Iterate Weekly - Issue 115
This week we're looking at the "invisible tech", fixing clickbait with AI, Coldplay's sustainable tour, Uber wants to rent your car, and we're watching Platonic!
Welcome to issue 115 of Iterate Weekly!
Hope you’re all doing well. This is just a friendly reminder that you can always reply directly to these messages or leave a comment on the Substack post. Feedback is highly encouraged and I’m happy to answer any and all questions that come up.
Let’s jump into this week’s stories.
🤖 Tech
Sony wants to sell you “Invisible Tech”
I think it’s safe to say that we all prefer it when our technology seamlessly blends into our lives right? Well a new line of products from Sony are looking to really become part of your to act as a form of “invisible technology”.
The products here are formed in a partnership with furniture maker Stellar Works and aim to create beautiful tech experiences that fit seamlessly with traditional home decor. The companies have been working together since 2018 and recently offered up a new exhibit at the NYCxDesign Festival called “STAYDREAM”. Here is how they’re positioning the initiative:
STAYDREAM explores the possibilities of design via the fusion of creativity
to realize richer sensorial experiences, whilst creating ambience
through space, furniture, and technology
Ok, that description is a little wordy, but I’m picking up what they’re putting down. Think of the possibilities of connected wallpapers that could project a variety of useful images. Or pieces of furniture with capacitive touch controls built into the arms or legs. There is an exciting possibility of living in a futuristic home where all of the tech is just seamlessly hidden within the structure of the rooms.
I see this as a trend that will be ramping up over the next few years. We want immersive technology in every aspect of our lives, we just also want it to be less visible.
🎓 Education/Productivity/Work
Rewriting clickbait headlines with AI
Here’s a use for AI that I think we can all get behind. Let’s use it to cut down on clickbait!
An app called Artifact is using AI to rewrite news headlines in order to make them more accurate and less clickbaity.
The app was founded by Kevin Systrom (of Instagram fame) and is a growing presence in the world of online news. Users of the app will be able to tag stories as potential clickbait. The titles of these stories will then be re-written by ChatGPT-4 to have a more accurate description.
Right now there is an actual human on staff to manually inspect the articles when there are numerous flags regarding inaccuracy of the headline. And to be totally transparent, headlines that have been rewritten by AI will also have a star to indicate the change.
In the future, they hope to have an automated system that can flag questionable news articles before users complain. In some ways it seems like a good system, but obviously it is a potentially slippery slope. Even with the star noting the AI rewrite, many users will likely assume that the new headline was the original.
Does a news story lose any of its impact if you know its title has been written by AI? How many other news outlets are already relying on AI but not disclosing it?
♻️ Health & Environment
Coldplay creates the blueprint for a sustainable music tour
A music tour doesn’t come to mind as an environmentally friendly endeavor. You often have lots of travel by air or bus. Thousands of people are showing up for each tour ate and consuming lots of food and beverages that may or not be recycled or composted. And tons of merch gets purchased that will likely end in a landfill.
But the band Coldplay is doing their part to conduct a tour with a closer eye on their carbon footprint.
There are tons of numbers to digest here that prove that the band has improved upon the wasteful tours of the past. I’ll highlight a few things here but if you want the full rundown they’re updating this page to keep track of all the details.
They’ve managed to conduct this tour with 47% fewer emissions than their last stadium tour in 2016-2017. Some of the changes just make sense in the evolution of green technology in the past few years. Let’s look at few key observations.
66% of all tour waste has been diverted from landfills. This one seems like a fairly easy one to achieve (at least in theory). If you only offer compost bins on site and only serve food and drinks in compostable containers, this seems like an achievable goal.
An average of 86% of the reusable, plant-based LED wristbands used by the audience during the show have been returned. This is a cool one. It’s become a lot more common for big shows and festivals to require wristbands for attendees rather than the standard paper (or digital) ticket. But most of these wristbands are made of plastic and end up in a landfill (most concertgoers will leave them on til they get home where you have less control over how they dispose of them.) But using a plant-based bracelet is a great idea. And if there are easy to find receptacles to drop them on the way out of the stadium, it’s even better.
Each show has averaged 15kWh in power generated by in-venue solar installations, kinetic dance floors and power bikes – enough to power the C-stage performance each night and provide the crew with phone, laptop and tool-charging stations. This one may be the most impressive accomplishment. Kinetic dance floors are not common technology. This is some cutting edge stuff. Yes, you have a whole stadium filled with high energy fans, why not use them to generate some electricity? The solar collectors make a lot of sense too. And who wouldn’t want to jump on a power bike to help juice up their favorite band while getting some exercise? Really clever stuff.
Kudos to Coldplay for thinking outside the box with this tour, and hopefully some of the practices become commonplace with every big stadium tour.
🛍 Grab Bag
Uber Carshare will rent out your car
Uber is always looking for new options to expand their vast transportation empire. You can already hire cars and bikes and order food. Why not rent your neighbor’s car when they aren’t using it?
Yep, Uber is unrolling an option called Uber Carshare that will let people rent out their cars for other Uber users to drive.
After a testing phase in Australia, the service is debuting in North America with availability in Boston and Toronto with other cities to come.
I’ve personally enjoyed using similar services from Turo and other companies that have come and gone over the years. I think we can all agree that the traditional rental car companies are still some of the most archaic and frustrating companies to work with. Any time there is a new option for car rentals, I’m all for it.
Plus, this just makes sense for the environment. Why should you have to go to an airport or industrial area with tons of parking to rent a car? If your next door neighbor has a perfectly good car that mostly sits unused, it just makes sense for you to be able to drive it while letting Uber handle the logistics of paying them for it.
I’m glad Uber is making this happen, and I hope it proves to be a success. With their ambitious goal to be carbon neutral by 2040, they need to start thinking outside the box. Converting to electric cars is a great start, but we should also try to maximize all of the unused vehicles that are already parked in our neighborhoods before we bring in more.
💬 Quote of the Week
"An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... the truly wise person is colorblind."
-Albert Schweitzer
📺 Content Recommendation
Platonic
I’ve long been a fan of Seth Rogen. You could tell he had the talent going all the way back to Freaks and Geeks (that whole cast was amazing). And back in 2021, I wrote about how much I enjoyed listening to his book “Yearbook”.
So it comes as no surprise that I’ve been watching his new show “Platonic” that also stars the amazing Rose Byrne.
These two were hilarious in the “Neighbors” movies and they keep the laughs coming in this series for Apple TV+. As you might be able to guess from the title, Rogen and Byrne play a pair of platonic college friends who reunite later in life. Byrne is the mom of 3 kids while Rogen is a brewmaster at a bar.
You can see how their conflicting lives may actually help each other find some balance. It’s a very interesting concept and I think most of us can relate to a platonic relationship we’ve had in the past that maybe fell out of touch as life got in the way.
If you’re a fan of Rogen’s comedy, you will not be disappointed with this one.
Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week!
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