DIGITAL -!WOW! HEROES- DIGEST : A.I.'S GLOBAL ESSAY

'' COMING TIMES - The World Students Society would be the biggest global '' part-time '' employer for students of the entire world. !WOW! would also be the most powerful, the most humble, the most peace loving org in the service of humanity.''

! PLACE your bets. Take your pick !. Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. And I also lovingly refer to Aymah Naveed Querishi, Bahrain.

NOW, WHEN GLOBAL FOUNDERS ARE REALLY GLEAMING...... ' beg your pardon',.... I meant to refer to times when glossies were really gleaming.

We may be facing a future without magazines, at least glossy ones, and passing into an era of disembodied media entities - an unholy maelstrom of websites, YouTube channels and, worst of all,  podcasts.

A.I will eventually replace entire swaths of human employees, many predict, a perspective that is being  widely embraced in the corporate mainstream.

At the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford Motor, said :

'' Artificial Intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.''

Whether that type of revolutionary change occurs, and how soon, depends on the real-world testing ground of many businesses.

'' The raw-technological horsepower is terrific, but it's not going to determine how quickly A.I. transforms the economy,'' said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist and co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Initiative of the Digital Economy.

Still, some businesses are finding ways to incorporate A.I. - although in most cases the technology is still a long way from replacing workers.

One company where A.I's promise and flaws are playing out is USAA, which provides insurance and banking services to the members of the U.S. military and their families.

After several pilot projects, some of which it closed down, it introduced an A.I. assistant to help its  16,000 customer service workers provide correct answers to specific questions.

USAA is tracking its A.I. investments, but does not yet have a calculation of financial payoff, if any, for the call center software. But the response from its workers, the company said, has been overwhelmingly positive.

While it has software apps for answering customer questions online, its call-centers field an average of of 200,000 calls a day.

'' Those are moments that matter,'' said Ramnik Bajaj, the company's chief data analytics and A.I. officer. '' They want a human voice at the other end of the phone.''

That's similar to an A.I. app developed more than a year ago for fieldworkers at Johnson Controls, a large supplier of building equipment, software and services.

The company fed its operating and service manuals for its machines into an A.I. program that has been trained to generate a problem summary, suggest repairs and deliver it all to the technician's tablet computer.

This Master Essay Publishing on A.I., Students, Jobs, Mankind, and the Future continues. The World Students Society thanks Steve Lohr and Christian Lorentzen.