Ask someone to picture AI, and they will most likely think about Terminators, psychotic fembots or angry robots from Hollywood central casting. But what makes AI actually frightening is not that it is ‘sci-fi’, but the that it is, in fact, already deeply embedded into our daily lives. If you have a child born post 2007, chances are that they have already been shaped by algorithms and digital platforms.
CATEGORY: People
Data is a curious thing. As consumers, we have an inkling that our daily activities — what we buy, what we do, and where we go — are analyzed and acted upon. But somehow, when it comes to wrangling a herd of humans into a room, we forget that the very same tools are available to us as well. You don’t have to be a software engineer from Google or Amazon to run a smarter meeting. You just need to think like one for a minute.
CATEGORY: Culture
Every year, we are rewarded with a new round of technology upgrades. Faster processors, bigger and brighter screens, better cameras — a bounty that promises more rapid selfies, status updates and streaming entertainments. Forget peak oil, we have hit peak tech. For the more enlightened, that means something needs to change.
CATEGORY: Culture
I followed a man the other day. He was unremarkable, except for one detail: he was listening to a pristine, vintage CD Walkman. I recognized the model, of course. It was a final generation Sony Discman — as thin as a CD itself, with a matte metallic exterior and polished chrome trim, fiber optic output and a twist action, cylindrical headphone remote with an illuminated LCD display. In other words, everything I could have possibly wanted in a music device — in 2003.
CATEGORY: Marketing
Spend enough time in LA, and you start to feel like you are living in a time loop. Burger joints, juice bars, coffee shops — it’s one long parade of endless franchise repetition. But after I complained one too many times, I was pulled aside and informed in a hushed tones that I had it all wrong. ‘You just need to know about the secret menus’, explained a friend of mine. And she was right. I did need to know. Because even the most banal of brands, it turns out, have back doors.
CATEGORY: Marketing
