Envisioning the future of education and energy through connected intelligence, cross-sector collaboration, and technological foresight

We are currently witnessing a very rapid transformation in the world of work. Lower skill blue-collar and white-collar jobs are under threat owing to advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and robotics. The pace of change has been faster than we anticipated and, this time, it is not restricted to the usual off-shoring of low-skill jobs. We see the integration of these emerging technologies into a variety of higher skill task domains that were hitherto regarded as fail-safe for workers. The current surge has been triggered by the favorable economics of the technologies, data and the availability of cheap, powerful, energy-efficient and highly connected processing, communication and storage hardware. However, the economics of robots and hardware breakthroughs alone cannot explain the recent rapid change that has caught government, industry and business leaders unawares.

There are applications that require arrays of state-of-the-art GPUs consuming megawatts of electrical power. However, some applications such as driverless cars need to be tightly integrated with highly energy-efficient, scalable and secure mobile technologies, robotics, communication and distributed infrastructure. The focus should be on energy efficiency across the stack as opposed to energy-hungry devices that push for larger batteries, fuel cells and energy harvesting solutions. Providing well connected, secure, and scalable high performance computing technologies that can execute a wide range of artificial intelligence algorithms at the edge is a formidable challenge. Nevertheless, the potential benefits of using such devices for healthcare, defense, supply chain logistics and employing them in heartland industries are enormous. To ensure continued growth and prosperity the state needs to initiate and nurture pre-competitive R&D through partnerships with industry, academia, government and organizations, and seed pre-competitive shared facilities.