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The Matthew White column

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas doing parkour

Ok this is cool. And amazing. Robot Parkour.

They’ve moved on a long way from just Spot the dog, and now this humaniod is doing things that some people find hard (eg balance beam) as well as things most can’t do (backflips). Looks we are getting to another skills set that robots can do better than humans.

If not us, then certainly our kids will be faced with a choice: do they want to be programming robots and AI, or taking taking their instructions from them?

One of the Flywheel values is service. We hire and performance manage against that and the other values. There were some raised eyebrows when, 5 years ago, described service as “We deliver massive service to our A Class Customers. And eventually when we are building AI systems and robotics, we will embed them with the same aim of service too.” Here was an IT Services company talking about embedding values of service into AI and robotics.

That’s because I can see robotics becoming commonplace in the office, as well as industrial workplaces, in a few short years. Within my working career, I’ve seen computers go from a niche thing only a few people had, to something everyone has in their pocket. And with that cheap and simple handheld, we have AI vision analysis apps that can recognise faces, objects and certain movements as well as a human.

It’s coming. What’s your business’ and school’s response to it – to ignore or to embrace?

If you need help navigating the use of advanced technology in your organisation, call your consultant or account manager to rebuild your 5 year development plan.