Institute For The Future

The Next Era of Human|Machine Partnerships

New Report Explores Emerging Technologies' Impact on Society & Work in 2030

Released July 12, 2017

Dell Technologies partnered with Institute for the Future to explore the emerging technologies shaping the future of the human experience over the next decade, and the specific impacts and implications they will have on society and work. To execute this, IFTF relied on its decades-long study on the future of work and technology, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, and the opinions and ideas generated during an all-day facilitated workshop with a diverse set of experts from across the globe.

At its inception, very few people anticipated the pace at which the internet would spread across the world, or the impact it would have in remaking business and culture. And yet, as journalist Oliver Burkeman wrote in 2009, “Without most of us quite noticing when it happened, the web went from being a strange new curiosity to a background condition of everyday life.”

Today’s emerging technologies also feel like strange, new curiosities. Artificial Intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality, home robots, and cloud computing, to name only a few of the sophisticated technologies in development today, are capturing the imaginations of many. The advanced capabilities of today’s emerging technologies are driving many academics, entrepreneurs, and enterprises to envision futures in which their impacts on society will be nothing short of transformative. At a recent expert workshop hosted by Dell Technologies and the Institute for the Future (IFTF), participants suggested that the technologies in play over the next decade have the potential to “solve some of the intractable problems that humanity has faced for so long,” offer the opportunity to “increase productivity [such that] all our basics needs [are taken care of],” and fundamentally reframe “notions of what it means to be a person.”

With this in mind, Institute for the Future set out with 20 experts to explore how various social and technological drivers will influence the next decade and, specifically, how emerging technologies will recast our society and the way we conduct business by the year 2030. As a result, this new outlook report concludes that, over the next decade, emerging technologies will underpin the formation of new human-machine partnerships that make the most of their respective complementary strengths. These partnerships will enhance daily activities around the coordination of resources and in-the-moment learning, which will reset expectations for work and require corporate structures to adapt to the expanding capabilities of human-machine teams.

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