After a year of exchanging human interaction for digital interactions, the economy appears set to continue the trend as machine learning and artificial intelligence expect to make more and more jobs obsolete.

However, unlike much of the automation in blue-collar sectors, automation in the white-collar sectors still require human involvement. While banking, legal, strategic foresight, and accounting all face increased automation, they still require humans to program the machines, interpret their output, and communicate the final product to their clientele.

Humans are collaborating with machines to provide both the efficiency of automation and the depth of human ingenuity. Augmented and virtual reality, voice commands, and the internet of things (IoT) are helping to facilitate how humans interact with increasingly automated machines.

As organizations continue to adopt digital immersion and AI, the world will become increasingly difficult to navigate. How will we differentiate between what is real and what is simply a product of our digital interactions, between facts and misinformation? Again, such a skill may require collaboration with a fact-checking machine.

The most difficult thing is trusting machines that are only as good as the people and tools who program and train them.

If you are new to foresight, we recommend that you view this slide presentation first to get the best out of this report.

Analysis
For a more detailed explanation of the graphics used in this presentation please click here. All outlooks based on the time period 2020-2070 and what’s likely to be happening in 2025 at a 95% confidence level unless otherwise stated. Please contact us for longer-term outlooks.