“It’s a big social change in the U.S.,” said Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies fertility. “A gradual shift of family formation to later ages.” Read more (NY Times)
Are biomaterials the future of beauty packaging?
A report by strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory, notes that the cosmetics industry creates 120 billion units of packaging a year and predicts that by 2050, the beauty industry will have contributed up to 12 billion tonnes of plastic to landfill.
In an effort to combat the plastic problem, a number of beauty brands are using innovative biomaterial alternatives. Below, we explore some of the most interesting solutions yet. Read more (Wallpaper)
Why The Chinese Gen-Z Demand For Local Brands Is Growing
ecently, the Chinese lifestyle app RED launched its “2020 RED Yearly Beauty Insight Report,” which showed that the number of views on the app related to domestic brands increased by 66 percent over the first half of 2020, garnering the highest year-on-year growth amongst sectors globally. Emerging domestic brand Colorkey experienced the most explosive growth, seeing an 8,529-percent increase in viewership. Although Western beauty brands still dominate RED with the highest percentage of content views, they have fallen slightly from 63.2 to 62 percent during the period. Views of overseas brands from Japan, Korea, and Thailand have also dropped — from 31.4 to 30.2 percent. Read more (Jing Daily)
I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we’re getting married
In this session, we discuss “I (28M) created a deepfake girlfriend and now my parents think we’re getting married,” a fiction story about artificial romance by Fonda Lee. In Lee’s story, a young man who wants a fake girlfriend to get his parents off his back finds the fake relationship has consequences he hadn’t anticipated. We will examine the consequences that result when chatbots become good enough to turn to for our emotional needs, and even for relationships. Read more (MIT)
Chatbot Gone Awry Starts Conversations About AI Ethics in South Korea
In Spike Jonze’s 2013 film, “Her,” the protagonist falls in love with an operating system, raising questions about the role of artificial intelligence (AI), its relationship with the users, and the greater social issues emerging from these. South Korea briefly grappled with its “Her” moment with the launch of the AI chatbot, “Lee Luda,” at the end of December 2020. But the Luda experience was not heart-wrenching or pastel-colored like “Her” – instead, it highlighted different types of phobia and risks posed by new technologies that exist within South Korean society. Read more (The Diplomat)
Meet the chatbot that simulates a teen experiencing a mental health crisis
In digital conversation, Riley is a young person who is trying to come out as genderqueer. When you message Riley, they’ll offer brief replies to open-ended questions, sprinkle ellipses throughout when saying something difficult, and type in lowercase, though they’ll capitalize a word or two for emphasis.
Riley’s humanness is impressive given that they’re a chatbot driven by artificial intelligence to accomplish a unique goal: simulate what it’s like to talk to a young person in crisis so that volunteer counselors can become skilled at interacting with them and practice asking about thoughts of suicide. Read more (Mashable)
Slavoj Zizek on Dating
The Future of Space 2021
It is clear that we leveraged technology to our benefit during COVID-19 lockdowns. Tech was a welcomed lifeline that we will continue to engage to augment our lives or lean on as a crutch as we begin to hesitantly re-enter public spaces. Our fears will turn toward each other as we gauge who we can trust. How that will play out in a world that continues to be raw and divided needs to be understood. What remains unknown is the role of alternate reality spaces and how it will interplay with our lives. Read more
Climate crisis: our children face wars over food and water, EU deputy warns
Older people will have to make sacrifices in the fight against climate change or today’s children will face a future of fighting wars for water and food, the EU’s deputy chief has warned.
Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the EU commission, said that if social policy and climate policy are not combined, to share fairly the costs and benefits of creating a low-carbon economy, the world will face a backlash from people who fear losing jobs or income, stoked by populist politicians and fossil fuel interests. Read more (Guardian)
The Googleplex of the Future Has Privacy Robots, Meeting Tents and Your Very Own Balloon Wall
In 2018, Google’s real estate group began to consider what it could do differently. It turned to the company’s research and development team for “built environments.” It was an eclectic group of architects, industrial and interior designers, structural engineers, builders and tech specialists led by Michelle Kaufmann, who worked with the renowned architect Frank Gehry before joining Google a decade ago.
Google focused on three trends: Work happens anywhere and not just in the office; what employees need from a workplace is changing constantly; and workplaces need to be more than desks, meeting rooms and amenities.
“The future of work that we thought was 10 years out,” Ms. Kaufmann said, “Covid brought us to that future now.” Read more (NY Times)
