In traveling to South Africa to cover Nelson Mandela’s historic presidential win (I was an L.A. TV news reporter), I was captured by the warmth of that nation’s culture and people. So I stayed. I soon discovered I held many negative stereotypes about the continent and its peoples, false preconceptions mostly based on Western news reports, books and movies.
What a surprise! Not all...
Not long ago, I started thinking about the brands that mattered most to me as a kid: Levi’s, Cheetos, Toyota, Rossignol. What, I wondered, was their purpose? Why did they exist? What was their North Star?
The more I thought about these questions, the more obvious the answers seemed. Cheetos wanted to sell me cheese-flavored snacks. Levi’s wanted to sell me jeans. Coke wanted to sell...
Our fourth annual survey of the public relations industry, conducted earlier this year, revealed that a majority of global PR professionals predict the next few years will bring dramatic change to the communication industry. Eighty-three percent believe technological innovations will be a powerful driver of that change and most believe not all of it will be good.
As shared in the 2019...
In June 2017, New Scientist magazine published a story about how long it would take for artificial intelligence (AI) to surpass human intelligence. The article was later shared on Twitter through a tweet that read: “AI will be able to beat us at everything by 2060, say experts.”
“Probably closer to 2030 to 2040 in my opinion, 2060 would be a linear extrapolation, but progress is...
If you’re on social media, there’s a chance that at one time or another, a social cause resonated with you. You may have felt closely aligned to it through self-identity, past experiences or maybe it just pulled at your heartstrings because that’s how humanity works.
So, you did what people on social media do: you changed your profile picture, used a trending hashtag, liked, retweeted...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a game changer with tremendous potential for people and organizations. It is expected to have a significant impact on society. However, some AI applications raise fundamental ethical and legal questions, as the examples below illustrate:
COMPAS is a ‘risk assessment’ software developed for American courtrooms to use artificial intelligence in...
For the better part of the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has played an increasingly prominent role in how we’ve experienced the world around us — in some ways that are obvious, like the digital personal assistant that responds to your every need, and in others invisible and technically complex, like the algorithms powering the camera in your mobile phone that help you take...
In an article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, USC Professor Robert Kozinets uses the example of foodporn to convincingly illustrate that social media are “networks of desire” that fuel our passion for consumption and our need to connect. They are persuasive technologies designed for us to want them and use them often. Together with equally needy smartphone technology, they...