Leaders are praised for seeing around corners and told to skate to where the puck is going. But what if you cant even see your own feet, let alone a puck or a distant corner?
Todays volatility and uncertainty obscure any clear path to the future, and the forecast isnt improving any time soon. In a recent World Economic Forum survey, 52% of experts expect an unsettled two-year horizon, 31% anticipate turbulence, and 5% foresee storms.
Even if the weather were clear, setting a direction of travel is increasingly difficult as leaders face more complex problems with no obvious or easy solution. Close to 60% of business executives admit that they are missing opportunities because they cant make decisions fast enough. However bleak the landscape, there is a way to lead even when you cant see the future. This requires letting go of standard practices and building a new skill.
What No Longer Serves You
Leadership has long meant setting a compelling destination, planning the route, and mobilizing people to move. The classic tool kitforecast, plan, executeassumes a knowable future. With todays complexity, forecasts are guesses and plans expire fast. Leaders who arent shifting away from a predictplanact approach will see their impact erodeand their well-being with it.
The reason sits in the brain. When complexity is high, trying to predict accurately and act decisively strains a leaders cognitive loadthe mental effort required to process information and choose. Its the difference between running on a clear, lit path and running on dark ice with crosswinds: far more effort, far less progress. Add time pressure and constant digital distractions, and cognitive load spikes further.
When cognitive load stays high, brain fog sets in, decision speed drops, details slip, and big-picture comprehension narrows. In short, youre not the leader you intend to be. Its time to work differently.
Awareness: The Quality That Changes How You Lead
We cant control the pace of the world, but we can change how we meet it. We can move from a predict-plan-act approach to a stop-sense-adapt approach. The key to this approach is awareness, the ability to notice what is happeningin yourself, your team, and the larger systemand choose accordingly. With greater awareness, you enhance your perception of emotions, biases, strengths, and limitations and can read the dynamics of the team, the organization, and the market. Rather than constantly seeking answers, you stop, notice, and let answers arise.
Unfortunately, our awareness is often scattered, crowded out by biases, fears, and clouded perceptions. Roughly 45% of our everyday behaviors are habitual (often outside conscious awareness), and our noisy, information-filled world clouds awareness even more. However, the case for building awareness is strong: in recent Potential Project research, teams led by highly aware leaders reported 78% higher trust in the companys leadership, 57% higher psychological safety, and 56% higher commitment to the company.
For leaders, mastering three mindsets makes awareness actionable and achievable: presence to anchor us in the moment, clarity to see options and define a path forward, and adaptability to navigate new paths even when uncomfortable.
Three Mindsets for the Moment
Presence: Stay in the Moment
Presence is the ability to be fully attentive in the momentwith ourselves, the people in front of us, the task at hand, or whats happening around us. Our research indicates that we are distracted even when we think we are paying attention, about 37% of the time. But when we can be present in the moment rather than being pulled by a million thoughts, things slow down and its easier to focus our attention on the things that matter, not just the things that squeak the loudest.
Clarity: Find a Path
Clarity is the ability to rise above uncertainty and chaos rather than trying to solve for them. Its not about having clear answers all of the time, but about having a clear mind that can better find the signal within the noise. Clarity of mind feels spacious and calm. It is the difference between being in the clouds and feeling overwhelmed versus being able to step back into the vastness of the sky and see the clouds more clearly. It is a welcome alternative when nearly 2/3 of leaders say they experience information overload from trying to keep up with texts, chats, emails, and meetings. Clarity helps us to see ways forward, even when it is foggy
Adaptability: Navigate the Path
Adaptability is the ability to shift approaches as things change. Adaptable leaders accept new circumstances or unfamiliar territory with openness rather than holding too tightly to familiar routines or past experiences. Adaptable leaders often believe that change is inevitable, natural, and a source of growth. With a mindset of adaptability, leaders can navigate more confidently down new paths, even when the unfamiliar feels hard.
The marriage of Awareness and AI
As we regularly witness, AI can scan oceans of data, summarize patterns, and surface signals faster than any team. This is a huge advantage for leaders. For example, AI can give us consistent, data-informed feedback on our leadership and correct for blind spots we have about our strengths and weaknesses. AI can synthesize data about how our organization and employees are doing and surface trends, opportunities, and challenges that may have escaped our notice.
However, AI is a leaders advantage only if paired with awareness. Awareness adds the human context machines dont hold: history, social dynamics, values, and the lived experience of people affected by decisions. It also keeps us alert to borrowed biasassumptions in the data or model that would steer us wrong if left unquestioned. Used together, AI expands what we can see; awareness ensures we interpret wisely.
Here are a few ways to start strengthening your skills of awareness, with and without the help of technology:
Dont outsource connection to yourself and others. Take advantage of devices that help monitor your levels of distraction and track heart rate variability, pulse, and stress levels. These can help us be more present with ourselves and take corrective action to be more present with others. But over-relying on devices to tell us how we feel diminishes our capacity for self-awareness. Similarly, using tools for feedback on a team shouldnt prevent you from reading a room, understanding others feelings, and making a connection.
Clear the mental clutter. There is so much already competing with our attention, and the abundance of AI resources can get overwhelming. It is harder to practice awareness when our brains are full. The best approach is a both/and: use AI as a filter and summarizer, for example, but watch that it doesnt tip over into a source of distraction.
Try new things: When we implement new routines or learn new skills, we become more adaptable, capable of seeing habitual patterns and breaking free of them. Experiment with AI-enabled apps that can suppot you in this pursuit in fun and rewarding ways. But dont hesitate to try something very simple like brushing your teeth with your nondominant hand or taking a new route to the grocery store.
You dont need a perfect forecast to leadjust a better beam
When visibility is low, speedor constant actionis not a leadership virtue. Better to change the way you see and respond. Awareness widens your field of view and keeps you oriented to what needs to be doneone confident step at a time. When we stop to be present, sense the signals with clarity, and adapt in short, honest moves, we demonstrate to our teams that we are steering with care.
It feels like they match anything.
Black. Silver. White. Cream. All rendered in gloss and knit. I wasnt sure how the silhouette would look in person when I first saw it in photos from Junya Watanabes Fall/Winter 2024-25 show. But they made my stomach churn in just the right way.
I needed them. And so did a lot of other people.
The New Balance 1906L launched last year, kicking off a new type of shoe: the sneaker loafer, aka (and please never say this term aloud) the snoafer. With a loafer silhouette, technical fabrics, and bouncy foam outsoles, they represented a new mix of formal wear and street style. Nike, Hoka, and Puma all quickly followed suit with snoafers of their own. While in Madrid, I snagged some by Hispanitas for my wifeonly learning that they were the stores last pair as I checked out.
Snoafers did more than redefine what we consider a sneaker since launching last year; they resuscitated loafers more broadly. Karis Munday, an analyst at the fashion trend firm Edited, says loafer sales are up 33% year over year for men and 28% for women this fall, in a surge she doesnt see fizzling out soon. The sneaker-inspired iteration will be a must-have investment, offering a smart-casual solution that serves equally well in a business casual environment as it does for weekend wear, she shares over email, calling the 1906L the blueprint for the industry.
But how did New Balance know it could pull this idea off?
A loafer is a preppy shoe. New Balance has preppy connotations, says Charlotte Lee, the design manager at New Balance who created the 1906L. Its a Venn diagram . . . where the center is the sneaker loafer.
New Balance 1906L [Photo: New Balance]
The evolution of streetwear
Lee is a trained footwear designer who has been at New Balance for over a decade. Shes obsessed with aesthetics and culture, but says shes always been intimidated by the streetwear side of her profession. I still feel like an outsider, even though I’m obviously, well and truly, an insider, she says.
Indeed, once disregarded by the fashion industry, streetweara mash-up of fashion aesthetics stemming from city subcultures like hip-hop and skatehas been on a 20-year ascendancy into mass culture. Now its become part of the lexicon of dress, often dissociated with any cultural origin.
In 2023, I was at the Musinsa Empty shop in Seoul when I pulled a ripped, decaled pair of jeans off the rack and mentioned to the shopkeeper that they had a street vibe. You could trace the pants’ visual lineage to punk rock in London (literal street style), or more recently, to Virgil Ablohs Pyrex Vision, which started by screen-printing on deadstock jeans. The manager looked at me blankly, saying, Thats not street.
Sneakers are the greatest motif in streetwearand theyve very much become the mass-produced art of our time as sculptures molded for our feet. As I debated with designer Jeff Staple recently, theres no certainty that such a motif will keep its relevance. It seems like a dozen new sneakers fill our feeds each day, and no art movement lasts forever. Impressionism and surrealism both burned out within 20 years.
Designing the New Balance 1906L
The 1906L is so interesting because it offers a thesis on how sneakers can evolve to stay relevant. It’s a rare project that was able to cut through the noise to redefine the industry. And perhaps it was Lees point of view, as an insider-outsider who is not too beholden to tradition, that was so crucial in manifesting it. “For me, it’s not just looking at streetwear; it’s looking at all facets of culture to be able to try and inform the shoes I’m working on,” Lee says. “[The 1906L] was born from the concept of integration, the juxtaposition between two worlds: the influence of formal dressing within society and culture, and fashion and trend.”As Lee tracked a bit of buzz around loafersspotting them here and there across the luxury market in the early 2020sshe discovered her perfect juxtaposition for sneakers.
It was an indulgent project for me, because it was cheeky. And it was a bit like, Can we? Can’t we? Shall we? she recalls. But once the concept was in her brain, she realized the form immediately. This is not a flex, but I literally drew one with CAD [computer-aided-design software], she says, laughing.
Truly, her first draft made it to production, minus a few slight adjustments. When she initially presented the design to the team, the response was a rare, simple, unanimous yes. This was 18 months or more before the shoe was actually released.
She says, only upon further reflection on the project, that the shoe solidified so smoothly because it just had to be made this way to feel authentically New Balance. The loafer silhouette already spoke for itself. And the rest was about framing that loafer with New Balance performance DNA.
It had to be mesh initially . . . like, it had to have that kind of classic silver overlay, the 2000s running aesthetic, she says. That was all I needed to do, because I knew then the rest was all New Balance DNA, like identity, and I kind of squished it in and made sure it fit in the shape and within the boundary of what a loafer is.
More probing reveals a touch more thought, however quickly it came together. When I ask why my shoes feel like they match anything in my closet, she notes that was by design. She pulled the blacks, whites, and even the silver in my shoe from New Balances existing line of lifestyle sneakers, like the 1906R. These colors have already been proven for a wide variety of fashion contexts.
riginalGrand [Photo: Cole Haan]
A trend that wont die
Notably, Lee wasnt the first to mash up formal shoes and sneakers. That idea likely belongs to designer Salehe Bembury, who stuck EVA foam on Cole Haan wingtips in 2014 for his riginalGrand, but the concept never quite gelled to reach a larger scale.
Lee had a feeling the shoe would be a hit due to its polarizing, disjointed identity. Loafers are among the most versatile formal shoeone that can be dressed up more than a boat shoebut are also easier to doff and don than a New Balance sneaker. I wear them all the time, not because Im being self-indulgent, but because I’m lazy, she says. Like, you just slip your foot in, and off you go.
But she was also worried that the shoe was arriving too late, and that loafers would already be over by the time it shipped. It turned out to be the opposite.
Were way past launch, and I think it’s still continuing, she says. I think what we’re seeing now is a diversification of integration . . . how can we integrate two worlds that shouldn’t belong, but when they’re in perfect harmony, they do belong?
I actually believe its not just about mashing up two unlikely ideas. I think the snoafer has given us one of the first truly convincing theses on how the sneaker can evolve, and how we can reconcile our penchant for foams with wider, more formal visions of self-expression.
Knwls Air Max Muse [Photo: Nike]
The Knwls Air Max Musea collaboration between Nike and the London fashion house Knwlsfeels like the perfect acceleration of concept. At first glance, you might call it a ballet sneaker, and it is. The ballet sneaker is partly inspired by the ballet flats of dance class, but when you really study where their silhouettes are going on the chunkier end of the outsole equationlike the Muse, youll also see the almost hoofed posture of a Tabi heel, and a smooth shadow of a loafer.
Sneex (created by the founder of Spanx), like other head-on attempts at a high-heel sneaker, are pretty cringe. Id argue thats because they werent refined within the established design language and limitations of the sneaker. Meanwhile, the Muse is basically a heel for the sneaker ageright down to its sharply pointed toe boxand Id suggest the Simone Rocha tracker ballet flat verges toward the same idea.
Today, were witnessing an evolution of the sneaker itself, born from a culture finally prepared to reconcile its technical materials and motifsnot simply as fodder for athletic performance or fashion trend, but as a tradition of design thats essential to craft and culture alike.
Just please dont call it a snoafer.
When I imagine the future of space commerce, the first image that comes to mind is a farmers market on the International Space Station. This doesnt exist yet, but space commerce is a growing industry. The Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization for education and advocacy of space, estimates that the global space economy rose to $613 billion in 2024, up nearly 8% from 2023, and 250 times larger than all business at farmers markets in the United States. This number includes launch vehicles, satellite hardware, and services provided by these space-based assets, such as satellite phone or internet connection.
Companies involved in spaceflight have been around since the start of the space age. By the 1980s, corporate space activity was gaining traction. President Ronald Reagan saw the need for a federal agency to oversee and guide this industry and created the Office of Space Commerce, or OSC.
So what exactly does this office do and why is it important?
As a space scientist, I am interested in how the U.S. regulates commercial activities in space. In addition, I teach a course on space policy. In class, we talk about the OSC and its role in the wider regulatory landscape affecting commercial use of outer space.
The OSCs focus areas
The Office of Space Commerce, an office of about 50 people, exists within the Department of Commerces National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. To paraphrase its mission statement, its chief purpose is to enable a robust U.S. commercial interest in outer space.
OSC has three main focus areas. First, it is the office responsible for licensing and monitoring how private U.S. companies collect and distribute orbit-based images of Earth. There are many companies launching satellites with special cameras to look back down at the Earth these days. Companies offer a variety of data products and services from such imagery, for instance, to improve agricultural land use.
A second primary job of OSC is space advocacy. OSC works with the other U.S. government agencies that also have jurisdiction over commercial use of outer space to make the regulatory environment easier. This includes working with the Federal Aviation Administration on launch licensing, the Federal Communications Commission on radio wavelength usage, and the Environmental Protection Agency on rules about the hazardous chemicals in rocket fuel.
This job also includes coordinating with other countries that allow companies to launch satellites, collect data in orbit, and offer space-based services.
In 2024, for example, the OSC helped revise the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, one of the main documents restricting the shipping of advanced technologies out of the country. This change removed some limitations, allowing American companies to export certain types of spacecraft to three countries: Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The OSC also coordinates commercial satellites flight paths in near-Earth space, which is its third and largest function. The Department of Defense keeps track of thousands of objects in outer space and issues alerts when the probability of a collision gets high. In 2018, President Donald Trump issued Space Policy Directive-3, which included tasking OSC to take this role over for nongovernment satellitesthat is, those owned by companies, not NASA or the military. The Department of Defense wants out of the job of traffic management involving privately owned satellites, and Trumps directive in 2018 started the process of handing off this task to OSC.
To prevent satellites from colliding, OSC has been developing the traffic coordination system for space, known as TraCSS. It went into beta testing in 2024 and has some of the companies with the largest commercial constellationssuch as SpaceXs Starlinkparticipating. Progress on this has been slower than anticipated, though, and an audit in 2024 revealed that the plan is way behind schedule and perhaps still years away.
Elevating OSC
Deep in the text of Trumps August 13, 2025, executive order called Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry, theres a directive to elevate OSC to report directly to the office of the secretary of Commerce. This would make OSC equivalent to its current overseer, NOAA, with respect to importance and priority within the Department of Commerce. It would give OSC higher stature in setting more of the rules regarding commercial use of space, and it would make space commerce more visible across the broader economy.
So why did Trump include this line about elevating OSC in his August 13 executive order?
Back in 2018, Trump issued Space Policy Directive-2 during his first term, which included a task to create the Space Policy Advancing Commerce Enterprise Administration, or SPACE. SPACE would have been an entity reporting directly to the secretary of Commerce. While it was proposed as a bill in the House of Representatives later that year, it never became law.
The August 13 executive order essentially directs the Department of Commerce to make this move now. Should the secretary of Commerce enact the order, it would bypass the role of Congress in promoting OSC. The 60-day window that Trump placed in the executive order for making this change has closed, but with the government shutdown it is unclear whether the elevation of OSC might still occur.
Troubles for OSC
While all of this sounds good for promoting space as a place for commercial activity, OSC has been under stress in 2025. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency targeted NOAA for cuts, including firing eight people from OSC. Because about half of the people working in OSC are contractors, this represented a 30% reduction of force.
In March, Trumps presidential budget request for the 2026 fiscal year proposed a cut of 85% of the $65 million annual budget of OSC. In July, space industry leaders urged Congress to restore funding to OSC.
The August 13 executive order appeared to be good news for OSC. On September 9, however, Bloomberg reported that the Department of Commerce requested a 40% rescission to OSCs fiscal year 2025 budget.
Rescissions are clawbacks of funds already approved and appropriated by Congress. The promised funding is essentially put on hold. Once proposed by the president, rescissions have to be voted on by both chambers of Congress to be enacted. This must occur within 45 days, or before the end of the fiscal year, which was September 30.
This rescission request came so close to that deadline that Congress did not act to stop it. As a result, OSC lost this funding. The loss could mean additional cutbacks to staff and perhaps even a shrinking of its focus areas.
Will OSC be elevated? Will OSC be restructured or even dismantled? The future is still uncertain for this office.
Michael Liemohn is a professor of climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
America’s next great riverfront park has just opened in Detroit. Covering 22 acres along the Detroit River, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park is the latest high-profile project to open in a troubled city now on a much-touted rebound. With an $80 million budget buying world class design from two highly regarded firms, it’s a major investment in the city’s public realm. And though a massive embezzlement scandal nearly derailed the project in 2024, the park is now open to the public.
Designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Detroit’s new riverfront park is a multidimensional destination intended to draw people from across the region and the age spectrum. Its postcard highlights are specially designed animal-themed playgrounds, a cityscape-framing allée of cherry trees, a covered basketball pavilion designed by Adjaye Associates, and, most uniquely, a two-acre lagoon fed by the river that gives visitors the rare opportunity to come up close and touch the water.
The project was led by the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, a nonprofit established in 2003 to reconnect the city with a formerly industrial riverfront that had devolved into abandonment and contamination. In the decades since, the organization has invested more than $300 million building out riverfront parks, public spaces, and a nearly 5.5-mile continuous riverwalk along the water. The site of Ralph C. Wilson Park, just west of downtown, had been an underutilized green space for years but suffered by being cut off from its surroundings by a railyard and a derelict parking lot.
Walking through the park a few weeks before its official opening, Detroit Riverfront Conservancy CEO Ryan Sullivan can’t help but marvel at the transformation. The formerly pancake-flat site had a short life as a public park before construction began in 2022, but the space was barely loved. Before that, it had been a rail turning yard and later the site of the printing press for the Detroit Free Press newspaper. Building this new park required laying at least 18 inches of clean dirt on top of what was less than pristine ground. “It was really a blank slate to reimagine what a park could be in this space,” Sullivan says.
The $80 million park was primarily funded by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, established by the late Detroit native and businessman who was the longtime owner of the Buffalo Bills NFL team. A companion park, also funded by the foundation, is currently being built in Buffalo. “Mr. Wilson was a lifelong Detroiter and he loved the city,” says James Tighe, senior director of parks and trails at the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation. “The desire was to make sure that this was representative of the community, but also that it was a world-class destination for the city and for all the residents in the region to enjoy.”
[Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy]
A direct connection to water
Dodging workers laying down sod and construction equipment hauling some of the roughly 900 trees planted in the park, Sullivan and Tighe lead me down a pathway leading to one of the park’s main highlights: a striking playground built around the bowl of an artificial hill. Wooden and metal playscapes inspired by Michigan wildlife, custom-designed by the renowned Danish playground designers Monstrum, rise on the hill’s rim and empty down into a central space.
One of the structures, a giant bear holding up a metal tube slide, has become the de facto mascot of the park. Nearby, a splash pad area features mechanical waterworks that kids can use to pump and divert water down pathways and creek-like channels. Another playground, designed for young children, is a short meander away.
“The playgrounds are something that we just lavished a lot of time and attention on,” says Michael Van Valkenburgh, who is for his work designing Brooklyn Bridge Park, Chicago’s converted railline park the 606, and the landscape around the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center. Van Valkenburgh says he’s had a soft spot for playground design since making it his focus in grad school. But he was also keen to make sure the park appealed to more than just kids. “We wanted the park to have things in it that the range of members of a family would need to have to go to the park and spend some serious time there,” he says.
Working with the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation and the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, Van Valkenburgh’s firm engaged directly with 21 Detroiters throughout the design process to help shape the park and its offerings. Starting in 2018, these community members, known as the Community Action Team, worked directly with the designers and went on tours of notable parks in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. A clear takeaway from this involvement was the importance of the park as a waterfront experience.
“People wanted to be around the water. They wanted more access to the water,” Sullivan says. “We live in one of the most water abundant places on planet Earth in terms of fresh water. Yet within the city of Detroit, there’s nowhere to actually touch and feel and interact with the water.”
That inspired the idea of bringing river water directly into the park. Van Valkenburgh says the original concept was to create a kind of cove cut upstream from the river, where people could step into the water without fear of falling in and being pulled downstream. But water from the Detroit Rivertechnically a strait between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erieis beset by contamination from an active shipping channel and combined sewer overflows. Instead, the cove became a lagoon, with no direct human access to the river and a pump system that can be plugged up if contamination levels in the river become too high.
Stepping onto the lagoon’s gravel beach, Sullivan points to the wildlife that hasalready made the lagoon and its small internal islands home. Geese pad by and cormorants can be seen poking their heads into the water nearby. Turtles, crawfish, and even a mink have been seen on site. “No confirmed fish sightings yet, but I’m waiting on that,” Sullivan says. The lagoon was given enough depth for any eventual fish populations to survive during winters, when the surface is likely to freeze over. Officials are hopeful this could one day create another recreational attraction in the park: ice skating. “That’s a future opportunity,” Sullivan says.
[Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy]
A park for all seasons
For now, the park has plenty else to offer, including a large covered pavilion that holds two NBA-sized basketball courts and space for other programming, as well as a constructed hill that offers panoramic views upstream of the downtown skyline and downstream of the Ambassador Bridge and soon-to-open Gordie Howe International Bridge beyond. The hill also serves as space for winter sledding in a largely flat city.
Making the park work in all seasons was a priority for the designers, and for the community. Van Valkenburgh, who grew up in upstate New York and remembers five foot snow storms, giving kids a place to experience the fun of a white winter was natural. But he also worked to make the park’s design celebrate the unofficial holiday of winter’s end. Cutting across much of the park is a long, straight walkway with views of downtown and the two bridges, and the designers chose to line this walkway with dozens of flowering cherry trees. “No matter how much you love winter, it sucks by the end. It just sucks. It’s like, enough. I love you, but I’m sick of you,” Van Valkenburgh says. “We wanted that explosion of spring.”
One unfortunate but unavoidable element in the park is the existence of a hulking concrete ventilation tower near the center. It’s the above-ground infrastructure of a freight rail tunnel running under the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. Standing about five stories tall, it’s an awkward inclusion in an otherwise refined space. But in a way it does help connect the park to its surroundings. It heightens the fact that the park sits adjacent to a rails-to-trails conversion project called the Southwest Greenway, which also connects to the Joe Louis Greenway, a 27-mile loop of trails being built around the city.
The park has one other scar. The park’s construction began in 2022 and was moving forward steadily until news broke in mid-2024 that the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy’s chief financial officer, William A. Smith, had embezzled more than $40 million from the organization over the previous 11 years. (In April, Smith was sentenced to 19 years in prison and ordered to pay roughly $48 million in restitution.)
The revelation was a black eye for the Conservancy and threatened to derail the park project. But according to Tighe, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation was committed to seeing the project through. Within a week of the news, the foundation issued an emergency grant to the conservancy to ensure work continued on schedule for the October 2025 opening. “It was a long year,” Tighe says.
With the park now complete, and an endowment created to supports its ongoing maintenance, the financial scare from the embezzlement may soon just be a bad memory. For most park visitors, walking just feet from the Detroit River or rushing down one of its slides, there will be no visual clue that all this had the potential of collapsing. “It’s really a miracle when you look around,” Sullivan says.
As AI oozes into daily life, some people are building walls to keep it out for a host of compelling reasons. Theres the anxiety about a technology that requires an immense amount of energy to train and contributes to runaway carbon emissions. There are the myriad privacy concerns: At one point, some ChatGPT conversations were openly available on Google, and for months OpenAI was obligated to retain user chat history amid a lawsuit with The New York Times. Theres the latent ickiness of its manufacturing process, given that the task of sorting and labeling this data has been outsourced and underappreciated. Lest we forget, there’s also the risk of an AI oopsie, including all those accidental acts of plagiarism and hallucinated citations. Relying on these platforms seems to inch toward NPC statusand thats, to put it lightly, a bad vibe.
Then theres that matter of our own dignity. Without our consent, the internet was mined and our collective online lives were transformed into the inputs for a gargantuan machine. Then the companies that did it told us to pay them for the output: a talking information bank spring-loaded with accrued human knowledge but devoid of human specificity. The social media age warped our self-perception, and now the AI era stands to subsume it.
Amanda Hanna-McLeer is working on a documentary about young people who eschew digital platforms. She says her greatest fear of the technology is cognitive offloading through, say, apps like Google Maps, which, she argues, have the effect of eroding our sense of place. People dont know how to get to work on their own, she says. Thats knowledge deferred and eventually lost. As we give ourselves over to large language models, well relinquish even more of our intelligence.
Exposure avoidance
The movement to avoid AI might be a necessary form of cognitive self-preservation. Indeed, these models threaten to neuter our neurons (or at least how we currently use them) at a rapid pace. A recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that active users of LLM tech consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.
People are taking steps to avoid exposure. Theres the return of dumbphones, high school Luddite clubs, even a TextEdit renaissance. A friend who is single reports that antipathy toward AI is now a common feature on dating app profilesnot using the tech is a green flag. A small group of people proclaim to avoid using the technology entirely.
But as people unplug from AI, we risk whittling the overwhelming challenge of the tech industrys influence on how we think down to a question of consumer choice. Companies are even building a market niche targeted toward the people who hate the tech.
Even less effective might be cultural signifiers, or showyperhaps unintentionaldeclarations of individual purity from AI. We know the false promise of abstinence-only approaches. Theres real value in prioritizing logging off, and cutting down on individual consumption, but it wont be enough to trigger structural change, Hanna-McLeer tells me.
Of course, the concern that new technologies will make us stupid isnt new. Similar objections arrived, and persist, with social media, television, radioeven writing itself. Socrates worried that the written tradition might degrade our intelligence and recall: Trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, Plato recorded his mentor arguing.
But the biggest challenge is that, at least at the current rate, most people will not be able to opt out of AI. For many, the decision to use or not use the technology will be made by their bosses or the companies they buy stuff from or the platforms that provide them with basic services. Going offline is already a luxury.
As with other harmful things, consumers will know the downsides of deputizing LLMs but will use them all the same. Some people will use them because they are genuinely, extremely useful, and even entertaining. I hope the applications Ive found for these tools take the best of the technology while skirting some of its risks: I try to use the service like a digital bloodhound, deploying the LLMs to automatically flag updates and content that interest me, and before I then review whatever it finds myself. A few argue that eventually AI will liberate us from screens, that other digital toxin.
Misaligned with the business modeland the threat
A consumer-choice model for dealing with AIs most noxious consequences is misaligned with the business modeland the threat. Many integrations of artificial intelligence wont be immediately legible to non- or everyday users: LLM companies are highly interested in enterprise and business-to-business sectors, and theyre even selling their tools to the government.
Theres already a movement to make AI not just a consumer product, but one laced into our digital and physical infrastructure. The technology is most noticeable in app form, but its already embedded in our search engines: Google, once a link indexer, has already transformed into a tool for answering questions with AI. OpenAI, meanwhile, has built a search engine from its chatbot. Apple wants to integrate AI directly into our phones, rendering the large language models an outgrowth of our operating systems.
The movement to curb AIs abuses cannot survive merely on the hope that people will simply choose not to use the technology. Not eating meat, avoiding products laden with conflict minerals, and flipping off the light switch to save energy certainly does something, but not enough. AI asceticism alone does not meet the moment.
The reason to do it anyway is the logic of the Sabbath: We need to remember what its like to occupy, and live in, our own brains.
Amazon is well aware that youre spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for thatand we have to admit, its pretty helpful.
Help me decide is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most interested in.
Designed to cut down on shopper indecision and usher users straight to the checkout cart, the feature is a smart move for Amazon, and it might make holiday shopping a bit less tortuous for customers. As the worlds most popular online retail site continues to roll out new AI features, its serving as a proving ground for how AI is radically reshaping online shopping as we know it.
How to use Amazon’s new “Help me decide” feature
To try out Help me decide, you can either navigate to the Keep shopping for tab on the Amazon homepage, or just click on a bunch of related products until you see a black pop-up with a sparkle icon.
From there, the tool will select the product that it deems best of your recently viewed based on customer reviews, your personal product criteria, and prices and return rates. Its selection includes an AI-generated summary of why you should commit to its choice, highlighting the most relevant product features and including one stand-out review of the item. At the bottom of the screen, you can also toggle to two other suggestions: one budget pick, on the lower end of the price spectrum, and one upgrade pick, if youre inclined to get spendy.
“Help Me Decide saves you time by using AI to provide product recommendations tailored to your needs after youve been browsing several similar items, giving you confidence in your purchase decision, Daniel Lloyd, vice president of Personalization at Amazon, said in a press release.
I gave the tool a try after spending the past several days window shopping for cat trees that are definitely outside my budget. True to its description, Help me decide picked a tree in the middle of the price range (still $99.98), describing it as the ultimate choice for your furry friends indoor adventure. The summary went on to describe the trees impressive 70-inch height, spacious hammock, and removable top perch that ensures easy cleaning.
Despite the flowery language used in the AI summaries, I found the tool generally helpful and easy to use.
How AI is changing online shopping
The Help me decide add-on is the latest in a growing bevy of AI shopping features from Amazon. These include the companys AI shopping assistant, Rufus; an Interests feature that tracks personalized shopping categories; and AI-generated review highlights that give top notes on customer reactions to products.
Over the past several months, brands including Ralph Lauren and Pinterest have invested in their own AI tools to drive online shopping. Walmart and Sams Club have partnered with OpenAI to allow customers to shop from within the chatbot. And the AI-powered app Daydream is purpose-built to help users find the perfect outfits.
In a recent Adobe Analytics study on holiday shopping behaviors, the company shared that 2024 was the first time it noticed a measurable surge in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites before the holidays. Now, its expecting a major escalation of that trend, estimating that holiday AI traffic to retail sites will rise by 520% in 2025.
AI is quietly rewiring the way we shopboth in subtle ways, like by improving product recommendations, and in more direct ways, like via AI chatbots that can literally shop on behalf of a user. It won’t be long until every part of the online shopping experience is guided, at least in some way, by a dedicated AI model.
The kinds of videos that do well on YouTube Shorts are depressingly predictable: cute cats, heated arguments, crazy stunts, and plenty of good old-fashioned shots of people suffering low-key injuries.
The issue is that the real world produces only so many epic fails. And of the small number that do happen, even fewer are caught on video. Think of all the airplane passenger arguments and dropped wedding cakes that have gone untaped and unposted!
Enter Sora. OpenAIs new video generator is hyperrealistic, and was clearly trained on billions of hours of short-form, vertical video. That makes it incredibly good at generating the kinds of short, grabby videos that pull in our attention and manipulate our emotions.
How do I know? I used Sora to create an entirely fake YouTube channel, populated with AI-generated versions of the kinds of videos I see on YouTube Shorts and TikTok all the time.
It took me about 30 minutes to build and it cost nothing. In less than a week, I have 21,400 views and counting. Lets dig in.
Slop by the bucketful
Getting access to OpenAIs Sora social network is hard. The platform launched as an invite-only app, and despite this hurdle quickly ballooned to more than 5 million active users. Its growing even faster than ChatGPT.
Once youre into Sora, though, using Sora 2 (the actual video generation model behind it) is extremely easy. You just type in the concept for a video, and Sora 2 writes the script, generates about 11 seconds of very realistic vertical video, and even adds synchronized audio.
The app struggles with beautiful, cinematic footage. In my early testing, Googles rival Veo 3.1which the tech behemoth launched to compete with Sora 2is much better at that.
But where Sora 2 succeeds is in generating emotionally charged, short-form vertical videos. The model was likely built to drive the Sora social video network, and it shows.
I decided to test the appeal of Sora 2s videos by moving them over to a traditional short-form video platform so they could compete in the real world against actual grabby, vertical clips.
To that end, I opened up Sora 2 and started typing in ideas for emotionally heated videos at random.
I quickly found that Sora 2 can work with either very detailed or very vague ideas. For one video, I used ChatGPT to write a detailed script for a complex scenario: a woman making a phone call in order to reconnect with her estranged mother.
Sora 2s video nailed the task. From the subtle jump cuts to the swelling music (again, entirely AI-generated), its 11 seconds of surprisingly powerful micro-cinema.
For other videos, I went much simpler, letting Sora 2 run with my basic prompt. The text two roommates have an argument, cellphone video yielded this:
Entering A man mistakenly knocks over a giant, beautiful wedding cake and people are shocked, realistic cellphone video produced this gem, which is my favorite Sora video so far:
In total, I created eight videos. Each one took about 60 seconds to generate. Using Sora 2 within the Sora app is currently free. Basically, the system generates AI slop by the bucketful. Your job is simply to give the model direction and scoop up its output.
Cat fail arbitrage
You can post your AI slop directly to Sora itself. But I wasnt content to stop there. Instead, I wanted to see how these videos would do in the real world. So I went over to YouTube and started uploading them to the platforms YouTube Shorts sectionbasically YouTubes clone of TikTok.
Rather than starting a channel entirely from scratch, I used a neglected one where I had previously posted videos of my dog, Lance. It had no traffic to speak of, and only a handful of videos, mostly uploaded to share with friends and family members.
The channel felt like an ideal blank slate; it wasnt entirely newI was worried that YouTube might flag and delete a fully new channel that started posting AI content right out of the gatebut hadnt been developed at all. I could thus test what would happen if an existing YouTuber suddenly started posting nothing but Soras delightful slop.
I uploaded each of my new videos. Crucially, I didnt want to deceive anyone, so I left Soras prominent watermarks in place. I also fully disclosed that the videos are AI generated, using YouTubes Altered Content flag.
It doesnt seem to have mattered. As I write this about a week later, my videos have already received 21,400 views. Poor little Lances best video had gotten only 2,600 views in the three years since I posted it. My top video from Sorathe one of the wedding cake fallingis at 12,000 views and counting.
Containment is impossible
AI-generated videos wouldnt be so much of a threat to the traditional social media landscape if they staye put. You could go to Sora for AI-generated fails, and TikTok or YouTube Shorts for the authentic ones.
My experiment proves that this containment is unrealistic. Its shockingly easy to move videos from Sora to other vertical video platforms. And despite disclosures and watermarks, users seem to engage with the AI videos just as much as they would with real ones.
Sora the social network is also a pared-down experience when it comes to running the Sora 2 model. In its new API, OpenAI provides developers with direct access to Sora 2, including customizable video lengths and aspect ratios.
Videos generated through the API cost $0.10 per second. They have no distinguishable watermarks. It took me only about 20 minutes to code up an integration in Python, and I was creating fully automated AI slop for about $1 per video, at scale.
All thats to say: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are about to be inundated with an unstoppable deluge of this stuff. YouTube tacitly admitted that when it introduced its Altered Content flag over a year ago.
At the time, AI video was so janky and unusable that YouTubers were confused as to why anyone would need to disclose AI contents origins. Now we know.
For consumers, the message is clear. From here on out, trust nothing that you see on vertical video apps. That amazing bottle flip or delightfully juicy neighbor fight clip may well have emerged not from real life, but from the endless slop bucket of Sora 2.
In 1995, the kids brand Hanna Andersson debuted matching family pajamas, kick-starting a trend. Three decades later, it’s become a tradition in many families to buy PJs emblazoned with reindeer or Christmas trees or menorahs to wear during the holidays. But if you’re concerned that seasonally specific sleepwear may not be so eco-friendlyafter all, how much use will your toddler get from those Santa Claus jammies?Hanna Andersson has a suggestion for you: Why not buy them secondhand?
In 2023, Hanna Andersson launched Hanna-Me-Downs, a website for customers to buy and sell pre-owned products. If you scroll through the site, you’ll find thousands of gently used Hanna Andersson pajamas for the whole family, along with dresses, T-shirts, and trousers from previous seasons. Since the platform debuted, Hanna Andersson has become the top resold children’s brand in the U.S., selling more than 160,000 garments to 25,000 customers. And interest in Hanna-Me-Downs is only growing, with site visits increasing by 30% this year.
Aimée Lapic, who became the brand’s CEO in 2022, helped launch Hanna-Me-Downs and believes it has been one reason behind the brand’s growth in recent years. (Since Hanna Andersson is a private company owned by the private equity firm L Catterton, it does not share its revenue, but says it has experienced double-digit growth since 2019, and even higher levels of profitability.) Other factors include its decision, in 2020, to shutter all 65 of its brick-and-mortar stores to become a purely digital direct-to-consumer retailer, and its launch, in 2023, of a rewards program that now has more than a million members.
While it might seem counterintuitive for a resale site to accelerate Hanna Andersson’s growthsince it might cannibalize the brand’s sale of new clothingLapic says the opposite is true. While the platform itself does not generate a profit, she believes it has brought new customers to the brand, also reinforcing the message that its products are made to last. “Circularity benefits us from a business perspective,” Lapic says. “It’s a real solid proof point that we sell high-quality, durable clothing.”
[Photo: Hanna Andersson]
Shopping for Kids in the Era of Fast Fashion
Many parents find it hard to shop sustainably for their kids. Children grow out of their clothes quickly and ruin outfits with stains and tears. In the era of fast fashion, budget retailers like Carter’s and Target market children’s clothes that are so inexpensive, parents don’t mind if they only last a few weeks or months before throwing them out. So it might not seem worth it to spend more on durable clothes that are more expensive.
Four more than 40 yearsas fast fashion has taken offHanna Andersson has tried to make the case that it is worth spending more on high-quality kids’ clothes. Its dresses start at $50, and T-shirts start at $30. Carter’s sells those products for as low as $15 and $5, respectively.
This focus on quality goes all the way back to the brand’s origins. Hanna Andersson was founded by Gun Denhart, a Swede who had settled in Portland, Oregon. She wanted to create clothing that would allow kids to play in the rainy, muddy conditions that were common in the Pacific Northwest.
Today, the company continues to focus on quality, thanks to rigorous durability standards. In testing, each garment is washed between 60 and 100 times to ensure the fabric won’t wear out or fade. Over the years, the company has introduced new eco-friendly fabrics such as certified organic cotton, Oeko-Tex fabrics that are certified to be free from harmful chemicals; and its newest material, HannaSoft, which is made of bamboo. In each case, it puts the new materials through durability tests.
Hanna Andersson has attracted a wide range of customers, Lapic says. Some are well-heeled parents who shop from other high-end children’s brands, like Petit Bateau or Janie and Jack. But others are middle-class families. “Not all of our customers are wealthy,” she says. “Some just buy fewer clothes than they would otherwise, and others buy secondhand.”
For years, consumers have been shopping for used Hanna Andersson clothes on other brands’ secondhand sites. Lapic says that it made sense for the company to create its own platform so it could engage directly with these fans of the brand. “Our clothes were very popular on ThredUp and Poshmark,” Lapic says. “We thought we had an opportunity to keep these buyers and sellers within the Hanna Andersson ecosystem.”
[Photo: Hanna Andersson]
Resale as a Growth Engine
Lapic says that the brand tries to give Hanna-Me-Downs customers good value for their old clothes. When they send in a used product, they can get 70% of the resale value in cash. If they choose to get store credit at the main Hanna Andersson website, they can get 100% of the resale value. Lapic says that 80% of sellers choose the store credit option. And the brand has found that when these customers use their credit to shop from the Hanna Andersson site, they spend two and a half times the amount on the gift card.
Besides engaging people who are already big fans of the brand, Lapic says that it has also tapped into an entirely new customer base that has never shopped with Hanna Andersson before. This group is drawn to Hanna-Me-Downs’ lower prices, and 50% will return to the site to stock their kids closets with pre-owned Hanna Andersson clothes. “They end up buying from us multiple times,” she says.
Ultimately, Lapic says that Hanna-Me-Downs illustrates that promoting sustainable behavior doesn’t have to come at the cost of profitability. The resale site keeps clothes circulating in the economy for longer, and reinforcesthe message that it is better to buy fewer, better-quality items. “We are excited about how this platform benefits our customers, the planet, and future generations,” Lapic says.
Below, co-authors Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei share five key insights from their new book, Choose Wisely: Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making.
Barry spent 45 years teaching psychology at Swarthmore College. Now he holds a visiting position at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Richard held a similarly long tenure at Swarthmore College, 42 years, as a philosophy professor.
Whats the big idea?
There is no such thing as a calculator for lifes decisions. Try as we might to quantify, count, and calculate in search of the right choice, that is simply not how wise decision-making happens. Qualitative judgment and consideration of preferences and values are required when identifying the best option before us.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Barrybelow, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Sorting through the possibilities
Imagine waking up on a beautiful Saturday morning and asking yourself, What should I do today? You consider the possibilities: get some exercise, go for a hike, go to a lovely park with a serious book under your arm, catch up on work, veg out, and watch sports on television. Or maybe, instead of thinking about what you might do, think about what we might do.
What social activities might you engage in? Get in touch with friends, visit your mother at the assisted living facility, or help your adult daughter pack for her apartment move. Lots of possibilities. Is there a right way to think through your options for the day? Is there a right way to choose which of these things to do?
2. Rational choice theory
In economics, according to rational choice theory, there is a rational way to make decisions, which requires thinking about two things:
How valuable are the options youre deciding between?
How likely is it that the option you pick will be as good as you expect?
We live in an uncertain world, and so you assess the value and probability of your options, then multiply them. What you get is expected utility. The rational choice should be the option that provides the greatest amount of expected utility.
This framework analogizes the decisions we make in life to the decisions you might make in a gambling casino. Whats the best strategy in a blackjack hand? What are the odds and payoffs at the roulette table? In situations like this, it only matters how much you could possibly win and how likely you are to win. Rational choice theory suggests that we should think about most of our decisions in these terms.
In figuring out how good it will be if I choose this option, and how likely it is to be that good, you must quantify the relevant information. Create a spreadsheet of all the factors that might matter in making a choice. List how good a particular option is with respect to all these factors, and enter a value for both how good it is and how probable it is. Fill out the spreadsheet with all the options, push a button that does the math, and youve made a rational decision.
This framework analogizes the decisions we make in life to the decisions you might make in a gambling casino.
Rational decisions are quantitative. You need to attach quantities and magnitudes to both the value of the options and the likelihood that you will achieve that value. Rational choice theory has nothing to tell us about what your preferences among options should be, what your values should be, or what set of options you should consider. In this economic framework, you have whatever values you have, your options are whatever options the world presents, you create the spreadsheet, do the math, and pick the best option. Thats the model of rational decision making.
3. Framing the options
Do we behave as rational decision makers? Definitely not. About 50 years ago, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started studying how people make decisions. They did some beautiful and extremely important research, but unfortunately, Tversky died prematurely. Kahneman survived to win the Nobel Prize in Economics and published a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, which has been on the bestseller lists for almost 10 years. His work helped create the field of behavioral economics.
Behavioral economics research has illustrated the ways in which people fail to meet the standards of rational choice theory. People are bad at thinking about probability. People are heavily influenced by the way in which options are framed. People divide their decisions into different accounts and often dont aggregate the potential consequences of those decisions into one big account. People are highly influenced by anchors. A $500 suit seems inexpensive on a rack full of $1000 suits but seems quite expensive on a rack of $200 suits. These aspects of decision-making get us to more or less the right place, but they can also lead us seriously astray.
The way Kahneman came to regard human decision making is that there are two processes happening:
Conscious process: Thinking through the pluses and minuses of various options when asking yourself what choice to make. This is effortful, slow, and demanding.
Automatic process: This system delivers answers to you even before you frame the question. It is fast, efficient, and operating whether you want it to or not.
These two systems interact, and sometimes the automatic system leads the more deliberate, rational system astray. Even if we end up making rational decisions, its not through the processes that rational choice theory tells us we should follow.
4. Not everything canor shouldbe calculated
Rational choice theory is a terrible model of what it means to be a rational decision maker. Are most of our decisions really like casino gambles? Can everything that matters in a decision be quantified? Whats good about doing strenuous exercise on a hike? And whats good about helping your daughter pack? What is the common scale of value?
Can everything that matters in a decision be quantified?
If youre choosing a job, you might be interested in knowing the salary, benefits, who your colleagues will be, whether the work will be interesting, the location, opportunities for advancement, and other relevant details. Its preposterous to attach numbers to all those factors and then use those numbers in a spreadsheet to figure out which job is best for you. Similarly, if youre deciding where to go to college, you might be interested in quantifiable things like graduation rate and average salary after graduation, but what about the qualitative features of the education, social life, food, and housing? Can thes things be arrayed on a spreadsheet using a common scale for assigning value?
When you follow rational choice theory, instead of thinking about decisions, you count. Calculation substitutes judgment. In some areas of life, that could be a good thing, but in many others, shutting down your ability to subjectively reflect will lead to worse, impoverished, pinched decisions.
5. A rational decision requires rational judgment
Rational choice theory is dangerous as a normative standard. It narrows our thinking by encouraging us to invent quantifications of things that cant be quantified.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government was facing pushback from citizens and wondering how to generate popular support for the war. It was concluded that if the public saw that the U.S. was winning, then more people would favor involvement. But it was a guerrilla war, so can someone know whos winning? It was decided to use body counts and casualties as an indicator. If the enemy had higher numbers of wounded or dead than our side, then we must be winning. This affected our fighting strategy. Instead of seeking strategic advantages, we made decisions designed to maximize casualties because it meant we could tell folks back home that the U.S. was winning the war. As a result, we didnt win the war, and thousands of people died needlessly.
Rational deciding requires rational judgment and not just counting.
You can see the danger of rational choice theory decisions, like where to go to college, too. People are heavily influenced by the ratings of U.S. News & World Report, so universities have learned how to game those ratings by making themselves look good with respect to the dimensions that U.S. News cares about. Does that make them better institutions? Maybe sometimes, but mostly it does not.
Rational choice theory forces us to focus on things that can be easily compared and quantified while leaving out the rest. Rational deciding requires rational judgment and not just counting. We dont want our ability to think and judge rationally to atrophy because we think that the rational approach to decisions is essentially mechanical and algorithmic.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Over the last five years, artificial intelligence has shifted from a fringe interest to one of the most important drivers of global economic growth. So important has the technology become that the United Nations Security Council held its first open debate on artificial intelligence last month. While little of substance was achieved, a General Assembly resolution authorizing the creation of an independent scientific panel on AI may have a more enduring impact. One of the core questions this panel will seek to answer is how AI can support sustainable economic development without entrenching inequality.
The potential dangers here have deep historical parallels. AI runs on compute, cloud capacity, and dataresources that are concentrated in the hands of countries in the Global North. Africa, for example, hosts less than 1% of global data center capacity, leaving the continent reliant on expensive infrastructure abroad. Even an IT powerhouse like India hosts just 3% of global capacity, despite being home to nearly 20% of the worlds population. Meanwhile, workers across the Global South are earning as little as $2 an hour creating, cleaning, and labeling data for use in Western models.
A new digital colonialism?
To some, this looks like a digital version of the kind of resource extraction associated with the age of empires: labor and data flow inexorably north, where they create economic value, but little of this value finds its way back into the pockets of developing nations.
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The reality is that these patterns are driven by market forces rather than imperial ideology, but the historical echoes are troubling nonetheless. Whatever the motivations, we know that this kind of concentration of power can do long-term economic and social damage. In some cases, the results are felt only in the underserved countries. AI systems trained to deliver healthcare to Western patients, for instance, can be dangerously inaccurate when working with other populations, limiting the transferability of the advances made in the West. Similarly, researchers at Columbia University have found that Large Language Models are less able to understand and represent the societal values of countries that have limited digital resources available in local languages.
These limitations are just the tip of the iceberg. AI is not just a productivity toolits a force multiplier for innovation. It will shape how we farm, teach, heal, and govern in the future. If the Global South remains a passive consumer of imported AI systems, it risks losing not just economic opportunity but digital sovereignty. The Industrial Revolution brought extraordinary wealth to Europe and North America while locking much of the world into dependency for generations. AI could repeat that cyclemore rapidly and at an even greater scale.
Why this should worry every global business
The irony is that this approach hurts everyone, including the companies driving it. In terms of population, India has overtaken China while Nigeria and other African nations are enjoying booming birthrates. These countries represent tomorrows largest markets. Yet multinationals that treat them as data factories without trying to situate that data in its local context will find that they dont understand the customers they will desperately need tomorrow. A model that misunderstands how most of the world thinks about family, risk, or trust is a model doomed to fail.
We have already seen how this trend can play out. The mobile money transfer company M-Pesa revolutionized banking in Kenya while Western banks were still trying to penetrate the market with credit cards. Today, Indian companies are developing chatbots that can speak to the hundreds of millions who communicate daily in so-called low resource languages. Unless multinationals begin to think intentionally about how they can serve these underserved populations, they will find themselves looking in from the outside once these markets mature.
The path forward
Avoiding the dangers of algorithmic colonialism and earning a position in emerging markets for AI products and services requires deliberate action from governments, businesses, and global institutions. Data centers, power supply, and research capacity should be financed like roads and ports, with blended capital from development banks and sovereign funds. Without local compute capacity, nations will inevitably remain digital renters, not owners.
Governments should also establish data trusts to negotiate how their citizens information trains global models, including setting benefit-sharing and transparency requirements. AI annotation work should pay living wages with proper labor protections. And critically, we need investment in open-source models, multilingual datasets, and local developers, so solutions are built with communities, not just for them.
Some companies are already changing course. They are investing in local infrastructure, creating genuine partnerships, and recognizing that sustainable profits come from creating value with communities, not extracting it from them. They understand that todays data creators and workers will be tomorrows consumers, and, potentially, tomorrows innovators as well, if they are given the chance.
AI has the potential to be a great global equalizeror it could become the most powerful driver of inequality in human history. We have seen what happens when transformative technology is hoarded: inequality deepens, resentment grows, and instability follows. If we want to write a different storyone in which the Global North and South cocreate the future and share the benefits of artificial intelligencewe must act now, before the gap becomes unbridgeable.
4 things leaders can do today to start bridging the AI divide
1. Audit your AIs eographic blind spots today. Map where your training data comes from and which populations it represents. If more than 80% comes from Western sources, you run the risk of not being able to represent or communicate effectively with consumers from much of the world. Work to diversify your data if that is feasible, or develop localized AI systems that are trained or tuned with local data.
2. Create transparent data-sharing agreements. Develop a framework for using local data to train your models, including benefit-sharing provisions and audit rights for local data providers. Companies that move first will become preferred partners when governments start to mandate these arrangements.
3. Pay fair wages for AI workand let your target markets know you are putting your money where your mouth is. Commit to paying local sustainable living wages plus a mark-up for data annotation and AI training work. Make this commitment public. You will attract better talent, improve the quality of your data, and build brand equity in emerging markets.
4. Launch an open-source initiative in at least one emerging market. Pick a specific challenge in a growth markethealthcare in Nigeria, agriculture in India, education in Indonesiaand commit to building an open-source solution with local developers. The relationships and market intelligence you gain will be worth more than any proprietary advantage you might give up.
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