Byron Reese

"Daily, the media greets readers with a variant of “THE ROBOTS ARE COMING FOR YOUR JOB!” The logic is simple: Everyday Robots get smarter, learn faster, and they will never ask for a raise. But Byron believes this simplistic reasoning is entirely wrong. "Just as electricity and the assembly line weren’t bad for workers, in spite of shrill predictions otherwise, AI and robots won’t be either," he says. "In fact, they will create so many new jobs that our bigger problem will be a labor shortage."

Sharing insights from his upcoming book, "The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity," to be released Nov. 2017 by Simon & Schuster, Byron invites his audience to meet him at the start of the Industrial Revolution, to explore from there the many advances leading to today's technological age, and then to dare to explore the vast possibilities of the future, the coming Fourth Age.

This talk is structured to be highly customizable to specific industries or can be presented to a general audience. Byron delivers a calm and factual analysis concluding that our best days are certainly ahead of us.

No matter what industry you are in, you probably have a sense that you are in one of those radical disruptive periods where everything seems to be changing. You might be wondering when it is all going to settle down so you can take a bit of a breather.

This talk explores how businesses that operate in industries that are undergoing dramatic changes can function and be successful. While traditional futurists seldom bridge the gap between “here is what is going to happen” and “here is how you profit from it,” Byron explores how it is that radical technology advance creates new multi-billion dollar companies and destroys old ones.

What would you have foreseen seven years ago? There were no self-driving cars or Apple watches. Would you have seen the transformative effect that tablets and smartphones would have? The next seven years will have much more change than the prior seven years. We know this. And this is the change we need to begin preparing for.

We usually think of technology in buckets. There is virtual reality, social media, block chain, artificial intelligence, and all the rest. But what that misses is the larger trend: They are all converging. We call that place where they all come together the metaverse. But what is it really? Does it matter? Is it just a bunch of hype and buzzwords by technohipsters? Or is ir the next stage of human evolution? Artificial intelligence expert and author Byron Reese explores this topic designed in a new talk designed for a non-technical audience.

The University system is a 12th Century French invention that remains to this day largely unchanged from it origins in the Middle Ages. Our K-12 system is a 19th Century German invention designed to produce homogenous factory workers. It too remains unchanged since the late 1800s. Now, we find ourselves in a world that has changed in ways no one expected. Now, the two most important job skills are teaching yourself new skills and working collaboratively with a team, neither of which are taught in our existing framework. How should education change? How will it? What skills will ensure that a person can economically contribute in a world of radical technological change?