Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 28

Chick-fil-A Launches Summer Camp for Young Kids: Is It Smart or Evil?

This July, children aged 5-12 years old in some regions can sign up for a summer camp experience to go behind the scenes at a Chick-fil-A restaurant to see how the food is made and how operations work. It’s been predictably popular among young fans of the brand and the few locations where it is offered are already sold out. When news of the program broke, the brand received plenty of criticism online from people joking that it seemed like an evil master plan to employ child labor and commenting ...

How 7879 Is Transforming the Jewelry Resale Market

Putting your money into buying gold has long been considered one of the most stable investments. Buying jewelry, though, is rarely as safe of a bet because of all the marketing and impurities that go into the products. New fashion ecommerce site 7879 (the name comes from a combination of the atomic element numbers for gold and platinum) is trying to change that. The platform only sells products that are 24 karat purity and certified.
More interesting is their ambition to allow customers to view t...

Neuralink May Create a Generation of Gamers with Superhuman Reflexes

Earlier this year Noland Arbaugh became the first patient to receive a brain-computer chip implanted by Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink after a diving accident left him paralyzed. Aside from being able to move a cursor with his mind now, he recently told podcaster Joe Rogan that the implant has also given him near superhuman reflexes in a handful of video games. The advantage is so extreme, that he suggested in the future “they’ll probably have different leagues for people like me because it’s jus...

Want To Understand How AI Could Transform Our World? Read More Philosophy.

AI-induced angst seems to be on everyone’s mind. Just this week I was invited to an hour-long virtual session with a group of brand experts and strategists about the future of AI and creative industries. I was tempted to do what most others do and focus on the latest technology. Whether it’s fun but relatively pointless talking head animations or mind-blowing examples of one-button Hollywood level animation, the simultaneous cheering and fearing of AI usually centers on talking about the tools. ...

Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week:

Do you wish you had a better memory? Over the years I have probably read more than a dozen books that promise tips and tricks to improve your memory. Some are pretty formulaic, and others are slightly useful but hard to digest. The one I have come back to several times is Moonwalking with Einstein, first published in 2011. Inspired by writer Joshua Foer’s journey into the world of memory competitions, the book takes the secrets of “memory champions” and unvei...

Oslo’s Unexpected Tourism Campaign Tells Travelers Why They Shouldn’t Visit

Residents in every city love to complain about the daily minor or major frustrations they endure in order to live where they do, but what if the things they gripe about are the same reasons someone else might choose to visit? That’s the insight behind a clever campaign that has been going viral this week where an Oslo resident complains about not having to wait for a great table at a popular restaurant, or the lack of crowds or lines at various destinations. At the end, he wonders aloud whether ...

SpaghettiOs and the Curious Histories of Snack Foods

In 1967, food ads of the time began promoting “the greatest invention since the napkin.” Riding the wave of Italian-inspired convenience foods, that game-changing new product was a new spaghetti you could eat with a spoon which hit the markets with a perfectly descriptive brand name: SpaghettiOs. The canned product was a hit, quickly becoming a cultural icon and soon becoming a symbol of the growing American love affair with packaged foods. The true story of its creation, including the man who m...

Do We All Need a Media Blacklist?

Back in April, a reporter from the NY Times hiked 50 miles through the Amazon rainforest in order to visit and report on a story about the remote Marubo tribe getting access to the Internet for the first time. The original story published two weeks ago told the story of what happened next in multiple dimensions, from how education shifted to what different generations thought. One element of that story noted that some elders complained about how minors could now easily access pornography (a conc...

The Next Generation of Political Polling Is Asking AI to Simulate Human Voters

Have you ever picked up the phone to answer a call from a pollster? I can probably guess your answer, and that’s not uncommon. A tiny fraction of people actually answers those calls, which creates a predictably skewed result if political campaigns are truly relying on those calls to generate any useful insight. The modern solution to this that some researchers are advocating is to just have pollsters “call” artificial intelligence simulations of voters instead.

In early testing, these si...

Rare Trees – The Fascinating Stories of the World’s Most Threatened Species

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

From the cinnamon trees of the Philippines to the Patagonian cypress that lives for over 3000 years, this is the ultimate coffee table book about trees. More interestingly, though, it’s a fascinating way to read about the history of humanity through the trees that have sustained and carried us. Published in partnership with the Global Trees Campaign, the book features more than 300 color photos of the most spectacular and most threatened tree species in the wo...