In 1962, Shintaro Tsuji, founder of Sanrio Company, began selling rubber sandals with flowers painted on them. He noted the profits gained by adding a cute design to the sandals and hired cartoonists to design cute characters for his merchandise. The company produced a line of character merchandise around gift-giving occasions. Hello Kitty, designed by Yuko Shimizu, was added to the lineup of early Sanrio characters in 1974, and had her first appearance on a vinyl coin purse. Since then, she has become a global phenomenon. 

One part of Hello Kitty’s design has sparked some controversy surrounding it. That is, she is not given a mouth. A spokesperson for Sanrio says that Hello Kitty is not normally given a mouth because “without the mouth, it is easier for the person looking at Hello Kitty to project their feelings onto the character” and that “the person can be happy or sad together with Hello Kitty.” Some people were particularly concerned about this. They felt that this showed Hello Kitty as being meek and unspeaking. They thought young girls could be made to feel as if they had no voice. Other people, however, believe that leaving a blank facial expression stimulates imagination in young girls. They believe that leaving the mouth off will allow young girls to imagine what the kitty is going through and imagine that she understands what the girls are telling her. 

In May 2008, Japan named Hello Kitty the ambassador of Japanese tourism in both China and Hong Kong, which are two places where the character is exceptionally popular among children and young women. This marked the first time Japan’s tourism ministry had appointed a fictional character to the role.

   Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around longer than most people realize. The intent behind much of AI is to free us from mundane repetitive tasks, giving us more time to grow our intellects and businesses, with more interesting, evolving actions. AI offers us that access with speed and accuracy when we need it.

   In London, self-driving robots deliver food. In Pasadena, California, a robot named Flippy can cook. Last fall, an autonomous train made its way across the Australian outback for the first time, and Zhuzhou, China, began testing a trackless and driverless train that navigates city streets by means of lines painted on the road. Artificial intelligence is everywhere. And its adoption is rapidly becoming necessary for businesses to stay competitive.

   How does this affect human employees? Those low-skilled jobs are most likely to be affected and most chances of being automated. White collar jobs are also at risk though with AI taking a bigger role in the financial industry.

   But despite all this, the future for human employees may be much brighter than many recent predictions. While AI destroys jobs, it also creates them. And according to a report from the research firm Gartner, artificial intelligence is currently creating more jobs than it destroys. This includes not only the obvious jobs such as software engineers but also low-level jobs such as training AI to recognize objects or human activity and many others.

   AI may destroy jobs and it may create them, but it's not always about man versus machine. AI can be at its best when it helps humans to perform jobs. For example, Walmart announced it was beginning tests of shelf scanning robots at 50 locations. These robots are not intended to replace human workers but to make them more efficient. The robots scan the condition of shelves, and workers may focus their time on filling the shelves, replacing items left in the wrong place and fixing problems that the robots notify them of.