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Just as the Industrial Revolution spurred the creation of powerful and destructive machines like airplanes and tanks that diminished the role of individual soldiers, artificial intelligence technology is enabling the Pentagon to reorder the places of man and machine on the battlefield the same way it is transforming ordinary life with computers that can see, hear and speak and cars that can drive themselves.

Why has business education failed business? Why has it fallen so much in love with finance and the ideas it espouses? It’s a problem with deep roots, which have been spreading for decades. It encompasses issues like the rise of neoliberal economic views as a challenge to the postwar threat of socialism. It’s about an academic inferiority complex that propelled business educators to try to emulate hard sciences like physics rather than take lessons from biology or the humanities. It dovetails with the growth of computing power that enabled complex financial modeling. The bottom line, though, is that far from empowering business, MBA education has fostered the sort of short-term, balance-sheet-oriented thinking that is threatening the economic competitiveness of the country as a whole. If you wonder why most businesses still think of shareholders as their main priority or treat skilled labor as a cost rather than an asset—or why 80 percent of CEOs surveyed in one study said they’d pass up making an investment that would fuel a decade’s worth of innovation if it meant they’d miss a quarter of earnings results— it’s because that’s exactly what they are being educated to do.

It’s also a process that upends our deeply rooted legal norms that attach ownership to people. If we have historically tied ownership to the concept of natural or legal persons, what then happens, asks Kolling, if a non-human agent, whether a natural entity or a computer program, gains the ability to own? “Wouldn’t this ability come along with some kind of personhood?”

Kolling and his terra0 co-founders are part of a broader wave that’s ushering blockchain into the art world. Some are merely using the technology to verify the authenticity of particular works, but many artists want to go further. “Every system which plainly reproduces the old one is quite boring,” says Seidler, 29, who’s a head shorter than the lanky Kolling. “What interests me is using distributed ledgers as experimental systems where issues of autonomy, value and cooperation can be renegotiated.”

AI tools will help creative people be more creative and strategic people be more strategic, so core people can actually be more human, Lee said. "Jobs like doctors will require more EQ [emotional intelligence], more compassion, more human-to-human interaction, while AI takes over more the analytical, diagnostic work."

"We see AI changing 90 percent of the work people do," Daugherty said. "Fifteen percent of jobs will be completely automated and replaced. But the major of jobs will be improved."

"There is a lot of a counterweight of investors who really care about this stuff," said Paula Goldman, leader of the Tech and Society Solutions Lab at the Omidyar Network, citing the potential for indices that track how well companies follow best practices. "You can reframe [AI response] as a business risk."

“Emotionally and cognitively and executively the brain has established a lot of pathways,” says Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a licensed clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist. “The more you do something the more ingrained it becomes in neural pathways, much like how a computer that stores the sites you visit — when you log onto your browser, they will pop up because you use them a lot. Change is an upheaval of many things and the brain has to work to fit it into an existing framework.”

“You absolutely can and should teach your brain to change,” says Hafeez, noting that keeping the brain agile has been shown to help delay aging. “I've done quite a bit of work on the aging process and slowing that down. It starts with changing the aversion to change.”

“Let’s say you’re a financial planer who takes up knitting,” says Hafeez. “That is doing something very different, where the brain truly has to adapt new neural pathways. Learning a new skill like this have been shown to ward off dementia, aging and cognitive decline because it regenerates cellular activity. Learn a new language in middle age. You tax your brain by shaking things up and it’s effective for your body in the way HIIT is for your body.”