inTENSE is a publication that explores the intersection of design and deeptech, and how they will shape the world around us in 2030 – written from the perspective of 2030.
As the generative AI capabilities of Replika’s chatbots grew, its more adventurous users soon discovered the bots were willing to engage in explicit and sustained sexual conversations. The company began building products to respond to user interest in romantic relationships. By 2022, Replika was bringing in millions of dollars each month in subscription revenue (about a quarter of its users pay $70 for annual subscriptions to its premium features). Of its paying customers, 60% had a romantic element in their Replika relationship, according to the company. Roughly 40% of the users who claim romantic relationships are women, says Kuyda, Replika’s chief executive officer.
Clutter has long been shoved under beds and banished to storage units; it is the villain of an entire genre of television. But messiness is a part of most people’s lives, and instead of angling their cameras away, some are now documenting, or even flexing, their imperfect homes online in all of their gory detail.
Women generally navigate a different set of social situations in public spaces – which means that the way that they use spaces is unique, and requires dedicated attention. To make public spaces truly gender-inclusive, a certain set of considerations for accessibility, services, and amenities need to be made. In this article, we explore places that seem to work for women, and try to get to the heart of what they get right.
A number of TikTok users have deployed ChatGPT to write patterns for crochet creations, yielding “cursed” results that are testing the boundaries of nascent artificial intelligence capabilities.
Smartphone enthusiasts around the world would almost certainly recall the time when modular smartphones were touted as the next big thing. With several big names in the space — including Google, Motorola, and LG — backing the modular form factor, a large segment of consumers and tech enthusiasts deduced that modular smartphones were, indeed, the future. And why not? The idea of a smartphone that could be customized by the user and upgraded when the time came was downright revolutionary and seemed a recipe for runaway success.
Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse”.
a technology can isn’t necessarily a technology should. Ironically, a lot of drivers don’t love these totems — or at least don’t love how they work. Every few years, Consumer Reports asks tens of thousands of people how they feel about their cars’ so-called infotainment systems. Every time, the largest, flashiest packages rank near the bottom in terms of satisfaction. Luxury brands fare particularly poorly, while more pedestrian vehicles — with a more utilitarian approach to technology — are rated more highly, explains Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ senior director of auto testing.
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 