Notes from SXSW London, Undoing American Policy and the World’s Tallest 3D Printed Tower

Dear Fellow Trend Curator,

Greetings from London! I’m here all week for the inaugural SXSW London event along with a side trip to Lisbon for the APCC Summit to talk about the future of retail and shopping centers. The common theme among both is the power of creating experiences and why they continue to matter so much in a digitally enhanced world. Over the past week I’ve shared an AI-driven idea sharing tool from the stage along with Henry as we launched the new paperback edition of The Future Normal, experienced a multi-sensory pod for storytelling, watched serendipitous connections happen at another one of our signature Non-Obvious Dinners and shared drinks with the next generation of entertainers and musicians talking about the future of art.

This is the sort of week that brings me plenty of new ideas and inspiration to keep sharing with you every Thursday. If you’re in London this week, let me know so we can connect—and for the rest of my readers for the newsletter enjoy this week’s batch of non-obvious stories and remember to stay curious!

rohit

Why Boys Are Falling Behind In School (And How To Fix It)

American schools and kindergarten specifically are not designed for boys … But they should be. That’s the conclusion from a piece in the New York Times this weekend that focuses on why boys are regularly falling behind girls when it comes to their performance in primary schools:

“Kindergarten has become significantly more academic because of the effects of a national law passed in 2001, with children expected to spend more time sitting still and learning math and reading — and many boys do not enter with the skills to meet those expectations … in just over a decade, teachers had allocated much more time to academic subjects and desk work, and less time to art, music and activities like blocks or dramatic play.”

There are several ways experts suggest to solve this problem. The first, which would benefit both boys and girls, is to bring more play and activities back into the earliest schooling years. There is plenty of research suggesting that this is how kindergarten children of any gender learn best. Other suggestions include trying to recruit more male teachers who “could be role models who know what it’s like to be a boy in school,” and generally including more movement, music, time outside to help children build skills like self-regulation and executive function.

Alongside emerging research showing that the long-standing metric of teacher to student ratio may be flawed, it seems we need to rethink some of the more fundamental assumptions around how we educate children and what works.

Just as we are seeing many initiatives right now targeted at supporting girls in later years of school to further achievement in STEM fields (for example), it seems we also now need a similar focus on making sure we have the right methods to ensure that boys don’t fall behind at an early age too. The only way the world gets better for everyone in the next generation is to make sure we aren’t unintentionally leaving anyone behind.

The Consequences of Being An Asshole While Flying

Sometimes life seems to offer sadly few consequences for being an asshole. And rarely are they irreversible. Unless you happen to exhibit that bad behavior when flying.

This interesting piece looks at four examples of passengers who got banned for life from flying due to bad behavior. It shows the extreme consequences of making a poor choice while getting aggravated, drunk, or simply having a bad day. While the punishments do seem extreme when it comes to banning them from flying (and nearly impossible to dispute), I kept thinking while reading this that it would be nice if other aspects of life had similar rules instead of just flying.

Some of these passengers do seem to be facing an unfairly harsh repercussions for their crimes, but outside singular episodes there are more than a few people who deserve at least some karma to come back on them for similar behaviour that didn’t happen on a plane. Like bullies at work or overly entitled customers.

I guess that’s a good life lesson in itself. Clearly there are some places where you just can’t get away with being an asshole, and perhaps too many others where you can.

The Doing and Undoing and Redoing and Undoing of American Policy

Being outraged used to be easier. You could look at a policy or an announcement or something happening in the world and if you disagreed with it, you could voice your opinion or join a march or write a blog post. The thing you were unhappy about, though, was pretty unlikely to change within 24 hours. We don’t really live in that world anymore.

A recent piece from The Atlantic talks about the rapid undoing of policy that has become a hallmark of the current administration:

“The administration’s claims to monarchical power are a real threat to America’s constitutional order. But its executive orders and policy feints are so haphazard and poorly articulated that they amount to a kind of autocratic takeover written in smudge-able crayon: terrifying, cartoonish, and vulnerable to erasure, all at once … The substantive problem with the MAGA agenda isn’t just that too much is happening for any median voter to follow; it’s that too much is un-happening for employers, investors, and consumers to know what the hell to do about it.”

In this world, confusion seems to be the name of the game. Shifting blame, taking credit and rapidly changing course has become the story itself. Of course, that makes it hard to write about or think about. More importantly, it makes it impossible to plan your career or future or investments. This is uncertainty by design.

It all seems a bit like driving down a windy road with a poor driver. With every turn, he knows what’s coming and so he is the only one who keeps from feeling sick. Everyone else just can’t wait to get themselves out of the car and back onto solid ground again.

The Real Question About AI: How Many Decisions Do We Want It To Make?

Is AI really better than nothing? That is the question we are immediately going to be asking as two stories emerge this week about some potentially concerning uses for AI. In one, the FDA announced it would be using AI to speed up the process for approving various products as being safe for human consumption.On the same day, Meta announced they would be using AI to assess the potential risk of its upcoming products to humans.

Meta plans to shift the task of assessing its products’ potential harms away from human reviewers, instead leaning more heavily on AI to automate the process. Internal documents seen by the publication note that Meta is aiming to have up to 90 percent of risk assessments fall on AI, NPR reports, and is considering using AI reviews even in areas such as youth risk and “integrity,” which covers violent content, misinformation and more.

The logic behind these moves is clear. When there is a large backlog and humans are unable to expedite reviews as quickly as needed, naturally AI could be a tool to speed this up. The dystopian implications are also clear. If AI decided that it wanted to poison us, the FDA tool could approve all sorts of dangerous things. Or allow Meta to launch products with known risks to humans.

Ultimately the question is one that came up in several conversations this week for me as well. Where is the line between the decisions that AI should be allowed to make on our behalf, and the human intervention required before those decisions get made?

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week
The Future Party Newsletter

A newsletter and online community that also hosts in-person gatherings, The Future Party has been on my reading list for a long time. They have a lot of platforms and partnerships with many other media sources as well but their flagship newsletter is routinely useful and worth subscribing to. The format is also refreshing, as they don’t just share the stories happening but also offer a prediction in the emails for what will likely come next. As a result, the stories add dimension and context instead of just becoming a random list of links to things you can read on your own. Subscribe here >>

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week
The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan

Ask anyone if they describe themselves as a tourist or a traveler and most people will say the latter. Seeing yourself as a “tourist” has become something of a bad word. Author Paige McClanahan dives into this topic and aims to reclaim the word and concept of being a tourist in her new book that is a timely read just before many of us head off on our summer travels. In her definition, a new tourist “engages with the people who live in the place they’re visiting, and ideally does activities on locals’ terms, not those of corporate chains or extractive behemoths.”

In a time when many places are actively running campaigns to try and convince certain types of travelers to stay away from their destinations, this book is a good reminder of the powerful upside of seeing the world for yourself and why it’s not just good for your perspective but also necessary to keep the world’s economies healthy. So go somewhere new this year and choose to engage the people who live there. Be a new tourist for yourself.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop? 

Watch my 2024 speaking reel on YouTube >>

This Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter is curated by Rohit Bhargava. Copyright © 2024 Non-Obvious, All rights reserved