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New Reality Show Deep Fake Love May Unleash a Lot of New Problems into The World

Netflix’s latest reality show Deep Fake Love is portraying a dark potential future. The concept is simple and diabolical: a bunch of couples go on a reality show where they are separated and told to live in villas surrounded by hot single people. Then, every week they have to watch videos of their partners seeming to hook up with others. … Read more

Korean Pop Star Releases Latest Song in Six Languages Using AI

What if AI could serve as a linguistics coach for a talented musician? That’s essentially what K-pop music label HYBE created using technology from AI startup Supertone to help singer MIDNATT release his latest single simultaneously in six languages —Korean, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese. Most significantly, each language version isn’t AI-generated. Instead AI tools helped … Read more

The Dark Side of “Sharenting” (And Why You Should Avoid Posting About Your Kids On Social Media)

European telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom launched a campaign using deepfakes to scare parents into being more careful about what they share online. The effort is meant to illustrate the dangers of “sharenting” (parents oversharing photos of their kids online). The video showcased is a disturbing imagined future where kids are suffering from identity theft, exploitation and … Read more

Will Humans Inevitably Turn Faith in AI Into a Religion?

Imagine a future where AI was all-knowing and all-understanding. These are abilities humans have typically ascribed to Gods worthy of worship. Soon, they may also be among the feature set of artificial intelligence. An article in The Walrus takes this possible future to it’s extreme – asking whether there may come a time when AI itself is worshipped … Read more

The Most Popular Non-Obvious Stories of 2022 (Based On Reader Feedback)

Based on this combination of quantitative and qualitative data, here is a partial list of some of the most popular stories of the year, based on what my readers shared.

The First Robot Many People Loved Is Getting a Second Life

Last year in I wrote about a story from WIRED about the unexpectedly real sense of loss that many owners of the Jibo robot were feeling when its parent company announced they would no longer be supporting the social bot. Now another company has acquired the rights and patents to Jibo and have plans for a bold … Read more

How Researchers Trained and Created AI With Psycopathic Tendencies

What happens when you train an AI algorithm only with murderous images from horror films or macabre photos from the Internet? A seriously disturbed AI, as researchers at the MIT Media Lab discovered. The AI, named “Norman” after the lead character from the horror film “Psycho,” reacted disturbingly in image association tests and exhibited severe tendencies toward … Read more

10 Futuristic Ideas Becoming Reality Faster Because Of COVID-19

For the past ten years I’ve been a collector of innovative ideas. When I write about them and interview the people behind them, I know they are far ahead of their industry. Over the past month as our entire culture has been upended by the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, one of positive side effects … Read more

5 Non-Obvious Megatrends Changing Our World In 2020

For the past ten years I have gone through an annual ritual of publishing a book about trends that describe our shifting culture and business environment. Over the past decade, my team and I have identified and written about well over 100 trends covering everything from the rise of the #metoo movement (a trend we … Read more

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#1 WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author

In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.

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