Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 51

What Is Prada’s New $650 Underwear Designed to Be Worn Without Pants Really Saying?

According to fashion industry insiders, Prada’s latest release of a $650 pair of underwear is “no surprise” given the brand’s track record of expensive essentials. What was unexpected, however, was how the brand seemed to be positioning the underwear as desirable outerwear without pants. 

In conversation at a fashion industry event once, I recall hearing these runway designs that may seem ridiculous to outsiders as a “provocation.” Many are not meant to literally be a piece of clothing someone mi...

Abolishing Wilderness and Ten Things You Can’t Say About Climate Change

For most animals, life in the wild is “one overwhelmingly characterized by fear, predation, stress, disease, parasitism, exposure, hunger, infanticide, cannibalism, and early death.” And there is an active human quest to protect and create more wilderness where those animals live. So here’s a mind-bending moral question: to protect animals, should we be abolishing wilderness?

That’s just one of the contrarian ideas that comes up in this edition of the Breakthrough Journal which explores “ten word...

The Team That Has Lost 17,000 Times … And Counting

People love an underdog. Unless it’s the Washington Generals. They are the team that have played against the legendary Harlem Globetrotters for more than 50 years. In all that time, they have managed just one win and more than 17,000 losses. Their job is to lose, which creates a pretty fascinating scenario for professional athletes who are skilled enough to play in front of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, but are never allowed to take a victory lap. They are the basketball equi...

How Accessibility Is Getting More Tactile, Innovative … and Normal

Technology was supposed to make the entire world more accessible. It still can, but sometimes it seems that progress has stalled. This past month, the MIT Technology Review magazine devoted an entire issue to exploring the future of tech-enabled accessibility and how it may soon be more “normal” than you think. They spotlight everything from the sonification of science to the use of tactile images to end graphic poverty. As I read several of the articles from this issue, examples of the impact o...

Japan’s Solution to Its Labor Crisis? Hire More Workers Over 70​

Most articles you might read about the crisis caused by Japan’s aging population is usually coupled with some mention of the many ways technology is being designed to address the problem through workplace automation or robotic in-home elder care. Now it seems some employers are landing on a surprisingly unexpected solution: hire more workers over 70 years old.

This solution shouldn’t feel so innovative. After all, as people live longer, their capacity to work for longer also increases. In additio...

Will Photoshop’s New Expand Feature Lead to False Memories or Realities?

Maybe you’ve already heard of Photoshop’s new “Generative Expand” feature that allows users to “expand images in any direction and generate an additional scene for the space with a combination of traditional app tools and AI.” Most of the examples of use cases for this feature involve filling in background details or fixing a photo that was unintentionally cropped too closely. The potential future uses for this technology, though, are worth considering.

What happens when AI expands images from hi...

The Paris Syndrome and Coping with Tourism Disappointment

The dangerous thing about expectation is that it can set yourself up for disappointment. In the case of travelers to some destinations, this can lead to a letdown so severe they literally faint from the experience. Paris is one city where so many travelers (particularly those from Japan) have had this reaction that it’s known as the Paris Syndrome.

Japanese psychiatrist Hiroaki Ota described this as “a state of complete culture shock. Tourists from Japan … are especially susceptible to having a d...

New Reality Show Deep Fake Love May Unleash a Lot of New Problems into The World

Netflix’s latest reality show Deep Fake Love is . The concept is simple and diabolical: a bunch of couples go on a reality show where they are separated and told to live in villas surrounded by hot single people. Then, every week they have to watch videos of their partners seeming to hook up with others. Soon after, the “secret” is revealed that those videos of infidelity may or may not be deep faked. Will the couples stay together?

Aside from this tortuously cre...

Korean Pop Star Releases Latest Song in Six Languages Using AI

What if AI could serve as a linguistics coach for a talented musician? That’s essentially what K-pop music label HYBE created using technology from AI startup Supertone to help singer MIDNATT release his latest single simultaneously in six languages —Korean, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese. Most significantly, each language version isn’t AI-generated.

Instead AI tools helped to divide the song into its components, build on new lyrics in each language recited by native speakers ...

How The Nintendo NES Game Console Changed the World

Yes, I am part of the generation that grew up with the original Nintendo gaming system … and sometimes I even feature it in my keynote talks. This year is the 40th anniversary of the console and my fellow geeks over at Engadget have put together an illuminating history of exactly why this system was so formative on the world of gaming for generations to come.

To start, it was the first console that introduced the D-pad instead of using a joystick … a design choice that has been copied by almo...