June 12, 2018
One person unsurprised by the unfolding data scandals surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is Cathy O’Neil. In 2016 Cathy published her book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.
June 11, 2018
For the millions of adults who grew up watching him on public television, Fred Rogers represents the most important human values: respect, compassion, kindness, integrity, humility.
June 5, 2018
As a fantasy lover, I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t aware of JRR Tolkien. I read The Hobbit until it fell apart as a child, and have always strived, in my own contributions to the genre, to take even a shred of the care in my world-building that Tolkien did in his.
June 2, 2018
Early in William Gibson’s novel “Pattern Recognition,” from 2003, Cayce Pollard, a highly paid professional “coolhunter,” wanders through a London department store. Pollard is hypersensitive to the semiotics of brands: when a product is lame, she feels it physically, as a kind of pain.
May 30, 2018
Remember Yanny vs. Laurel? It was some science thing that made people hear the same sound in two different ways, and everyone on the internet talked about it. In a sane world, there would be nothing else to discuss.
May 26, 2018
Recently I was on one of those budget airlines where you have to rent a tablet or provide your own to access the in-flight entertainment system. In preparation for one day being the most annoying…
May 22, 2018
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence.
May 22, 2018
In 2016, Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., predicted that in the next 20 years there will be a trillion connected devices in the world and orbiting the planet.
May 22, 2018
Judea Pearl helped artificial intelligence gain a strong grasp on probability, but laments that it still can't compute cause and effect. Artificial intelligence owes a lot of its smarts to Judea Pearl. In the 1980s he led efforts that allowed machines to reason probabilistically.
May 19, 2018
The other day, I found myself looking at a blinking cursor in a blank address bar in a new tab of my web browser. I was bored.
May 11, 2018
Last March, during the enormous South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, the late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! sent a camera crew out into the streets to catch hipsters bluffing.
May 11, 2018
On the eve of a historical election, last year’s Fast Company Innovation Festival was about hope and potential. In the wake a historical upset, this year’s festival was about resilience, values, and impact that we as individuals, communities, and organizations should strive for.
May 7, 2018
Do you set high goals for yourself? If you’re ambitious, or if you simply want to do a lot of things in life — there’s something you might have experienced: Goals can sometimes be counterproductive. I see it a lot with the highest achieving people.
May 6, 2018
An American consulate is surrounded. At 1:06 p.m. local time, three trucks arrive and a dozen men gripping matte black assault rifles stream out of the vehicles. There might have been an explosion in the compound.
May 2, 2018
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Essentially, low ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence.
April 12, 2018
2019 UPDATE: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
April 12, 2018
Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in.