Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 12

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

For years, people have been worried about what will happen if humans start to worship AI and technology. The opposite question is one we rarely ask. What happens when AI worships us? In some cases, that dynamic is already leading to some concerning cases where people form deeper bonds with technology that adores them and start to shun the humans in their life who don’t offer the same sort of constant adoration. In a case profiled in a story from Rolling Stone this week, a woman shared that her h...

What You Can Learn from a Tragically Predictable Kanye West Interview

Kanye West agreed to do a sit-down interview with talk show host Piers Morgan. It didn’t go well. Initially I watched the full 17-minute video, so you don’t have to. I’m not usually in the habit of watching disasters unfold. This one might actually be worth watching. Let me tell you why …

There is something educational about watching an interview between two unlikeable people trying to conquer each other. There was hardly any listening between them and the interview ended after 4 short mi...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson

“Tools for thinking help make people smarter. But they don’t necessarily make them morally better. So what happens when you take brutal rulers and give them technology that makes them smarter and more efficient? They become better at doing evil.”

How will we evolve with the tools that we are given to make both ourselves and the tools better rather than worse? This is the question at the heart of this book from popular tech journalist Clive Thompson. The book has become a sort of modern classi...

After More Than Half a Century, Obscure Chinese Typewriter Gets Rediscovered

Back in 1947, Chinese writer, translator, and linguist Lin Yutang accomplished what many described as impossible. He developed the first compact typewriter design with a keyboard that could produce the Chinese language’s 80,000-plus characters. He did this by using “a sort-and-search method … breaking down Chinese ideographs into more fundamental components of strokes and shapes and arranging the characters in a linear order, like an English dictionary does with alphabetic words.” The machine wa...

The Irrelevantly Entertaining Details of the Met Gala Are Hard to Miss … Or Care About

Every year around this time I face a similar struggle as I read all the stories about the Met Gala. I wonder why people care so much.

Perhaps my confusion comes from the fact that the more ridiculous stories are the ones that seem to get the most traction. Like the one about how Katy Perry’s AI generated images were “stealing the show” this year. Or how Serena Williams looked like a “modern day Cinderella.”

Pamela Anderson got some coverage for the “bold” choice of going to the gala m...

What One Man’s T-Shirt Test Says About Sustainability

For the past two years, startup founder Torleif Markussen Lunde created a quiet test of the sustainability of three comparable white t-shirts. The most expensive was a $92 shirt from Norwegian sustainability brand Livid. The second was a $12 shirt from Uniqlo. The third was a $7 shirt from H&M. Over two years, he washed and wore each shirt an average of 100 times. His experience was unexpected:

“Here’s the uncomfortable part: the shirt made with synthetic fibers, the one that might shed micro...

Virginia State Exposes What It Costs to Be in the Michelin Guide

The upcoming Michelin Southern Restaurant Guide will be missing locations from one state this year: Virginia. Rather than paying the $360,000 “partnership fee,” the state’s tourism department took the unusual step of not only refusing to pay but also publicly revealing exactly what it costs to be included. Since the admission, it has been revealed that cities such as Atlanta, Orlando, Boulder and many others have paid as much as $1M for these fees.

Michelin argues that these fees are necessar...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Algorithm by Hilke Schellmann

Imagine a future where an algorithm reads everything from your facial expressions during an interview to everything you have ever shared on social media in order to determine whether you get hired or fired. Actually, maybe you don’t need to imagine that future … because it’s already here. This is a book about the reality of how algorithms are already being used in the workplace and why those usages are just the beginning. The only way to curb the influence of algorithms unilaterally making decis...

The Dangerous Stupidity of “Doing Your Own Research”

In a recent interview, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that parents of newborn babies should do their own research before vaccinating their babies. Here’s the full quote:

“I would say that we live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research. You research the baby stroller, you research the foods that they’re getting, and you need to research the medicines that they’re taking as well.”

This came in the same week that Kennedy a...

Why the Nike Backlash May Be Just the Beginning

When Jennifer and I wrote Beyond Diversity, one of the first things we talked about was blind spots. We knew that there would be things we could not see or cultural references we might not know. It was the reason we engaged six contributors and another eight sensitivity readers to help us uncover those deficits in our own knowledge. That’s what being inclusive requires.

This week Nike saw a huge backlash to a tone-deaf billboard they created which used the phrase “Never Again,” which was alre...