About The SPEAKER
RACHEL MAGUIRE
Research Director at the Institute For The Future
Rachel is Research Director at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) – an independent, nonprofit, strategic research and educational organisation celebrating nearly 50 years of forecasting experience, based in Palo Alto, California. IFTF’s goal in studying the future is to help organisations/societies think long-term about directional change so they can make more informed, ideally better, decisions in the present. Rachel puts people at the centre of her technology forecasts.
Understanding humans as consumers, workers, householders, and community members allows Rachel to help companies look beyond technical feasibility to identify the value in new technologies, forecast adoption and diffusion patterns, and to discover new market opportunities and threats.
During her decade-long tenure at IFTF, Rachel has explored how the futures of mobile technology, connected sensors, and cognitive computing will vary in different geographies. She has led expert workshops and ethnographic research in Latin America, and co-authored numerous reports including The Magic of Kids Tech, Living in a Health Aware World and The Future of Cities, Information and Inclusion, a research projected funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
About The TALK
REALIZING 2030: The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships
In 2030, every organisation will be a technology organisation and as such businesses need to start thinking today about how to future-proof their infrastructure and workforce, according to a report published by Dell Technologies in January 2018.
The research, led by IFTF alongside 20 technology, academic and business experts from across the globe, looks at how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality and cloud computing, will transform our lives and how we will work over the next decade.
Rachel will analyse the four main findings of the report:
• A future in which humans and machines partner to transcend their respective limitations
• Humans as “digital conductors” in which technology will work as an extension of people, helping to better direct and manage daily activities
• Work chasing people, in which by using advanced data-driven matchmaking technologies, organisations can find and employ talent from across the world
• People learning “in the moment,” as the pace of change will be so rapid that new industries will be created and new skills will be required to survive
