Guri Sohi, chairman of the UW-Madison computer sciences department, expects major disruption in Wisconsin’s biggest industries as computing plays an increasingly important role.
“It’s now getting to the point where there’s no getting away from computing,” he said at a recent meeting of the Wisconsin Technology Council’s Innovation Network in Wauwatosa. “Every decade or so something big is coming up.”
Importantly, he notes, this rate of change is accelerating. As future advances take less and less time to come out, he expects shakeups in industries across the board.
This trend is already hitting Wisconsin, where manufacturing and agriculture dominate the economy. But Sohi expects upheavals in financial services, tourism, medicine and transportation, noting “that’s where a lot of the future action is going to be.”
“Manufacturing is increasingly getting data-driven, automated — a lot of these processes are being improved by all sorts of data gathering and analysis,” he said. “A lot of biotech is becoming increasingly reliant on computing at its core.”
Jignesh Patel, a UW-Madison professor of computer sciences, says this rapid advancement is leading to a future global economy in which most tasks are performed by robots. Read the story here.
;
