Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Spoiler Alert: The odds are high that a robot/algorithm is going to be better at your job than you are.

The ascendency of the robotic workforce is a complicated issue. On the one hand, millions of human rely on driving to earn a crust. On the other hand, over a million humans die in car accidents every year. Autonomous cars are guaranteed to greatly reduce both of these numbers. It’s hard to know how to feel about that.

If you’re not convinced that self-driving cars would increase road safety all that much, we’ve got an infographic on The Car of the Future that is sure to convince you.

Speaking of autonomous vehicles, I can’t agree that airline pilots are unlikely to be replaced by machines because they practically have been! Autopilot does the majority of the flying already, and it’s a small step from there to obsolescence. I also think it’s much more likely that police patrols get replaced by robots than this graph does, but let’s not dwell on that dystopian possibility....

This is the time of year people post their prognostications for the next year. The predictions will be … predictable: More video! More Snapchat! More podcasts!

Well, OK. It’s pretty easy to make a prediction based on what’s already happening. But there are less obvious tectonic forces rumbling through our marketplace. Here’s a view of some of the underlying shifts, the marketing mega trends, you need be considering in 2017....