A full version of this McKinsey briefing note is available as a PDF download.

A new McKinsey Global Institute report finds realizing automation’s full potential requires people and technology to work hand in hand.

"The most popular AI product 20 years from now that everyone uses has not been invented yet," Kelly says. That means that you're not late.

Interview with Genevieve Bell about the need for corporate anthropologists, artificial intelligence and the impact of technology. 

When machines plus artificial intelligence begin to replace human beings, the entire social, political and moral dilemma for humanity becomes a question of systems.

This article is part of Wired's Frontiers Issue, guest-edited by President Barack Obama. 

Much like “the cloud,” “big data,” and “machine learning” before it, the term “artificial intelligence” has been hijacked by marketers and advertising copywriters.

In truth, competing visions of the smart city are proxies for competing visions of society, and in particular about who holds power in society. 

A smarter way to build cities might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team. That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the “end user” – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”

With the advent of the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in general, we've given the internet hands and feet: the ability to directly affect the physical world. What used to be attacks against data and information have become attacks against flesh, steel, and concrete.

A recent report by Christian Aid places more than a billion people in coastal cities vulnerable to severe flooding and extreme weather due to climate change by 2070, with Kolkata, Mumbai and Dhaka topping the list.

The question remains whether large-scale adaptation will be possible in the face of short electoral cycles, the abiding influence of commercial interests, and a sense of inertia beneficial to the status quo.

Watch Mary Meeker's presentation of the Internet Trends at the Code Conference 2016 here. 

Some highlights from the presentation:

• There are now about 3 billion global internet users, but user growth is stalling at about 9% year-on-year.
• But internet use in India is skyrocketing—it’s now the second-largest market behind China, passing the US, with over 277 million users.
• Smartphone sales are slowing, as is the yearly growth in the number of smartphone users, down to 21% from 31% last year.
• Internet advertising in the US has grown by about 20% since last year, reaching $60 billion—two-thirds of that growth has come from an increase in spending on mobile ads.
• Facebook’s yearly advertising revenue (up 59%) grew much more than Google’s (18%) last year.
• Online video ads are ineffective: 81% of people surveyed mute video ads, 62% are annoyed by pre-roll ads, and 92% have considered using ad-blocking software.
• Internet sales have increased from less than 2% of all retail sales in the US in 2000 to about 10% in 2015.
• But there’s still some room to grow in real life too: Online glasses store Warby Parker now makes more money per square foot in its US retail stores than Tiffany’s or Michael Kors.
• The time it takes retailers to get to $100 million in online sales is shrinking. It took Nike 14 years from the time its retail site launched, compared to nine years for Lululemon, and eight year for Under Armour.
• The rising Snapchat generation: Millennials communicate with text, but Generation Z prefers to communicate with images.
• The average Snapchat user plays with sponsored lenses for 20 seconds.
• Brand power in Facebook Live: When “Chewbacca mom” mentioned retailer Kohl’s twice in her viral video, the store’s app shot to the top of the downloads chart on the US iOS App Store.
• There are now over 3 billion images shared daily between Snapchat, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp—all but one of which are owned by Facebook.
• 55% of Pinterest users use the site to find products they want to buy.
• Messaging apps are moving from simple text tools to communicate with friends to platforms for commerce.
• There are 10 million business accounts on WeChat, and about 80% of all users follow one.
• Generation Y is the first generation to prefer chatting over the web or social media to talk to businesses, rather than over the phone.
• Computer recognition of speech has gone from about 70% to 90% accuracy in the last five years.
• 65% of US smartphone owners now use a voice assistant.
• By 2020, at least 50% of all searches online will be through voice or image search, according to Baidu’s chief scientist Andrew Ng.
• Only about 5% of US Amazon customers own an Amazon Echo—fewer than those that own a Fire TV streaming device.
• It’s time for self-driving cars: The average urban US worker spends about 42 hours a year sitting in delays on their commute, and the average person’s car is only in use about 4% of the time.
• Millennials don’t drive like their parents did: Only 77% of 16-44 year-olds have their licenses in the US today, compared with 92% in 1982.
• 71% of the time spent on mobile in China is divided between properties owned by three companies: Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu.
• 31% of Chinese WeChat users purchase something from retailers though the chat app.
• About 70% of the roughly 6.3 billion on-demand rides requested around the world in the first quarter of 2016 were requested in China.
• There’s been a 263% increase in the last three years of non-technology companies acquiring and investing in tech companies, such as GM buying Cruise Automation, and Fox Sports investing in DraftKings.

You can’t create a blueprint for the future. But we know one thing for sure. The future will be different from the past. A better approach is to look for people who are the contrarians, whose ideas, while they sound crazy, are focused on the future. Most often these are not the safe brand names.

If your gathered advisory board, task force, panel, study group, etc., tasked with predicting the future doesn’t have 1/3 contrarians, all you’re going to do is predict the past.

We all know that quite a few corporations or terrorist groups have more influence in the world than many states do, but have yet to place them all in a single framework that measures them according to their reach and relevance. And yet such a "Mindshare Matrix" is precisely what we need to properly understand the 21st century landscape of power.

In the immediate future, bots are likely to continue to suffer from significant limitations. Today, robots have difficulty with manual tasks that we find simple, such as picking items from cluttered warehouse shelves, and roboticists predict their creations will find such tasks difficult for years to come. But use a robotic system to enhance a person's capabilities and let the human fill in the gaps in the bot's skills, and the result could be something far greater than the sum of its parts.

The merging of man and machine is leading to the formation of entirely new ways of thinking about the human body. 

The report, compiled by Brian Solis, is organized by socioeconomic and technological impact.

Here are 15 technology trends driving companies to reinvent themselves.