Discover more from be radical Briefing
The Hidden Flaw in Forward-Thinking and Its Remedy
Read on to uncover the surprising way innovators' own biases may be hindering progress, and the simple, powerful technique to mitigate these effects.
I’m Pascal Finette, co-founder of be radical – and this is our weekly Briefing. We share our latest insights, analysis, and articles we read; all focussed on the future of technology and business. Just like a good banana, it’s easy to digest. nutritious and yummy.
Decode. Disrupt. Transform.
You’re likely familiar with confirmation bias - the pervasive human tendency to seek out and prioritize information that supports our existing beliefs while systematically dismissing contradictory evidence. Recently, researchers studying prospection - our ability to imagine and plan for the future - have been exploring an error similar to how we envision the future, termed the innovator’s bias.
As proposed by Andrew Reece and his team at BetterUp Labs, the innovator’s bias describes our inability to accurately assess potential harms and unintended consequences of new products and innovations that we create. In other words, we’re often poor evaluators of the risks inherent in the futures we’re heavily invested in bringing to life. In a series of experiments, Reece and his colleagues found that subjects who had a sense of ownership over a generally neutral hypothetical new product consistently rated that product more favorably in terms of its potential benefit vs. harm compared to a control group.
It’s not challenging to find historical (such as Facebook’s Open Graph) and likely current (like several of today’s generative AI tools) examples of the innovator’s bias at work in Silicon Valley. Here, the effect is likely amplified by intense competition, venture capital dynamics, and so forth.
Interestingly - and fortunately - Reece suggests a relatively straightforward intervention for counteracting the innovator’s bias without stifling the innovator’s enthusiasm for future-building work. Asking innovators/owners to imagine the worst possible outcomes of their inventions appears to nudge their assessment of potential harms towards a more nuanced and less optimistically biased view.
This effect creates some critical distance between innovators and the futures they might be too attached to, allowing them to examine assumptions and hopefully foster new, valuable, and socially beneficial design conversations. All of this reminds me of a saying by our old friend Paul Saffo, a Stanford professor and veteran Silicon Valley forecaster: Sacred cows make the best burgers. (via Jeffrey)
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
We Have Reached Peak Sustaining Innovation. The term, coined by none other than Clayton Christensen, refers to the improvements made to existing products, services, or processes that enhance performance and value for the current customer base, without significantly altering the underlying business model. It’s the reason why you have an iPhone 14 – the same thing that Steve Jobs introduced in 2007, just better. Every once in a while, we reach the pinnacle of sustaining innovation – the moment in time when things don’t get better, just sillier. Case in point: Microsoft’s pizza-scented Xbox controller. When you reach the peak – the only way is down…
The Ultra-Fast Fashion Battle Royale. Unless you have any Gen Z / Alpha folks around you, you might be forgiven to not realize that the two fastest growing players in the fashion space are Chinese-based Sheinand Temu. In a nutshell, they both pioneered and perfected fast fashion (a concept brought to live mainly by Spanish fashion company Zara/Inditex), exploit their supply chains and take advantage of loopholes in the US import tariff system to ship you insanely cheap stuff from China. And now the two giants are getting into a cage match over their respective business practices – mirroring the brewing battlebetween Elon Musk’s Twitter (or X, or whatever it will be called after Musk lost the looming copyright lawsuits over the name “X”) and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta empire. I guess all these companies realize that there are some very real limits to growth – there is only so much money one can spend on stuff and only so many hours in a day one can aimlessly scroll through social media posts. Battle on!
One API to Rule Them All. In the race to dominate the human race through an almighty AI, one player is suspiciously absent: Amazon. But of course, Amazon isn’t sitting on the sidelines waiting for greener pastures. Instead, Amazon does what Amazon does best – letting others battle out the “who has the best LLM model?” war and instead focusing on making the best available models highly available, scalable, secure, and actually useful. Yesterday, the Seattle-based company, which isn’t Starbucks, announced the availability of Bedrock. Its AI service layer now offers AI agents to make RPA (Robotic Process Automation) a whole lot smarter. Well played, friends.
Working from Home is Down - Yet Still at a Historic High. Well, look who’s back in the office! It turns out that working from home now represents a mere 30% of total work time. This appears to be our new baseline. So much for the grand revolution of remote work, right? Yet, paradoxically, this still represents an astonishing 40 years of pre-pandemic growth.
What We Are Reading
🌱 Research: A Little Nature in the Office Boosts Morale and Productivity Integrating small, cost-effective natural elements (referred to as micro-nature) in workplaces enhances employee performance and well-being. Recent studies indicate an increase in productivity, cooperation, and creativity. Begin by introducing real or artificial elements of nature and optimally using your spaces. Remember to encourage exposure to nature outside work too. Jane ⇢ Read
🤖 OpenAI can’t tell if something was written by AI after all Was this article composed by AI? I suppose we’ll never know… LOL. Mafe ⇢ Read
🌍 How to Escape ‘the Worst Possible Timeline’ The secret to escaping self-reinforcing doom loops may lie in recognizing ourselves as participants on “an unfinished—and potentially unfinishable—journey toward a more just world.” Jeffrey ⇢ Read
🤖 Aided by A.I. Language Models, Google’s Robots Are Getting Smart One machine trick is significantly enhancing another’s intelligence! By integrating AI language models into their robots, Google is vastly improving their capabilities, venturing into potential use cases beyond the controlled lab environment. Julian ⇢ Read
🤔 The A.I. Revolution Will Change Work. Nobody Agrees How.Determining the effect of AI on employment is a challenging task, as various studies offer diverse predictions, underlining the uncertainty that surrounds this topic. Pedro ⇢ Read
🔥 ‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record It’s quite concerning when the UN Chief redefines what was formerly known as “Global Warming” to “Global Boiling.” Pascal ⇢ Read
Around The Horn
If you’re still wondering how LLMs actually work (I don’t blame you!), here is an excellent and easy-to-understand explainer.
We might be just a few steps short of “design your own baby in a test tube,” but the AI baby photo generator is just weird and creepy.
It’s addictively fun to take a doodle and turn it into art.
This is why VR is not a big deal.
Turns out, autonomous trucking is difficult.
Dr. Google will see you now.
Autonomous agents are on the horizon. Here’s one that enables you to construct independent, self-hostable web environments that replicate existing websites such as Reddit or Shopify.
Some Fun Stuff
Before Tinder, there were pneumatic tubes. This is what flirting in 1920’s Berlin looked like. 💬➡️💌🎩💃🕰️
Postscript
Did you know you can comment on this post by simply hitting reply? Your response lands directly in our inbox – and we love to hear from you. 🤗
🚀 Radical Universe: The Heretic // The Podcast // The Book