Robots are taking over our jobs and maybe our entire life as we know it. But among the most worried about the coming change is someone, that you may not expect to see there - the most wealthy man in the world Bill Gates. In an interview with Quarz last week the billionaire said that governments should tax companies that use robots to temporarily slow the spread of automation and fund labour transition to other forms of employment. According to the co-founder of Microsoft, this could finance the development of jobs, that will not be taken by machines, such as taking care of elderly people or working with children in schools. Gates took a leftist position on the issue, saying that governments must oversee such programs rather than relying on the business to redirect the employment and help people with lower incomes.

“Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level”, he said.

The idea for robot taxation is not entirely new. Last June the European Parliament released a draft report on robotics, which warned that artificial intelligence and automation present legal and ethical challenges that could have severe consequences. The document says that within the space of a few decades AI could surpass human brain capacity in a manner which, if not prepared for, could pose a challenge to humanity’s capacity to control its own creation. Among the proposals in the report was the idea to register robots with authorities and to hold them responsible for the damage they cause, such as loss of jobs. This type of taxation is one of the ideas of the surprise front-runner in the French Socialist Party presidential primaries Benoit Hamon for funding a €750 monthly universal basic income for the citizens of the country. But Bloomberg’s columnist Leonid Bershidsky points out that linking basic income to the destructive influence of automation is not supported by data. According to a research he quoted, the ICT capital would have needed to increase several times as fast as it actually has done if it were to account for both the occupational shift and the unemployment growth during the last couple of decades. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of artificial intelligence Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During our summits, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Partner in IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach and the VP & CTO of VMware for EMEA region Joe Baguley.

Our life today is more dynamic than it was at any point in history and none of our days is like the previous one. In the world of business this new form of operation speed is both a gift and a curse depending on your company’s ability to adapt to the social and economic changes and use the full potential of the new environment. In 2017 serious marketers use every tool in the kit, from native ads and influencer channels to visual storytelling and now or never expiring content. The biggest trends in the industry will help these expert engage consumers more directly by increasing their marketing reach. At this year’s Webit.Festival you can listen to some of the top marketers in the world. During the Marketing & Innovation Summit of the event they will share their thoughts on topics, such as Programmatic, Mobile, Video and Native Advertising, Brand Strategies, Metrix & Data, Mobile Marketing, OmniChannel & Personalisation Strategies and Media & Digital Entertainment. Their insight information will help you transform your business into the enterprise of tomorrow and will give you the best tools to increase your performance. As more and more brands learn the true value of content, our lives are becoming increasingly over-saturated in information. This means the competition for our attention has never been greater and getting eyes on your content is no longer good enough. The design director of TBrand Studio International Graham McDonnell will tell us more about the importance of the story in storytelling. The President and Global Brand Director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jercinovic will talk about the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its role in today’s politics and political marketing. Meanwhile, the CMO of Selligent Nick Worth will tell us more about marketing automation and the use of AI. During the Brand Strategies track, the Chief Creative Officer at DigitasLBi Chris Clarke will tell us more about the death of empathy in marketing and why global brand consistency doesn’t matter anymore. Chris is a member of the Campaign A-List and was recently placed at #53 in The Drum’s Adverati, a list of the most influential people in advertising. Twice Reply’s Managing director for digital transformation Volker Glaeser will inform you how new innovation processes can change the digital world and what are the most efficient ways of creating and testing future products. The German expert will explain the two most important approaches of today’s leading global innovators - Rapid Prototyping and Constant Beta. The General manager of Advertising at Phunware Jon Hook will talk about the changing landscape of mobile advertising, what are the best ways to adapt your strategy to that change and where are the biggest gaps when starting a mobile ad tech business. Meanwhile the Global chief strategy and digital officer at Mindshare Norm Johnston will explain the exploding market of connected devices and how to use the marketing opportunities it brings to better connect and service consumers. In his session, Norm will share examples from his recent book Extra Sense, which illustrate how marketers are exploring the post-mobile third wave of digital marketing. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

Digital transformation is the process of adopting digital technology in all aspects of human society. Right now it sits atop the strategic agenda for businesses around the world and two-thirds of the top executives worldwide predict that their organizations will be vastly digital after the next two years. This will not be easy task, but it may bring huge opportunities for emerging and already established businesses. In the next 10 years between 40% and 60% of the companies in Fortune’s 500 will not play the same role on the world. Their places will be taken by new enterprises that manage to adapt best to the economic realities of the future. Over the last 8 years Webit.Festival has been all about creating density of opportunities for the business and entirely new entrepreneurial ecosystem. Among the 5000 guest of this year’s event in Sofia you can find top level speakers from all over the world, that will talk about the latest trends in the world of digital transformation. During the event’s Digital Transformation Summit the CEO of JetPack Aviation David Mayman will tell the audience about the smallest and lightest jetpack ever created and the change it can bring to the transportation industry. The chief designer of SAP Martin Wezowski will share his thoughts on how to build the future we want to live in and the merging meaning of what to be an innovator and designer. He will also talk about the designer’s role in creating of everything, including social and political systems in a space between cutting edge technology and humanism. The partner for Europe and Innovation at VCI Roby Stancel will talk about the digital transformation in the most real world. He brings to the stage two decades of experience in innovation, services, strategies, roadmaps and cultural transformations for over 100 partner companies. Now Stancel offers a unique combination of design thinking innovation and business strategy. As founder of Change Sciences, Pamela Pavliscak advises designers, developers and decision makers on how to create technologies that promote well-being. On Webit’s stage she will tell the audience how to design happiness - which has been the promise of technology right from the start. Researches suggest that technology has negative impact on our lives instead of aspiring us to get better at our work and augmenting human abilities. Pamela will share her thoughts on how we can start designing a long-term well-being rather than short-term goals. The Chief marketing officer of AngelHack Brian Collins will tell the best options for the existing communities to leverage their resources and build up their well-being. Right now AngelHack is the world’s largest and most diverse global hacker community. The company helps drive open innovation of tech products, platforms and brands with extraordinary smarts, scale and speed with tech education and hackatons. The CEO and Founder of SignAll Technologies Zsolt Robotka will speak about the first automated sign language translator that can improve the lives of 70 million people and unlock services for the deaf. Furthermore, the expert will share his thoughts on how to accommodate sign language users in smart cities. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

The fourth industrial revolution has already led to transformations that alter our way of life fundamentally. But perhaps the most important of them all is the change in the labour market, which affects hundreds of jobs and can become a challenge even for the most sought ones - the developers. Recent study, conducted by the Oxford University, showed that 47% of jobs in the United States are at risk of being automated in the next two decades. But according to McKinsey Global Institute, only 5% of all occupations are at risk of being entirely automated. Rather than disappearing, the report’s authors say, jobs will change dramatically, forcing workers to adapt. McKinsey’s analysis of 800 occupations and 2,000 job tasks predicts that half of workers’ current tasks could be automated by the year 2055 using technology that currently exists. The experts think that those changes will not lead to mass unemployment. Instead, the automation could increase global productivity by 0.8% to 1.4% annually over the next 50 years. Those jobs are not only in the manufacturing sector, where robots will soon be doing almost every task. Today we can see the automation slowly taking over many white collar occupations, and this is just the beginning. Industry data show that enterprises are investing more money in platforms, tools and automated processes and less in manual professional services. Eventually experts predict that robots or robo-software will replace developers and will prove to be the only solution able to support the increasing demand. The CEO of Zuznow mobile development platform Chen Levkovich told Venture Beat that while many developers oppose automation, the new tools can help them become more efficient. Last November Forbes reported that the custom software development company Dev9 is using artificial intelligence to eliminate strenuous processes and drastically reduce manual overhead. Using teams of 3 to 8 people, with expertise ranging from architecture, development, project management, quality and deployment, Dev9 develops original technology that rapidly, reliably and repeatedly pushes software enhancements and bug fixes to customers at a low risk. To learn more about the future of software development and DevOps, join the Dev Summit within Webit.Festival. On the scene you’ll see and hear top level speakers, such as the Founder and CTO of Maria DB Foundation Michael “Monty” Widenius, the Founder and CTO of Hired Allan Grant, and the Developer Evangelist in Amazon Peter Heinrich.

Digital transformation is on the rise worldwide and with it comes the increasing pressure on large public institutions and enterprise to become more efficient in their work. This process is closely connected with the development of artificial intelligence technology and digital assistants and has the power to totally transform the public and customer services sector in the years to come. The IoT technologies made cross-device integration common, while the lines between reality and digital world are more blurred than ever. Experts predict that in 2017 millions of users around the world will get used to dealing with bots, and synchronizing their lives and operations to include digital assistants. Microsoft and Google already added powerful AI services to their cloud platforms and now they allow anyone with coding knowledge to create simple chatbots. This means lower financial costs for customer service and saving time from manual operations. Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that the Chinese phonemaker Huawei is working on its own voice-activated assistant, just like Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa. Initially it will be exclusive for the customers in China. But later this year the company is planning to release a second version of its digital assistant for the US customers of Huawei Mate 9. Once a standout feature, competitors to Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant could soon become a crowded market, with companies such as Adobe, Samsung, and potentially even Nokia all planning a hat of their own to throw in the digital assistant ring. The Chinese search giant Baidu has unveiled its assistant Xiaoyu Zaijia (Little Fish), who responds to voice commands with a combination of pictures, text and speech. It can answer questions, find local services, play music, make video calls and control smart home devices. According to the company’s chief scientist Andrew Ng AI is the new electricity with its steady growth. “Every year our AI has been 50% better. Those of us on the inside feel the acceleration now but we have been feeling it for the last decade. Just as 100 years ago the electrification of our society transformed industry after industry, I think AI tech has now reached that stage”, he told BBC. Gartner predicts that AI will become so important to enterprise that by the end of the year the worldwide spending on IT will reach $3.5 trillion. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of this growing industry, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During our summits, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Partner in IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach and the VP & CTO of VMware for EMEA region Joe Baguley.

Aerospace industry worldwide is experiencing a renaissance, but unlike the space race years during the Cold War, now the innovations come not only from American and Russian government agencies, but also from emerging economies like India. Just yesterday the Asian country made history by successfully launching 104 satellites on a single mission, surpassing the previous record of 37 satellites, launched by Russia 3 years ago. Experts say this is a sign that India is emerging as a major player in the multi-billion dollar space market, while the Prime Minister of the country Narendra Modi was among the first to congratulate the team behind the effort. He tweeted that this is another proud moment for the nation’s scientific community.

This remarkable feat by @isro is yet another proud moment for our space scientific community and the nation. India salutes our scientists.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 15, 2017

The main task of the launch was to get the Cartosat-2 Earth-observation satellite in orbit. It is expected to be used for monitoring of India's local rivals - Pakistan and China. The other 103 spacecraft were nanosatellites, provided by countries like Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. 88 of them are owned by the San Francisco company Planet (ex Planet Labs). Their dimensions are just 30 by 10 by 10 centimeters, while their weight is about 4.5 kilograms. Despite the small size, they have sharp vision and can observe the Earth surface with precision. During the last year’s Webit.Festival in Sofia the European Space Agency (ESA) engineer and coordinator Lluc Diaz spoke about the institution’s mutual work with startups, like Planet Labs. The expert explained the benefits from launching small communication satellites, that cost between $10 and $100 million, unlike the big ones for $500 million. The small devices are easier to maintain and can be replaced with new ones when they are hit by space junk for example. Last year 210 satellites weighing less than 50 kilograms were launched this year to do such things as map the Earth, expand broadband access and track packages on shipping vessels. Тhat is up from just 25 launches in 2010. The 2016 number is expected to double in the next five years. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the space industry Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During the event, you can find out more about the future of exploration of the Universe from top level speakers, likе the Chairman of Breakthrough Prize Foundation Simon P. Worden. The author of more than 150 scientific papers in astrophysics space sciences and strategic studies will talk about the search of life beyond the Earth and deep space traveling.

About a decade ago the Ray Kurzweil presented to the world his concept of the singularity, and from today’s point of view this utopian idea looks more real than ever. In his famous book The Singularity is Near, the inventor, futurist and Director of Engineering at Google wrote about the moment, when machine intelligence will surpass our own. Now the top entrepreneur and visionary Elon Musk is talking about this moment not as something bad, but as a next step in humankind evolution. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX told an audience at the World Government Summit in Dubai that over time we will probably see a closer merger of biological and digital intelligence. He explained that humans will need to merge with machines, so that they don’t become useless in an age when AI is widespread among every aspect of our lives. "Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem”, Musk said. And while this kind of problems may seem too distant, the reality is that the are already a part of our lives. Just the last year a automated Tesla car crashed and killed its test driver. This was the first of its kind tragedy and opened series of ethical dilemmas. As the self-driving vehicles are going to be the most near term AI innovation that we are going to see, the regulators will have to answer important questions about the responsibility and ethics in this new kind of transportation. It is a question, first raised by the celebrated science-fiction author Isaac Asimov in his short story Runaround. The futurist revealed an early version of his laws, that states: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. The computer’s victory over a human Go master this past March reminded us of the coming singularity, while the respected Japanese magazine Shukan Shincho predicted that in 2045 a computer with the combined intellectual power of the entire human race would cost around $100. Although the development of artificial intelligence undoubtedly lead to risks, approaching a moment of singularity can bring unimaginable advances in medicine, economics, government and social spheres, while completely changing the way we live today. We can expect the merger of humans and machines to bring the next step of our civilization’s evolution and to finally make us interplanetary species - one of the biggest ambitions of Musk’s SpaceX. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of artificial intelligence Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During our summits, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Partner in IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach and the VP & CTO of VMware for EMEA region Joe Baguley.

Amid the political turmoil in Europe, caused by the unprecedented influx of refugees from the MENA region and the election victory of Donald Trump in the United States, the issue of immigration quickly established itself as a major in today’s political life. And although most people in the developed world have their reasons to be worried about the migration and its effect on their country’s social system, on the political scene we see a clear conflict between the stated policies of governments and the interests of the industry, and especially the tech sector. Last week we saw that the tech companies in USA continued to rally against the new president’s immigration ban for the citizens of 7 countries with Muslim majority population. More than 100 firms in the sector voiced their opposition to Trump’s executive order, and among them were Apple, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Airbnb, Twitter and Microsoft. Meanwhile Starbucks even announced that it will hire 10 000 refugees in 75 countries over the next 5 years. But what caused the strange connection between large technology corporations and the issue of migration? Quite simply, it’s the fact that vast majority of the directors of successful businesses in the US and around the world are either immigrants or descendants of those and feel committed to this issue. Among them we can mention the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa and studied in Canada, the Co-Founder of Google Sergey Brin, who was born in Moscow, the Аrmenian refugee descendant and founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian, the Cuban immigrant descendant and Founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos and many others. In fact, the connection between being an immigrant and becoming an entrepreneur is well studied, even by Harvard. Last year the famous university published a report on the extensive cross-cultural experiences of top level business leaders and how it helps them take over the industry with out of the box decisions. According to the Harvard’s experts immigrants in USA are almost twice as likely to become entrepreneurs as native-born citizens of the country. Right now they represent 27.5% of the US entrepreneurs, but only around 13% of the population. This pattern extends beyond the United States. The data from 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor showed that the vast majority of the 69 countries surveyed reported higher entrepreneurial activity among immigrants, than among natives, especially in growth-oriented ventures. This year Webit continues its mission of hosting top level policy discussion about dealing with Europe’s most pressing issues and forming the digital future of the continent. The Digital Economy Leadership Summit of this years Webit.Festival will again become a platform for presenting the best ideas for the future development of European industry. The event will gather some of the most influential policy makers and top level experts, that shape the global agenda of the World Economic Forum, like the Global Leadership Fellow at WEF Thomas Philibeck, the Head of Europe and Eurasia at WEF Martina Larkin,the President & Global Brand Director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jerinovic and the Director General of Digital Europe John Higgins.

The tech industry, social media, marketing and entertainment in the next few years will all be shaped by the development of virtual and augmented reality and the emergence of artificial intelligence. This industry will finally rid us of two-dimensional monitors, which for several decades played the role of a window into the virtual reality. Experts predict that by 2020 the VR hardware market size will reach $5.2 billion, while the VR software market will be around $24.5 billion. In 2016 the worldwide sales of VR head-mounted displays were for just $1.43 million. Polls show that 44% of the people with access to internet are very interested in virtual reality. The AR market can grow from nearly zero today to $90 billion by 2020. And half of that revenue is going to come from sales of AR hardware devices. By the end of this year worldwide AR headset sales could hit $1.2 billion. This will be perfect for Microsoft, which started selling the developer version of the mixed reality device HoloLens last year. In 2017 we expect a huge splash by the wireless virtual reality tech. This whole process started with Apple’s adoption of new Bluetooth standard in the iPhone 7 and 7S and now we are going to see products in different categories. The Taiwanese manufacturer of Android and Windows smartphones HTC is already taking pre-orders for a $220 add-on that cuts the cables of the headset Vive and transform it into a wireless device. Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed to the world a new prototype for VR gloves, that he tested during his tour inside Oculus Research facility. “We’re working on new ways to bring your hands in virtual and augmented reality. Wearing these gloves, you can draw, type on a virtual keyboard, and even shoot webs like Spider-Man. That’s what I’m doing here”, he wrote on his profile in the social network. Earlier this week Google revealed its plan to bring virtual reality into the web with the new mobile browser support for WebVR in Chrome. Now the browser allows users to navigate through webpages using their fingers or mouse on desktop PC. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of virtual and augmented reality Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During our summits, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Partner in IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach, the VP & CTO of VMware for EMEA region Joe Baguley and the General Manager of PlayFab for Europe Mark Val.

The debate about self-driving cars is already over. They are coming and the important question is who is going to build them first and how they will be regulated. Nowadays there are more than 20 companies, from traditional giants in the automotive industry to new startups, who are trying to build autonomous car by the beginning of the new decade. And hundreds of others, who work on creative solutions for the new opportunities, that the self-driving cars present. The dedication of Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk to developing autonomous vehicles is not new. But as the company is now testing its self-driving cars on public roads in California the idea is looking more like reality, than just a project. But before we get to the implementation of this fascinating technology, we must look at changing need of car ownership. According to KPMG’s study 59% of industry bosses believe that more than half of all car owners today will no longer want to own a car by 2025. The automation systems of the future will empower us to make the choice whether to drive on our own, or enjoy our automobile journeys as passengers. And instead of today’s car ownership model, we will most probably rely on the idea of mobility as a service by the end of the next decade. And while most of us imagine that the future of automotive industry is fully committed to the electricity, the senior director of NVIDIA Danny Shapiro does not agree with this statement. “We have a projection that by 2025, globally 15% of vehicles are going to have an electric component, whether that’s a pure electric vehicle, a plug-in hybrid or full hybrid. For western Europe, that percentage would obviously be higher”, Shapiro said in an interview for The Guardian. He thinks that the huge oil infrastructure worldwide and the pro-oil administration in the United States in the next four years will slow down this process, or at least divert it to development of hybrid engines. Meanwhile Japanese government is subsidising automakers, that create cars with hydrogen fuel cells, but the lack of infrastructure to support this new kind of fuel consumption will delay their implementation. The common thing between all this technologies is the aim to transform the transportation into a more eco-friendly industry and lower its harmful emissions in line with the commitments in the Paris climate agreement, reached in the end of 2015. If you want to keep up with the hottest trends in the world of mobility Webit.Festival is the right place for you. During our summits, you can listen to top level speakers such as the Director for International Transportation and Government in Xerox Richard Harris and the Managing Partner at New Mobility World Alexander Renz.