Latest news with #criticalthinking
Fast Company
13 hours ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Stuck in a ‘trend' economy? Here's how you can break free from it
It's never felt more impossible to keep up with the trend cycle. Trends feel harder to predict, too fast to respond to, and even harder to get in front of. In many instances, it appears to be all reactive rather than proactive. 'Micro-trends' are fleeting and elusive. By the time you read this, the Labubu boom might be over. Don't know what that is? Exactly. We're inundated with trends that are so low-level, so born from 'the internet,' that it makes it hard for anyone to zoom out and see the big picture. There's no time to ask questions like what's driving this change? What's the human trend behind the micro-trend? However, there are always ways to distinguish the fleeting happenings of the day from insights that actually matter. Doing this successfully does require time and effort. A recent MIT study revealed that the use of ChatGPT is atrophying critical thinking skills. This is a bitter (but likely not shocking) pill, but critical thinking is exactly what we need more of. Sure, tools like ChatGPT can help you move quickly, collating info or top-line snapshots, but they can't replace the time and thinking that you need to unlock relevance. There are core tenets of trend forecasting that can help us with this. They allow us to sort the relevant and useful from the overblown and noisy. But like I said, they require a little effort. Build your bibliography First, breaking free from your self-perpetuating, algorithmic bubble requires significant work. Some platforms may allow you to reset your algorithm, but there's no substitute for building your own bibliography. If you haven't already, try to build one that actively takes you away from your typical sources of news and information. Look in places you might not naturally gravitate towards, but show you what's happening outside your sphere. If you're a telehealth brand trying to move from transactional to aspirational, look at what's emerging in high-end hospitality. If you're a fitness brand looking to help your consumers build habits and stay with you, consider reading about the mechanics of the gaming industry. Look outside of your business to get new points of view. Say you're a beauty or a wellness brand right now. It's easy to think 'clean girl' is the key micro-trend influencing the globe, and you should lean in. But if you look around your meeting table and see only slick-haired, twenty-to-thirtysomethings with Rhode lip gloss phone cases, it might just be your surroundings. Businesses have to learn to think forward. Consider the driving factors Once you've uncovered an insight that feels meaningful, it's time for some critical evaluation. Speed and convenience are everything right now, so it's easy to slip into the 'just get it done' mindset. But when you're trying to speak to deep human truths, you do need to get it right. That means sitting with things and letting them percolate. A classic trends tool is STEEP factors. These help us remember the drivers of trends. They are social, technological, environmental, economic, or political forces that feed into major movements or attitudinal shifts. For example, do you know what a borg (blackout rage gallon) is? A favorite of college students the last several years, they're gallon jugs filled with alcohol and usually have a fun, borg-centric play on pop culture written on them. The average person looks at this and thinks, 'Wow, college kids are drinking more than ever. That's insane.' A marketer may look at it and think, 'Cool, we can sell borg-sized products to young people now.' Cultural strategists and trend forecasters might ask, 'Well, what's in it?' If you unpack Gen Z's borgs, they're made up of alcohol, water, flavor, and electrolytes. That's because they're a generation that grew up firmly steeped in wellness culture. You realize borgs aren't just about silly names and colorful alcohol, they reflect an attitude of a generation who considers their health differently than those before them. Manifestation versus cultural moment Bear in mind as you uncover new ideas and topics, too, that one example doesn't make a trend. Yes, we can use data from fast-moving content, but we need to assess it thoroughly. That's when you notice what's beneath the surface of a seemingly quick-churn micro trend. Remember, we're looking for cultural signposts. That means different, multi-category, multi-industry spanning examples. I wouldn't call the sustainability movement a trend necessarily, but when it began to explode, we saw its impact everywhere. In fashion, we saw Patagonia encouraging us to buy less. In food, we saw Impossible Foods and Oatly become consumer favorites. Beauty brands began to offer refillable packaging. When you see cross-category adoption, you know something is sticking. Crafting relevance Isn't this the goal of every business leader? To uncover insights that meaningfully shape your business and its future. Some relentlessly chase relevance, jumping on every viral trend, while others strive for resonance and longevity. You need to strike a balance between the two, but it's also important to be intentional in how you pursue the former. To be honest, I struggle to think of an example of a trend that's established itself as truly resonant in recent years. Something impactful doesn't get lost in the endless flood of content. Yet, consumers are increasingly looking for something more enduring. A definition of 'insight' is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep, intuitive understanding of a person or thing. If we're so overloaded with content, we no longer have that capacity. Those who succeed will be the ones taking the time to uncover the enduring, shaping not just their businesses, but the culture around them.
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
Being Creative With A.I., for Better or Worse
To the Editor: Re 'My Summer of Reckoning With ChatGPT,' by Meghan O'Rourke (Opinion guest essay, July 20): I'm a parent and a public educator, and I agree with Ms. O'Rourke's suggestion that educators need to make bold changes in our curriculum and teaching strategies to 'minimize the temptation to outsource thinking.' Changes like increasing the amount of in-class reading and writing with no access to A.I. (pencil and paper, please!) are a good start. The result of a great classroom experience is that we, the learners, are changed — not that we generate the product to receive the mark to advance to the next checkpoint. This is not only true of the liberal arts and those privileged enough to study them; learning a trade requires hard-earned struggle and thought that cannot be outsourced. A.I. tells us the inner world does not matter — or at least, not nearly as much as the exterior world, particularly if it cannot be advertised, packaged and sold. Schools need to provide a refuge from this paradigm. Seth Torkelson-ReganGrand Rapids, Mich. To the Editor: Meghan O'Rourke correctly identifies A.I.'s threat to students' critical thinking when they have ChatGPT complete their writing assignments. I believe we can still teach critical thinking, but we may need to adjust the medium. One approach is increasing emphasis on oral presentations. As an engineering professor, I noticed that this year, my students' written reports 'magically' improved. But oral presentation skills still required development through multiple iterations and feedback. Oral communication demands significant mental effort as students organize their thoughts, consider audience perspective and tell a compelling story. As a bonus, students are motivated to improve oral presentations because they care about peer perception. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Mark Cuban talks education with Gov. Jared Polis, says AI can transform teaching
COLORADO SPRINGS – All in on AI. That was the message billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban delivered July 25 about how to improve America's education system. Speaking to the National Governors Association in an onstage discussion with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis at The Broadmoor about Polis' 'Let's Get Ready! Educating All Students for Success' initiative, Cuban urged the governors to think outside the box. Instead of identifying ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into our current education model, which he argues has changed little since the 1880s, he believes educators should unlock the full potential of AI. 'Why wouldn't you, A) first make the determination for what you want your kids to learn, whether it's your own kids you're home-schooling or kids at school,' Cuban said. 'Is it just reading, writing, 'rithmetic so that they could do well on tests? Or is it logical thinking. Is it critical thinking, in addition to reading, writing and 'rithmetic? 'And wouldn't it be better to customize using AI to set up quizzes and training sessions that not only did the training but also took the responses and analyzed them against all the other responses to look for shortcomings or acceleration so that it knows that this student is going to need help.' More: State program eases career change for former CSU employee now teaching special education Polis, who is completing his term as president of the National Governors Association, opened the door to the discussion of AI with his first question. 'Let's start with AI, in two ways. One, kind of globally how is this changing the world we live in for better or worse, macro level? And then drilling down, what does it mean in our schools and what kids should learn?' Cuban took it from there. He said he fed questions about how to improve our education system into multiple AI systems himself before coming to the July 25 session, acknowledging that each — ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. — have their individual strengths and weaknesses. His comments, Cuban said, were developed using a consensus of responses from multiple AI platforms. AI can customize problems, lessons and quizzes for individual students in a way that no teacher ever could, Cuban said, personalizing the delivery and pace based on their responses. That way, both the best and worst students in all schools are given an equal opportunity to increase their knowledge in whatever areas the educators setting up the program deem important. With AI's knowledge base, every student with an internet-connected device has access to the work of doctors, mentors, nearly every book in every library, research published by researchers and professors and so on, Cuban said. 'There's nothing that they don't have access to,' Cuban said. 'Every governor in this room, your assistants are using ChatGPT and now your 4-year-old gets access to the same information? When did that ever happen in the history of the world before? 'That is the ultimate democratization, egalitarian use of knowledge. It's incredible.' U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon participated in an earlier question-and-answer session led by Polis and also advocated for the expanded use of AI in classrooms. She spoke highly of the individualized learning she witnessed in a mathematics classroom at a school in Austin, Texas, where each student was working on a problem on their own individual screens while the teacher monitored all 25. When the teacher saw a student struggling, McMahon said, she went to their desk to help. Cuban said the eight or nine biggest AI companies are spending tens of billions of dollars annually, maybe more than $100 billion per year, in hopes of becoming the dominant force globally in artificial intelligence. That competition, Cuban said, has them all competing for information to be able to train the models. As they try to 'silo' that information so that it's only available to their models and not those of their competitors, Cuban said governors should have no trouble getting them on board to provide free or low-cost access to their systems in exchange for the AI model's access to the questions and responses of tens of thousands or even millions of their students. Not to mention getting students familiar with a system they might keep on using well beyond school. States and educators can and should build some guardrails into whatever systems they choose to use, he said, to ensure students don't stray too far off topic and complete their assignments. And, he urged the governors to make sure any AI providers maintain text files of all queries and responses of users under the age of 18 that can be easily accessed by parents or guardians. Recalling that he often sat his own children, now ages 15, 18 and 21, in front of an iPad to watch "Scooby-Doo" to entertain them when they were young, Cuban said he'd use AI now, plugging in some questions that could get them started on inquiries that would peak their curiosity and provide him with more insight into their interests and learning style at a younger age. Parents of older children who worry their kids don't like to read, he said, should simply get them started on AI exploration of whatever it was they hoped their children would learn from those books. Let their natural curiosity lead the way, Cuban said. At home and in the classroom. 'We have this unique tool that's never existed before,' Cuban said. 'We have to use that for a way to teach that's never been done before.' Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@ and This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Mark Cuban talks with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis about AI and education Solve the daily Crossword
ABC News
6 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
BTN Newsbreak 23/07/2025
AI SCAMS First up, AI scams. Experts say they're on the rise, and one CEO is particularly worried. This is Open AI's CEO, you know the company behind ChatGPT, and today, he shared his fears about the future of AI scams. Look, scams aren't a new problem. Just last year, Australians lost more than two billion dollars to them. And new data shows the Australian Financial Complaints Authority has received more than 100,000 complaints for a second year running. But thanks to AI, scams are only getting more sophisticated and believable. Experts say the best way to beat AI scams is critical thinking. Asking yourself: does this actually seem like the person I think it is? Does the scenario seem realistic? Families are also being encouraged to create a safeword, a word you can ask someone to say when you're unsure about their identity. UNESCO US President Donald Trump has decided to pull the US out of UNESCO, the UN's culture and education agency. According to the White House, UNESCO's values are at odds with President Trump's America First Policy. It's not the first time he's done it. Mr Trump originally pulled the US out of UNESCO back in 2017 during his first term as president. But a couple of years ago, that decision was reversed by Joe Biden, who was the president at the time. UNESCO's director general says while she's upset by the decision, she was kind of expecting it. HECS DEBT Now that parliament's returned everyone is talking about Labor's election promise to reduce student loans. Yep, today legislation has been introduced to parliament to reduce student debt. It was one of Labor's big promises ahead of this years election proposing a one-off, 20% reduction to all outstanding loans. Now, if it passes about 3 million Aussies who have debts from studying at university, or debts from doing things like apprenticeships will have their debt reduced! You see, here in Australia, it costs money to go to university but Aussie students can apply for HELP, which lets you borrow money from the government and pay off your debt bit by bit once you start earning a certain amount of money. But over the years, the cost of uni has gone up, making student debts more and more expensive so there have been a lot of calls for a reduction of student debt like this one. Meanwhile others aren't too happy with the idea because it'll cost the budget 16 billion dollars. Money that they reckon should be spent elsewhere. NIGERIA ROBOTS First up, to a robotics competition in Nigeria. Where young inventors are showing off robots they've designed to solve specific problems. Among the inventions was a land mine detecting robot, a tractor slash irrigator for farmers, and a prototype fire truck dubbed the "firebot". SHIPWRECK Now to a partial shipwreck on a remote beach in Scotland. A local schoolboy discovered it last year, and it's taken researchers until now to work out – it's actually a 250 year old wreck from an old navy boat turned whaling boat called the Earl of Chatham. BUTTER SCULPTURES And finally to these sculptures made entirely out of butter at the Ohio State fair in the US. The butter cow is a bit of a tradition here with the butter being donated by dairy farmers, and according to organisers it'll all be recycled once the fair is over.
Khaleej Times
21-07-2025
- Business
- Khaleej Times
UAE: AI can make you lazier, affect your career growth, say HR experts
With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives, HR and recruitment experts are raising concerns that overreliance on the technology may be encouraging laziness and negatively affecting critical thinking skills. This weakening of critical thinking could also impact employees' career growth. A new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) measured the brain activity of 54 participants as they wrote a series of essays over several months. Of the three groups studied, those using LLM (Large Language Model) showed the lowest levels of brain engagement and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels.' Over several months, these users became 'lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.' The power of AI According to a study conducted by Stanford University, the UAE has been ranked fifth globally in terms of countries leading in AI and where the use of this new technology is growing fast. The top 10 countries leading in AI are the US, China, the UK, India, UAE, France, South Korea, Germany, Japan and Singapore. Leadership coach Sara Sabin said consistent use of AI weakens the brain's cognitive processes required for critical thinking and must be balanced with active brain training. 'You need to actively strengthen skills such as trend prediction, intuition, creativity, uniqueness, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence,' she said. 'For tasks that demand originality or interpersonal engagement, like writing in your own voice, strategic planning, or complex problem-solving, it's crucial to put in the mental work yourself,' she said. Lisa Lyons, Transformation Centre of Excellence lead for India Middle East and Africa (IMEA) region at Mercer, said that as technology is integrated into how people work, it will be important to possess skills critical to its usage and innovation. 'For example, skills like advanced data analysis, critical thinking and creative problem-solving will become inherently valuable. By focusing on cultivating their critical core skills, individuals can harness the power of AI to elevate their performance and drive meaningful impact,' she added. 'For employers, investing in the development of critical AI skills can enhance long-term productivity and differentiate the organisational employee value proposition when bidding for talent,' added Lisa. Supplement not replacement Jason Grundy, managing director of Robert Walters Middle East & Africa, said AI tools should serve as a supplement to employees' existing knowledge, not as a replacement for their entire responsibilities,' he said. 'Skills are like any muscle; if they aren't regularly exercised, they will become weaker. In the long term, relying too heavily on AI could erode both professionals' ability to think critically as well as gain and develop essential skills. With any evolving technology, mindful use will help ensure that employees' abilities remain at the forefront and are not overshadowed,' he said. He added that soft skills such as stakeholder management, communication, teamwork, and creative thinking will continue to be prioritised by employers, particularly those looking to identify their next cohort of leaders. 'When advising clients, we encourage them to think long-term. Deep cuts in entry-level and graduate roles now could create talent shortages in the future for positions that require human input,' he said.
