by Mouncey Ferguson

Industrial automation is on the move, robots are finding new ways to get around, and CG is popping up where you least expect it. Check out our picks for the week:

• Go big or go home. When it’s completed in late 2018, India’s Statue of Unity (pictured above) will be nearly twice the size of the Statue of Liberty, not to mention the tallest statue in the world. ArchDaily has a construction report with a gorgeous animated rendering of the project’s past and future progress.
• Automation goes global. The McKinsey Global Institute hosted a juicy podcast about how automation and AI will affect the economies of China, Europe, and India.

“Every decade, we create 10 percent of jobs that you haven’t heard of before. Think about the day we started all using Google and search, and search-marketing jobs were invented. Now we have also invented cloud engineers. These jobs are something you couldn’t imagine would exist 20 to 30 years ago.” – Jacques Bughin, The McKinsey Global Institute  

• New era, new skills. Who’s going to do all these new jobs? The people who know how. Learn how Autodesk is working with the support of the Indian government to reskill Indian workers for the new age of automation.
• Beyond optimization. Autodesk’s own Ravi Akella explains the basics of generative design in IndustryWeek—what it is, how it works, and what it means for your industry.
• Dramatic effects. You may find more CG in dramas like “I, Tonya” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” than in popcorn fare like “The Dark Knight” or “Interstellar.” But unless you watch this video from Digg.com, you may never know it.
• The robots are coming. Some are swimming like a fish, using soft robotics. Others are slithering like a snake, using tricks learned from kirigami, the Japanese craft of paper cutting.