Many individuals recognize that the building industry is one that is not quick to embrace technology or innovation. However, experts from MIT suggest that could be very dangerous. Leaders need to think of it as a complement that boosts productivity and adds jobs.

Deep learning and neural networks have dramatically improved in effectiveness and impact, leading to human-level performance in many aspects of vision, conversational speech, and problem-solving. As a result, industries are in the midst of a major transformation and more is on the way.

But there’s also a backlash brewing. Median income in America is lower now than in the past 15 years, and wealth is concentrated at the highest levels. As seen in the recent U.S. elections, there is dissatisfaction with the uneven distribution of the benefits of technological progress. IDE research bears out the chasms many are feeling.

Rumblings about robots replacing more and more human work have been heating up — with legitimate concerns. In 2014 when I published The Second Machine Age with Andrew McAfee, we anticipated much of this progress, but the pace has accelerated beyond expectations. This isn’t the first time automation has transformed factories, of course, but with today’s robust AI technologies, automation is starting to creep into fields that require less repetitive manual labor and once seemed immune to this shift, such as law, education, and journalism. Today’s advances are augmenting human minds, not just muscles.

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