Daily Archives: October 11, 2013

At some point US Steel decided they wanted to be supercool and impress all the cool steel-buying kids, so they did something very smart: they hired futurist Syd Mead to make a bunch of paintings showing a utopian future. Built from steel. With lots of great steel cars.

These paintings show an incredible, sleek future, one that seems to take its design inspirations from 1970s America, but filters them through an elongating lens of sexy science. Check out that car in the top shot there it's clearly inspired by 70s-era Cadillacs, but takes all the those design cues to their utomost extreme, and the result is pretty spectacular. And, interestingly, it suggests a significant change to DOT regulations that put a huge emphasis on side-marker lighting.

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Also, what's with that white genetically-modified tiger-cat thing? Did he come in the car, or are those things just wandering around in the Utopian future?

There's even a Hot Wheels version of the Mead-designed Sentinel 400! Who knew?

Anyway, I suggest getting really close to your monitor and staring into these images until you believe you're actually living in there. Enjoy.

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More here:
This Is What A Great '60s Futurist Thought The Present Would Look Like

One of the hot topics at this week's Gartner Symposium/ITExpo is the future impact of smart machines that exploit machine learning and deep-learning algorithms to let them behave autonomously and can adapt to their environment.

One of the hot buttons with such machines is that they "can enhance processes and decision making, but could also remove the need for humans in the process and decision effort. CIOs will see this as a means of delivering greater efficiency, but will have to balance between the active human workforce and the cold efficiency of machines that can learn," Gartner analysts said.

[IN THE NEWS: Vinyl records fight digital death]

Still 60% of CEOs believe that the emergence of smart machines capable of absorbing millions of middle-class jobs within 15 years is a "futurist fantasy," according to Gartner's 2013 CEO survey. However, Gartner predicts that smart machines will have widespread and deep business impact within only seven years through 2020.

Gartner believes that the capability and reliability of smart machines will dramatically increase through 2020 to the point where they will have a major impact on business and IT functions. The impact will be such that firms that have not begun to develop programs and policies for a "digital workforce" by 2015 will not perform in the top quartile for productivity and operating profit margin improvement in their industry by 2020. As a direct result, the careers of CIOs who do not begin to champion digital workforce initiatives with their peers in the C-suite by 2015 will be cut short by 2023.

"The bottom line is that many CEOs are missing what could quickly develop to be the most significant technology shift of this decade," said Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner, in a statement.

There is already a multifaceted marketplace for engineering a 'digital workforce,' backed by major players on both the supply and demand side. This marketplace comprises intelligent agents, virtual reality assistants, expert systems and embedded software to make traditional machines 'smart' in a very specialized way, plus a new generation of low-cost and easy-to-train robots and purpose-built automated machines that could significantly devalue and/or displace millions of humans in the workforce, Brant continued.

"The supply side of the market - including IBM, GE, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon - is placing large bets on the success of smart machines, while the demand side includes high-profile first movers that will trigger an 'arms race' for acquiring and/or developing smart machines," Brant added.

While Gartner research asserts that smart machines will have widespread and deep impact through 2020, we also recognize there are significant impediments in the business, political, economic, social and technology spheres that must be overcome and these include

Some other interesting smart machine observations from the Gartner analysts include:

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Smart machines: “Futurist fantasy” or future job menace?