terms.

Our personal lives and decisions will become more informed by data and less governed by instinct.

I have a good friend who once told me about his dating spreadsheet, where he attempts to understand what worked and didn't work on dates and in relationships so that he could better understand the patterns.

It sounds crazy, but perhaps it will feel just as crazy in ten years to make any important life decision without data analysis?

One of my portfolio co's, Airtable, is reimagining the "spreadsheet" to be a more intelligent, customizable, and interactive way to track and analyze any kind of data. Among Airtable's open source templates you'll find airtables for tracking your pet's medical history, apartment hunting, your favorite books, and many more.

With consumer-friendly tools that pack the power of deep data analysis, the possibilities are endless.

7. We'll want stronger relationships, fewer loose connections.

No doubt, the state of social networking has degraded into a small number of mass-adopted applications driven by vanity and FOMO.

Under the hood, most social networking and media products that proliferate our lives are optimized to keep us growing our networks and scrolling mindlessly through never-ending updates. As a result, we've ended up with larger loosely connected networks that provide more noise than signal for what actually matters to us.

But something is changing in our desires and tolerances. We're starting to mock these platforms, limit our time with them, or all-together delete our accounts.

Perhaps it is our natural biological response to a superficial stimuli that has started to deteriorate our collective happiness and productivity?

I anticipate (and hope) that the social networks of the future focus more on the problems to solve as opposed to fighting for our attention. What factors will drive these new social products?

Depth > breadth.

Now that we all have LinkedIn and at least one Facebook product, we can summon pretty much anyone's digital profile with a simple search. We don't need another network for everyone where people carefully curate and anxiously post content to a massive network of acquaintances at best, stalkers at worst.

Instead, we want to learn more about fewer people. We want to know where our closest friends are. We want to make meaningful intros for the people we care about.

The early era of social network was all about vanity, as people sought to accumulate "likes" and reach as opposed to meaningful exchange. No wonder "chat" has been called "the next social network."

We want technology to scale our direct connections. We need a product like Path, which came half a decade too early.

And we need to rethink core mechanics: this network should be decentralized to some extent, it shouldn't be ad-supported, it should have some lean-forward defaults for sharing location and recommendations that would only work in a closed and trusted network, and it should offer alternative interfaces like voice (AirPods) and AR (when the time comes).

Social tech will become an intimate endeavor, a way to connect with the people most close to us and, more importantly, connect with our own past.

Colby Saenz‏ suggested on Twitter that we'll look back in disbelief, "that we never valued the importance of personal (and private) documenting of our lives/thoughts/ideas." Modern social products will account for this.

8. Artificial intelligence will protects us more than we ever expected.

Finally, for all the talk of the dangers of artificial intelligence, we tend to skip over the fact that identity theft is a raging problem, that data breaches happen every day, that we're always trying to moderate the impact of tech in our lives, and that spam and scams have become an everyday reality.

Artificial intelligence is our best chance at a step-function more peaceful existence.

More positivity by default.

For all the talk of AI helping convert customers and optimize product experiences, we haven't thought about the implications of people using AI to better control what comes into their lives.

Like Apple's default options for ceasing notifications on the phone and blocking certain ads by default in Safari, we may choose to empower AI to proactively "protect us" in the future, which will change the game for advertising and media.

Imagine setting default preferences on every device at the OS level to not only block ads, but block malicious characters, non-fact-checked content, and certain notifications at certain times based on AI-analysis of your calendar. Lots of innovation to come here.

More productivity.

When I was in Tokyo recently, I spent some time with journalists and customers that were asking about how AI would replace creative professionals and somehow automate creative work.

On the contrary, I explained, AI will help us humans focus our energy on the creative part and spend less time on everything else in-between. All of the work we're doing at Adobe using artificial intelligence is intended to reduce the mundane, repetitive, and annoying parts of the creative process.

I think this is generally how AI will be used: to not only automate the mundane, but also to unleash our uniquely human capabilities.

Fewer mistakes.

Seth Godin recently suggested in a post that, despite all the technological advance, our devices still default to 3am when scheduling a meeting at 3, lets us leave a $5,650 tip if we accidentally put our PIN in the card reader when it asks for the tip amount, and so on.

His point is: "Are you sure" is something that humans know to ask but machines don't. AI should solve this in the coming years.

Data will become a natural resource.

Will the oceans of data that power artificial intelligence be classified as a natural resource the enriches its citizens, much like oil is managed in countries like Norway? If it is a natural residue of our everyday activity, why shouldn't it belong to society?

Hey, who knows?

These future forecasting exercises are fun, if nothing more.

They spark conversation and debate with people you can learn from, so bring it on. Here's to an exciting decade to come.

Follow Scott on Twitter, get the latest book — The Messy Middle, or sign up for an infrequent newsletter summary of insights. Disclosure: I mentioned a number of personal/CapitalB investments including Remix, Uber, Cheddar, August, Airtable, Bowery Farms, and Pinto (and, of course, Adobe).

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• On Wednesday, Chinese cloud company and search giant Baidu announced OpenEdge, the first open source edge computing platform out of the country. 
• Edge computing is poised to become the next thing after cloud computing — it brings processing power to "edge devices" like smart home appliances and wearables.
• China's open source community is growing, and Baidu has previously led other open source platforms like the autonomous driving platform Apollo and the artificial intelligence framework PaddlePaddle.
• Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are investing heavily in edge computing, as well. 

Baidu has just announced China's first open source edge computing platform – reflecting the country's growing open source community. 

Baidu, a cloud company and search giant sometimes known as the "Google of China," unveiled OpenEdge at the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday.

"Edge computing is becoming more commonplace due to the rise of IoT devices," Zun Wang, a Baidu spokesperson, told Business Insider. "It brings different kinds of compute power, especially for AI processing, to the edges of your network, allowing close proximity of your data source with the cloud."

Edge computing means that the processing power is shifted away from the cloud and towards the "edge"— which is to say closer to the users who are using it. For example, edge devices might be gadgets people use each day, such as PCs, smartphones and tablets, or Internet of Things gadgetry like wearables and smart home appliances.

With OpenEdge, developers can build their own edge computing systems and deploy them on various devices and hardware. This platform include features that allow users program devices to collect data, send messages to each other, and generally "learn" from user behavior. 

Previously, Baidu has led other open source projects like Apollo, its autonomous driving platform, and PaddlePaddle, an artificial intelligence framework. It also offers cloud services that are based on open source software created by other companies. 

However, this is Baidu's first open source initiative in edge computing, and the first coming out of China. Baidu hopes open sourcing this will improve the development of edge computing globally. It's generally believed in the industry that developments in artificial intelligence, coupled with the rising demand for smart gadgets, self-driving cars, and industrial robotics, mean that edge computing will be the next big thing after cloud computing.

Read more: One of the biggest trends in tech over the last decade has been the shift to cloud computing — and we're seeing the first signs of what might be next

"The explosive growth of IoT devices and rapid adoption of AI is fueling great demand for edge computing," Watson Yin, Baidu Vice President and GM of Baidu Cloud, said in a statement. "And by providing an open source platform, we have also greatly simplified the process for developers to create their own edge computing applications."

More recently, Baidu has been focusing on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. OpenEdge was originally designed as a part of Baidu Intelligent Edge, a commercial software product that works with Baidu Cloud, and will include functions to manage different edge computing applications.

"We wanted to let developers build their own edge computing system as well as contribute functions and edge apps to the existing platform," said Wang, the Baidu spokesperson.

McFly, an agriculture technology company, has used Baidu's software in drones to collect data about crops that helps it lower pesticide use. This is just one possible application of edge computing.

Similarly, Microsoft Azure also has an open source edge computing project, and offers edge computing services to developers. Amazon Web Services also offers edge computing services, but the underlying software is not available as open source. 

Currently, China is seeing its slowest growth in decades, but despite the economic slowdown, analysts predict Baidu's annual revenue increased by 20% in 2018.

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• The US Army is considering putting certain weapons in the hands of artificial intelligence to quickly return fire when US soldiers come under attack.
• The improved response time provided by AI offers the Army an enhanced ability to defeat enemy weapons, Bruce Jette, the head of Army acquisitions, explained Thursday.
• There are concerns about putting AI controlling weapons and the removal of a human being from the decision-making process on the use of deadly force.
• "Time is a weapon," Jette explained, "Let's say you fire a bunch of artillery at me, and I can shoot those rounds down, and you require a man in the loop for every one of the shots. There are not enough men to put in the loop to get them done fast enough."

The head of U.S. Army acquisitions said Thursday that allowing artificial intelligence to control some weapons systems may be the only way to defeat enemy weapons.

U.S. military has embraced AI, arguing that America cannot compete against potential adversaries such as Russia and China without the futuristic technology.

Concern over placing machines in charge of deadly weapons has prompted military officials to adopt a conservative approach to AI, one that involves a human in the decision-making process for the use of deadly force.

But Bruce Jette, assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology (ASAALT), said it may not be wise to put too many restrictions on AI teamed with weapons systems.

"People worry about whether an AI system is controlling the weapon, and there are some constraints on what we are allowed to do with AI," he said at a Jan. 10 Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington, D.C.

There are a number of public organizations that have gotten together and said, "We don't want to have AI tied to weapons,"Jette explained.

The problem with this policy is that it may hinder the Army's ability to use AI to increase reaction time in weapon systems, he said.

"Time is a weapon," Jette said. "If I can't get AI involved with being able to properly manage weapons systems and firing sequences then, in the long run, I lose the time deal.

"Let's say you fire a bunch of artillery at me, and I can shoot those rounds down, and you require a man in the loop for every one of the shots," he said. "There are not enough men to put in the loop to get them done fast enough."

Jette's office is working with the newly formed Army Futures Command (AFC) to find a clearer path forward for AI on the battlefield.

AFC, which is responsible for developing Army requirements for artificial intelligence, has established a center for AI at Carnegie Mellon University, said Jette, who added that ASAALT will establish a "managerial approach" to AI for the service.

"So how do we put not just the AI hardware and architecture and software in the background? How do I do proper policy so we [ensure] weapons don't get to fire when they want and weapons don't get to fire with no constraints, but instead we properly architect a good command-and-control system that allows us to be responsive and benefit from the AI and the speed of some of our systems?" Jette said.

"We are trying to structure an AI architecture that will become enduring and will facilitate our ability to allocate resources and conduct research and implantation of AI capabilities throughout the force," he said.

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• Microsoft President Brad Smith penned a blog post on LinkedIn about the 10 biggest issues tech is sure to tackle in 2019. 
• Artificial intelligence, he mentioned, will play a powerful role in how the economy functions, whether it leads to job growth or decline, and how tech companies work with law enforcement to implement facial recognition. 
• And with no mention of President Donald Trump, Smith echoed concerns made by other tech giants over the trade relationship between China and America. 

The tech industry is still reeling from a tumultuous 2018, as growing privacy concerns, cyber security threats and online disinformation campaigns have caused many people to reassess their relationship with technology.

Things are only going to get more complicated as new innovations like artificial intelligence and voice recognition become increasingly commonplace in our lives. 

Microsoft President Brad Smith outlined some of the biggest tech issues in store for us this year in a sobering blog post he recently published on LinkedIn.  Another year of public 'tech-lash' seems probable, Smith writes, as society debates the roles that technology, and tech companies, play in our lives. But there's also an opportunity for us to confront the challenges head on, and to take steps that will help us reap the benefits of innovation while avoiding the pitfalls. 

Here's what Microsoft's President believes the top 10 tech issues will be in 2019: 

First priority: Privacy

Smith believes privacy protection is set to gain traction in 2019, both in Europe and the United States. 

Businesses in Europe will have to continue to find ways to interpret the General Data Protection Regulation — a 2016 law guarding the data and privacy of all those within the European Union. And California's new Consumer Privacy Act means the issue is becoming more widespread. 

"Look to the next few months for the spread of privacy legislation to several other state capitals, all of which will set the stage for an even bigger debate on Capitol Hill," Smith says. 

Fakes News and 'Disinformation'

Social media platforms have become a preferred means for nation-states to spread disinformation campaigns. And last year marked a "sea change" in our understanding of the problem, Smith says. 

"The big question now is what will be done to address the problem," he writes.

While social media companies have begun to acknowledge their responsibilities and accountability, Smith suggests that new laws could be used to ensure that social media companies take the issue seriously. He mentions a white paper by Virginia Senator Mark Warner to "impose a duty on social media platforms to determine the origin of accounts or posts, identify bogus accounts and notify users when bots are spreading information." 

The US/China relationship

The tech sector could be in for a bumpy ride this year when it comes to trans-Pacific trade, Smith says.

"Across the American political spectrum there is greater appreciation of China’s momentum in artificial intelligence and other technology and heightened concern about its economic and national security implications," writes Smith. 

Smith likened the December arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese smartphone maker Huawei, to a "Netflix drama."  Talk of export controls on emerging tech like AI, and the potential for protectionist rules limiting acquisitions by foreign companies in Europe will become increasingly important stories to follow. 

• Data management platform startup Rubrik announced Tuesday that it closed $261 million in new funding, in a deal valuing the company at $3.3 billion.
• Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha says that this funding means the company is opening a new chapter. 
• Chapter one for Rubrik was all about data backup and recovery, he says. Now, Rubrik is entering chapter two: machine learning, a foundational technology behind artificial intelligence.
• Rubrik's revenue has grown quickly, but Sinha recalls that in the early days, recruitment and marketing were some major challenges Rubrik faced.

Bipul Sinha, CEO and co-founder of data management platform company Rubrik, found inspiration in an iPhone.

When you take a photo on an iPhone, the phone tags it with your location, places it in a folder or album, and shunts it up to the cloud. Likewise, that's what he hoped to do with Rubrik: Help make it easier for companies to automatically organize their data and shunt it up to public clouds like Amazon Web Services for safekeeping.

Now, Rubrik announced Tuesday that it closed $261 million in a series E funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, in a deal valuing the company at $3.3 billion, as it takes that vision to the next level. 

"Back in 2013, when we started to think about Rubrik, public cloud was getting a lot of prominence in the enterprise," Sinha told Business Insider. "We were thinking, what if we re-platform and re-architect an infrastructure for the business environment. That's what got it started."

The first chapter of Rubrik, Sinha says, was all about providing those basic backup and recovery services for data. But now with another $261 million in hand, Rubrik is about to enter what Sinha refers to as chapter two: applying artificial intelligence to the whole affair. 

"Now we are entering the second chapter of the company where we are looking at the data we are managing for our customers and asking if we can provide machine learning," Sinha said.

In other words, Rubrik wants to use AI to do more with helping its customers automatically manage even the largest amounts of data. If nothing else, Sinha says, AI can automatically apply the right security and regulatory compliance properties to that data, recognizing it on the fly even as it gets backed up to the cloud. 

Read more: This investor turned founder scoffs at funding slowdown: 'real businesses' can still get money

Ultimately, Sinha hopes to build Rubrik into a large public company, with a platform that every small business around the world can use.

Just last year, Rubrik launched an enterprise data platform called Polaris, even as it welcomed Microsoft Chairman John W. Thompson and former Cisco CEO John Chambers to its board of directors. Sinha says that Rubrik plans on investing more in product development with this new funding in the can.

At $3.3 billion, Rubrik is now one of the most valuable enterprise technology startups on the planet. Sinha recalls that when he first launched Rubrik, he felt he that he let the company down when it launched with no media coverage, making it difficult to create buzz. Similarly, Recruiting talent was also a challenge, Sinha says, as Rubrik was fighting with the Silicon Valley giants to recruit good people. 

But now, Rubrik has grown to a 1400-employee company with global offices, and fast-growing revenue, Sinha said. In total, and including this new round, Rubrik has raised over $553 million from investors like IVP, Greylock Partners, and Khosla Ventures. The secret, Sinha says, was just to work harder and focus on figuring out what, exactly, your customers want from you.

"High ambitions, high expectations — that becomes a rallying cry for you to double down and work harder," Sinha said.

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• Amazon is introducing a new event called re:MARS, which focuses on machine learning, automation, robotics, and space technology.
• re:MARS is inspired by MARS, a private invite-only event hosted by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, focused on artificial intelligence and space.
• The first event will take place this year from June 4-7, and registration will open in March.
• Pricing information isn't available yet, but astronauts can attend for free.

Amazon announced Thursday a new conference that's all about artificial intelligence, robots, outer space and other cutting-edge technology.

This event is called re:MARS, which stands for "Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space." This year's event will take place June 4-7 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. It was inspired by MARS, which is an exclusive invite-only AI-focused event hosted by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Now, Amazon is introducing a larger event, open to the paying public, to bring together academics, engineers, roboticists, executives, and more to learn how AI can be used in business.

“We’re at the beginning of a golden age of AI. Recent advancements have already led to invention that previously lived in the realm of science fiction—and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible,” Bezos said in a statement. “AI is an enabling technology that can improve products and services across all industries."

Registration will open in March, and pricing information isn't available yet — although astronauts can attend for free. Although re:MARS has some similarities to Amazon's re:Invent cloud conference, and will include Amazon Web Services-related workshops, re:MARS is more specifically focused on the latest innovations in AI.

The event this year will include speakers from MIT, UC Berkeley, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and more. Participants will also see robotics demos and the Blue Origin New Shepard crew capsule, and they will have the chance to participate in AI hackathons and technical workshops on Amazon's AI technology, like Alexa and Amazon Go.

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At last year's AWS re:Invent, Amazon made an assortment of new AI announcements, including releasing an AI chip and a self-driving toy car. Also, Amazon has already gotten into the space business. Last November, Amazon announced a new offering that lets businesses rent access to data from satellites.

Meanwhile, Bezos' more exclusive MARS conference have always made a splash — last year, the exec took a robot dog for a walk, and before that, he showed up in a 13-foot-tall robot suit.

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• UiPath, an artificial intelligence company backed by Google and Sequoia, will soon hit $200 million annual recurring revenue, sources told Business Insider.
• Though founded in 2005, the company had just $3.5 million in ARR in 2016. 
• The company, which is backed by Accel, CapitalG and Sequoia, was last valued at $3 billion in a September funding round.

The buzzy and well-funded $3 billion artificial intelligence startup UiPath will soon hit $200 million in annual recurring revenue, sources told Business Insider.

UiPath, which does robotic process automation, brought in just $3.5 million in ARR in 2016, according to one source. This means the company grew its revenue by 5614% in just over two years.

ARR is a popular metric used by subscription software or SaaS companies. It essentially takes the value of long-term subscription contracts and normalizes it for a one year period.

The company announced that it hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in July 2018, then $150 million in November. When UiPath hits $200 million in revenue in the next couple of weeks, its revenue will have grown 33% in just over two months. 

Founded in Romania in 2005, UiPath stayed relatively low-profile until 2015 when it raised its first round of venture capital. Silicon Valley firm Accel led its Series A in 2017, when it raised around $30 million at a $110 million valuation, according to PitchBook.

Alphabet's CapitalG jumped into the company in 2018, leading its first $1 billion unicorn round with a $153 million Series B. CapitalG and Sequoia Capital co-led a $225 million Series C in September, which valued the company at $3 billion, according to PitchBook.

SEE ALSO: US artificial intelligence startups had a record Q1 2018 and raised $1.9 billion of venture capital

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