The non-obvious blog
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03 2026 August
What AI Generated Bird Photos Can Teach Us About Database Pollution
One of the engaging art concepts from AI artist Kelly Boesch features a collection of birds that don’t exist. The video is hard to stop watching,...
Read Now05 2025 February
The Age of the AI Chatbot Salesperson Might Have an Unintended Side Effect
Training an employee to do upselling (and be good at it) is notoriously difficult. When it’s done right, it can drive significant revenue for many...
Read Now04 2025 February
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities, by Thomas Heatherwick
Imagine a graphic novel that offers a compelling argument for why our cities can be more than just boring backdrops for daily routines. That’s the...
Read Now03 2025 February
The Revolution of Self Driving Cars Is Not Going to Be Easy
Would you leave a tip for your driverless taxi? This past week a security researcher named Jane Wong shared leaked screenshots apparently showing the autonomous taxi service...
Read Now31 2025 January
The Stories Within the Story About Why DeepSeek AI Is Such a Big Deal
The big AI news of the week was Chinese startup DeepSeek releasing their AI model which seemingly offers similar functionality to ChatGPT. The news has apparently shocked...
Read Now30 2025 January
The No Book: An Inside Look at Tim Ferriss’s New Book (and How He Protects His Time)
In case you’re not familiar with author Tim Ferriss, here’s a crazy fact about him: If he’s in a time when he isn’t checking email...
Read Now29 2025 January
The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week: Dubai Future Foundation
One of the most forward-looking nations invests heavily in future planning, and much of their planning, research, insights and project efforts are all published freely...
Read Now28 2025 January
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Long History of the Future by Nicole Kobie
Wide-eyed predictions of the future are fun to read, and even more fun to write. Yet for every book that promises to predict the future,...
Read Now27 2025 January
DEI May Be Dying … But Here’s What Could Replace It
When Jennifer Brown and I first published our book Beyond Diversity in 2021 it was moment of big momentum for DEI. Amongst the many other books published...
Read Now24 2025 January
The Library of Lost & Imaginary Books
There are books mentioned within the pages of other books that never existed on their own, but what if they did? That’s the fascinating story...
Read Now23 2025 January
Flash Superhero Movie Director Proves We’re Not Great at Learning from Failure
The Flash movie came out in 2023 and by box office standards, it was a flop. A story making the rounds in entertainment trade publications...
Read Now22 2025 January
Why The “World’s First” AI-Powered Hotel May Be More Than Fancy Marketing
From the outside the Otonomus Hotel (pun probably intended) doesn’t really look much different from any other spot. The property just had their soft-launch before...
Read Now21 2025 January
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Brave New Words by Sal Khan
Back in April of 2023, Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) did a TED talk with a timely title: How AI Could Save (Not Destroy)...
Read Now20 2025 January
The Problem of Fake Job Postings
The Wall Street Journal published a piece this week about the rise in fake job postings online. The reasons for these range from some companies using those listings to...
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