It’s like ray-eee-aaaain
A bit like Turkeys voting for Christmas, Microsoft has co-authored a paper showing that using AI can weaken humans’ critical thinking skills.
“[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”
Ignorance is bliss
In the least surprising news of the year, Martin Weigel has smashed it out of the park. Again. This time with a piece on how walking in stupid is the smartest thing we can do.
“If we believe our job in the development of strategy is to chart new territories and open up new futures […] We must walk in humble and allow ourselves the beginner’s outlook. We need to see the world as fresh each time and have the courage to ask the unasked questions of it in order to gain new and unpredictable insights.”
Talking of strategy, this is a great resource (h/t Storythings).
Trend fodder
Matt Klein has been sifting through the Times New Roman tealeaves that are trend reports and offered his analysis of them. He says:
- The vast majority of trend reports are not forecasts, they’re corporate advertisements.
- Trend reports, in aggregate, should not be seen as sources of emergent or disruptive thinking, but rather culprits of repackaging established nomenclature.
- 90% of trend reports come from only 10 cities in the world
“You don’t get real by ditching demographics”
Most will agree that many demographic segmentations reduce people into simplistic, generational cliches. However, Ian Murray and Andrew Tenzer have argued that real world understanding of generations does remain helpful. We just need to ask better questions to get there.
“If marketing is serious about representation, cultural relevance and commercial effectiveness – we need to take demographics seriously. This means embracing the real world diversity of worldviews and behaviour that exists within generations, and the similarities that exist across generations.”
Rantasaurus Rex
For anyone who knows me, they might think that I wrote this piece on how nobody cares under a pseudonym. It wasn’t me, but I wish it was.
There are some belters on here – especially the Bluetooth speaker, self order kiosks, and the escalators. It’s quite the list, but not quite as long as the one that I keep on my notes app (true story).
And finally…
If you haven’t seen Questlove’s edit celebrating 50 years of music on Saturday Night Live, then mark yourself as ‘away’ for 6mins 45s and enjoy. It’s an utter masterclass in editing. Sublime.
Heading to New York soon and need to find a place with a real jukebox? Of course you do. So here’s a map.
The Rest is Entertainment podcast did a feature on TV series that were cancelled after just one episode. Some true shockers in there.