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When its parked in your garage, the Polestar 3 can now help you save on your electric bill. The automaker is the latest to roll out bidirectional charging for its electric vehicles, making it possible to charge the SUVs battery when power is cheap and then use the vehicle to power your house when prices go up. The company partnered with Dcbel, a startup that makes technology that manages the flow of energy between the car and home. “Most of our cars sit in driveways more than 80% of the time,” says Dcbel CEO Marc-André Forget. “Now, for the first time, if we think about it, cars start to be useful even when parked. This is transformational. It’s the second-largest investment for most family after the market of the home, and those assets are underused.” The 2026 Polestar 3 [Photo: Polestar] When you plug the car into Dcbel’s home energy station, called the Ara, artificial intelligence kicks in and analyzes energy prices, forecasts how much energy you’ll need over the next few days and how much you need for driving, and, if you have solar panels, it also predicts how much solar power you’ll be generating. The device uses that data to decide, “Should I charge the car right now?” Forget says. “Should I supercharge the car? Should I wait and charge later? Should I use the energy from the car to power the house, to basically avoid buying energy from the grid at a very high price?” When your house needs power, the equipment converts DC power from your car into AC for the wiring in your home. (The tech can also double as an inverter for solar panels, though if you already have a solar inverter, it likely doesn’t have the right software to work with an EV.) [Photo: Dcbel] Any EV could become bidirectional, but automakers need to develop software to make it work. Polestar spent 18 months working with Dcbel to design a seamless user experience. Users can track the system through an app, though it handles everything automatically. If the power goes out in the middle of the night, the car will wake up and start charging your house. If the grid is down over a long period, the car’s battery can charge an average house for 2.5 days, or as long as 10 days if you start rationing power. The home energy system is pricey, starting at $5,000 for a base model. But in California, Dcbel won a grant that will provide customers with generous rebates: up to $8,100 for a full-featured version of the tech, up to $2,000 for installation, up to $200 for interconnecting to the grid, $1,000 to enroll in a dynamic rate utility program, and up to $2,500 toward a bidirectional EV like the Polestar 3. The rebates are first-come, first-serve, and decline over time. But for the first customers, the charging equipment could be nearly free. “We chose to focus on California primarily because of the state incentives that are available,” says Peter Wexler, head of product for Polestar in North America. “They made a natural introductory plan for us.” Customers in other states can buy Dcbel’s charging system, but would have to front the full cost. For utilities, this type of system can help stabilize the grid. Power demand surges at certain timeswhen everyone gets home from work in the evening, or when everyone turns on their AC during a heat wave. If enough EV owners use their batteries to power their house when demand is highest, it can make it possible for utilities to avoid turning to more polluting sources like gas power plants. California also has some vehicle-to-grid (V2G) pilots that allow EV owners to sell power back to the grid at peak hours and make money, but that isnt yet widely available since the public utility commission still needs to finalize interconnection and compensation rules. Dcbels equipment will enable V2G charging as soon as utilities permit it. Dcbel has developed and shared a new software standard for bidirectional charging that it hopes automakers will universally adopt; it’s currently working with eight automakers to add other cars to its system. Forget contends that more cars with this capability will likely roll out soon, noting, “I think we’re going to see lots of news about current cars becoming bidirectional over the next couple of months.
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Africas official maps are stuck in the past, often either outdated, incompleteor both. But governments dont have the budgets to fix them, making it difficult to complete projects as complex as deciding where to put new solar plants to as simple as delivering a package. Now a new plan is underway to map the entire continent using satellite data and AI. Maybe 90% of African countries dont have access to an accurate current base map for their country, says Sohail Elabd, global director of emerging markets at Esri, the mapping company behind the Map Africa Initiative. At a United Nations event last year, Elabd met the heads of national mapping departments from around 30 African countries. Nearly all said they didnt have accurate base mapsthe foundational maps that are critical for everything from urban planning to disaster response. Everyone was complaining that theyre struggling, he says. They had no funding. On the plane ride home, he started thinking about what satellite data could make possible. Traditionally, mapping a country required flying specialized planes with sensors and cameras over the land for a month or more, along with extensive data collection on the ground. “Usually it’s a very costly process and time consuming,” says Elabd. Now AI can analyze satellite data and create detailed maps at a fraction of the cost. The new project will train AI to recognize features across different terrains, from roads in the desert to homes in the rainforest. Then it will produce base maps that include physical features of the landscape, buildings and roads, and geographic boundaries. The project will also map additional layers, from agricultural fields to urban infrastructure and vegetation. It’s possible to map not only where farms or trees are located but also to analyze the type of crop and the species of each individual tree. While satellite data and AI are already used in mapping, the continent-wide scale of the project is unprecedented. The maps can help governments update land registries and plan everything from where to best deploy wind and solar farms to port infrastructure improvements. They can help make navigation systems more accurate. And in parts of Africa where standard addresses don’t existmaking it hard to make deliveries or deploy emergency servicesthe new maps can give governments the details they need to create address systems. The project will launch early next year, with Space42, a UAE-based space tech company, providing satellite data, and Microsoft supplying cloud infrastructure and the AI framework. Each African country must submit an official request to participate. After the AI is trained, updating the maps will become significantly cheaper, and each country will receive a data management system for annual or biannual updates. The same approach can help other areas that have gaps in map data, including South America and parts of Asia. Elabd notes, The platform we are building for Africa is designed to be reusable and cost-effective for other regions, and it can produce base maps anywhere in the world.
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Working for myself was the goal. I did it. I made it. I work for myself. But it hasnt fixed my life. Im free to pursue anything I want. But achieving goals doesnt and wont make me complete. Theres a term for it: the arrival fallacy. Its the reason we sometimes still feel empty even when we achieve what we want. Achieving a goal rarely feels like arrival. Because its not the end we imagined. You do everything you can to climb the ladder. But you get up there and then nothing. Or even worse, a disappointment. That happens because the end we expect doesnt necessarily solve our problems. Goals are meant to guide us. They can show you how much youve grown. How far youve come. And what you are capable of achieving. But they are not an end in themselves. Happiness is a by-product of getting things done. Philosophers and psychologists have been saying it for years. But we forget because we want instant gratification. You want to experience what it feels like when you finally tell yourself you made it. The brain is in pursuit of happiness, and because the brain is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee of an indefinitely long future of pleasures, wrote philosopher Alan Watts. The hedonic treadmill Goals are never done. You are never done. The human mind is wired to adapt. You achieve one thing today, tomorrow you will find something else to focus on. Its called the hedonic treadmill. You think more money, a bigger house, a promotion, or a new project will make you happy. You get it. It feels good for a while, then your brain moves the target. You feel that weird emptiness again. It doesnt mean theres something wrong with you. Its just biology. Even the most successful people you know suffer from the arrival trap. We are wired for pursuit, not possession. The feel good emotion is in the chase, not the results. The thrill is in the doing, the process, the almost-there. The minute you get what you want, the brain jumps ships. The fallacy becomes a trap because we assume a number, a title, or a single experience would fix our wiring. It wont. Accept it, and you stop beating yourself up. You will never be satisfied. But theres a way around the arrival trap. The solution Focus on finding meaning and joy in what you do daily. Its the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top, says writer and philosopher Robert M. Pirsig. The point of life was never to tie our happiness to goals. Or arrive to feel joy. You are already on the mountain. You might as well find and enjoy what makes you come alive. Build meaning into your experiences, not the onetime milestone. Enjoy todays wins no matter how small. Notice your progress. Find joy in the act of doing, not in checking boxes. By all means do what you must. Set the goal. Focus on the process of getting things done. But stop expecting life-changing happiness when you arrive. Completion is not necessarily fulfilment. Learn to enjoy the climb. That way, even failure feels like progress. Because it is. Youve learned what doesnt work. Youve become wiser. I start projects that bring out the best in me. That means I refuse to get attached to the outcome. I get my thrill from the process. Im only entitled to my actions, never to its fruits. Whatever I achieve is a bonus. Mahatma Gandhi said The path is the goal. Shift your focus to finding meaning in the doing, not the having. Completed a small task of the project. Good. Celebrate the weird small stuff. Helped someone at work without waiting for praise? Great. These micro-wins can do wonders for our happiness. The arrival feeling you expect isnt the end. Its just one of many experiences to come. You may feel empty again. And thats okay. Thats normal. Accept it, and suddenly you stop fearing the emptiness. You stop blaming yourself. Find joy in the climb Goals will give you direction. But its the process that truly transforms you. Reaching a goal wont fill the existential emptiness. Start finding joy in the climb. Thats where you actually feel alive. Happiness isnt a place you arrive at. Its the quality of your attention along the way. Its the focus you bring to your work, the connection with your team. And the small improvements you notice along the way. By all means set your goals. Pursue them. But remember, the finish line is just one of many in your lifetime. Pursue goals for growth. Thats where you actually feel alive. The real work is reaching the peak; its learning to enjoy the climb. The prize was never the point. The person you became while earning it was. Next time you achieve something and feel that strange emptiness. Its not a sign you are ungrateful. Its a sign youre human.
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Below, coauthors Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein share five key insights from their new book, Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work. Melissa is an associate professor of management science at Stanford University, where she codirects the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. Michael is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, where he is a Bass University Fellow. Both have had their work featured in major publications, including The New York Times and Wired. Whats the big idea? Have you ever wished that you could assemble your version of the Avengers at work? Thats basically what it means to build a Flash Team. Bringing together the right set of experts at exactly the right time to tackle a tough, important job has become a realistic, repeatable goal for leaders todayunlocked by powerful new technological tools that enhance organizational strategy. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Melissa and Michaelbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. There are experts everywhere, all the time One of the biggest mindset shifts of flash teams is recognizing that expertise is abundant. Managers have been trained to think that hiring an expert takes weeks of job postings, interviews, and approvals. But whatever expertise you need, you can probably access it in minutes, not months. A founder of a $35 million start-up told us that he had a client who needed to reimagine how to sell a beloved toy truck after their retail stores shut down. Using the flash teams approach, he quickly found a former McKinsey partner in retail, someone from Toys R Us corporate development, and a supply-side expert from Amazon. They had never met before, but they delivered so well that the client rehired them to manage execution. Weve demonstrated that same speed in our classrooms. Ive asked students to hire a professional designer from Upwork and get a finished team logo in under 80 minutes. Every time, theyve done it. Technology lowers the transaction cost of finding, vetting, and convening experts. Leaders can stop assuming that talent is a bottleneck. Once you recognize expert abundance, you can start designing projects differently: taking on bolder challenges, experimenting faster, and pulling in expertise at the moment its needed. This shifts managers from fearing scarce or hard-to-find talent to orchestrating abundant talent. This is possible because modern online labor markets and digital platforms are the infrastructure. They provide access to millions of professionals worldwide, reputation systems that help you assess quality, and fast contracting and payment systems that remove friction. Technology lowers the transaction cost of finding, vetting, and convening experts, so leaders can act on the abundance thats already available. We live in an economy of expert abundance. With the right mindset and tools, you can assemble the right people at exactly the right time. 2. AI can help you design teams and organizations The amazing thing about having flash teams is that, because they are created using computing, you suddenly have the ability for AI to help design your organization: how to staff, how to work together, and when to adapt. As a result, we can solve lots of problems that are organizational and managerial blind spots. Were not talking about theory here, but about practical dials that managers usually leave on the table. AI can influence how our teams and organizations are structured and function: How should this team be collaborating? Should we have horizontal leadership or enforce a steep hierarchy? Who should even be on this team, or are right for this project? Many of the decisions needed to build an effective team can be supported by AI insights. As people, we tend to under-explore. We dont try enough options. We try a couple different things, see what seems to work, and then we say, Yeah, seems good. But this is how we fall into a rut. With AI plus flash teams, you instrument the basics and give the system permission to propose small experiments, such as: Try a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for decisions this week. Rotate one member for fresh eyes. Shorten stand-ups and add a mid-week asynchronous check. If it produces improvements, the AI learns to keep it; if it doesnt help, the AI might toss it. As people join or roll off, the recommendations adapt. These kinds of things give us managerial superpowers. AI-enhanced flash teams can make this possible. 3. Management classics are still classicjust reimagined. In some ways, flash teams sound like something brand newon-demand experts, AI tools, dynamic org chartsbut the management classics are still classics. They just look a little different in this new world. Take project management. In our research, we studied hundreds of flash teams. The best teams didnt succeed just because they had the right experts. They succeeded because a team manager made sure the pieces came together: synchronizing handoffs, keeping information transparent, and making sure the clients vision stayed connected to the teams daily work. One engineer told us bluntly, The PM (project manager) makes or breaks the team. Or leadership. In one of our experiments, when a client suddenly changed requirements mid-project, the teams that thrived werent those with the flashiest experts. They were the ones where a leader stepped in to integrate different perspectives, rebalance priorities, and help the group adapt quickly. Leadershipthe ability to inspire, coordinate, and adaptstill matters, maybe more than ever. Flash teams give new life to timeless management skills. And integration. Even with great role clarity, unexpected complexity shows up every day. Someone doesnt deliver, or two roles conflict, or the work comes in messy. Thats the residual complexity that only managers can resolve. In one case, a team writing poems for a card game had beautiful but mismatched outputs. They quickly elevated one person into the role of Chief Poetry Officer for a dayjust long enough to integrate the parts into a coherent whole. Thats hierarchy reimagined: temporary, lightweight, but crucial. With flash teams, digital tools support classic management functions. Platforms like Slack or project dashboards give managers real-time visibility across the whole team. AI-enabled systems can help leaders spot when handoffs are slipping, recommend worflow adjustments, or even simulate different team configurations before you commit. The human arts of leadership, integration, and project management get amplified. Flash teams give new life to timeless management skills. The tools may be modern, but the fundamentalsclear leadership, good coordination, thoughtful integrationare still what make or break a team. 4. AI org simulations and organizational what-ifs. Flash teams open this incredible opportunity to have a what-if machine: What if we organized the team this way? Would the team work better or worse? What if we brought this person onto the teamwould it help? What if we split up into two smaller units? Would we move faster and make better decisions? Imagine being a manager and getting a fast, concrete preview of what might happen: what could go wrong, whats likely to improve, and what might get worse. This is possible through the clever application of large language models, such as ChatGPT. We can use this new generation of AIs to create lightweight simulations of your organization. Imagine digital twins: little digital copies of everyone on your team that act and behave roughly the same way that they do. With those simulations, you could put the digital twin of your team or org into different configurationsreconfigure the team, change collaboration rules, and moreand see if they coordinate more smoothly. This is possible through generative agents. These are AI agents that simulate people based on a bit of knowledge about them. Maybe you run a little interview with everyone in the team and use that to create a digital twin of them, or maybe everyone agrees to use a slice of your historical Slack or email to create digital twins of your team. Once you have that, your team can become this dynamic, queryable object: you ask a question, run a quick scenario, and watch how it plays out. Its a rapid, plausible rehearsala what if. This is possible through the clever application of large language models, such as ChatGPT. In this way, we can also catch early warning signs for a team. It allows leaders to flag whether a team is likely to fractureto stop wanting to work togetherby using about 60 to 90 seconds of their chat. A tiny glimpse into how people communicate and coordinate can reveal surprisingly strong signals. Suddenly, we can predict whether this team will work as great long-term partners, or if we should reconsider them. Its almost like organizational speed dating. Imagine having the superpower to create organizational what ifs. It gives you this amazing managerial sandbox. Flash teams turn your org into a safe, queryable what-if machine, so you can prototype structure before you commit to it. 5. You already have a flash teams toolbox You dont need to have a PhD in artificial intelligence to do these things. You can do it today, without any custom software. All you need is the idea and access to a modern large language model like ChatGPT. It turns out that everything we had to spend months coding manually can be generated on the fly by an LLM if you can just be specific about what you need. AI can help you design or refine your team. One option is to get an advanced degree in computer science and learn about networks of multi-armed bandits, then build it internally. But the other option is to just keep a spreadsheet where youve been keeping track of how things are going, and the management decisions youve been making so far. Input that into GPT-5, ask it to implement this approach, and it will do all the math for you. 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.
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Meta allegedly stopped internal research on social medias impact on people after finding negative results, a court filing released Friday claims. The filing took place in a Northern California District Court, as a group of U.S. state attorneys general, school districts, and parents launched a suit against Meta, Google-owned YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The court documents allege that Meta misled the public on the mental health risks to children and young adults who excessively use Facebook and Instagram, even though its research showed that the social media apps had demonstrated harm. “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study,” the lawsuit says. “Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew.” The research, code-named “Project Mercury,” took place in 2020. Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to see what impact deactivating Facebook had on people. According to internal documents, people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison.” According to the filings, instead of pursuing more research, Meta dropped the project, claiming that participants feedback was biased by “the result of the existing media narrative around the company. Politico reported that in a sealed deposition earlier this year, Metas employees expressed concern about the research’s findings. Oh my gosh, y’all. IG is a drug, Shayli Jimenez, a Meta senior researcher, is quoted as saying in internal documents. In response, another employee allegedly said, Were basically pushers.” The Politico story reported that Jimenez said in her deposition that the comments were made “sarcastically.” In a statement, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said: “We strongly disagree” with the allegations, which rely on cherry-picked quotes and misinformed opinions in an attempt to present a deliberately misleading picture.” Stone continued: The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teenslike introducing Teen Accounts with built-in protections and providing parents with controls to manage their teens experiences.” And in a series of posts on BlueSky, Stone also pushed back against the idea that Meta was trying to bury the results of the terminated study with Nielsen, noting that the study found that people who believed using Facebook was bad for them felt better when they stopped using it. “It makes intuitive sense, but it doesnt show anything about the actual effect of using the platform, Stone wrote. However, the latest uproar over Meta’s research is hardly the first time the company’s impact on children’s mental health has been questionedeven by its own employees. In 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen leaked hundreds of internal company documents to the government, which referenced risks to children. Haugen said the company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but refuses to “because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”A growing body of evidence, outside of the company’s own research, has long pointed to the harm that social media may have on children’s mental health. A 2019 study found that teens who spent more than three hours a day on social media may be at heightened risk for mental health problems, particularly internalizing problems.” Likewise, research shows that mental health disorders among today’s youth are at an all-time high and growing. In response to growing concern around children’s mental health, in a 2023 report, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on social media companies and policymakers to act, rather than to place the entire burden of limiting kids’ time on social media on parents.
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