Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 8

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Here’s a fascinating statistic about the recent state of AI regulation: “at least 69 countries have proposed over 1,000 AI-related policy initiatives globally, but these primarily focus on how to control AI rather than empower it.” What could empowered AI do for the future of government? The United Arab Emirates is the first nation to test the ability for AI tools to actually create legislation. What does a future where AI writes the laws look like? For many people, this is the opening to an epi...

How polite are you when you ask ChatGPT a query? According to Sam Altman, the human propensity to be nice when asking technology for solutions is “wasting millions of dollars of computing power.” Some experts aren’t so sure. One suggested that being kind “helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs,” while another noted that “when it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back.” There is plenty of social research that does show this to be the case in social media interactions betw...

This wonderfully useful book written by former CIA analyst Cindy L. Otis is actually meant for young adults to teach them about how to spot fake news and become more media literate. This was what initially intrigued me about the book. Among the necessary life skills that students rarely learn in school, I think media literacy has to be near the top. So a book that promises to teach that to young people immediately deserves praise and elevation. Beyond that, though, the stories and insights i...