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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In 2025, Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, and dozens more have doubled down on demands for employees to return to the office (RTO) at least three days a week, if not all five. And theyre getting exactly what they want.
Now, when I say exactly what they want, you might be expecting me to paint a picture of workers happily returning to their daily commutes, overcrowded highways, cavernous or claustrophobic offices, constant interruptions, and extra expenses, and all of it resulting in massive productivity gains.
Thats not happening, the productivity-gains part. And the longer we play this out, the sillier the performances of productivity theater have become. The truth is, the science on productivity is still out.
So you have to go with your gut. Or your experience. And what 30 years of gut and experience tells me is that the real question isnt whether people are more productive at homeits whether companies can afford to lose their best talent over this.
Right now, tech workers are desperate. Companies know it. Thats why Amazon can demand five days in the office and get compliance instead of resignations.
But the labor market isnt static; it never was. In fact, it tends to whipsaw back and forth every few years. Remember 2022? Companies were begging people to take jobs. Signing bonuses, remote work, unlimited PTOwhatever it took. Candidates were ghosting interviews. That shoe was totally on the other foot, and it was a Doc Marten.
But if we look at history, even recent history, a lot of companies that are mandating RTO now are writing the future resignation letters for their best employees, to be delivered the nanosecond the tech job market stops being the worst in history.
Let me tell you how common sense foreshadows a reckoning for RTO.
How did we get here?
I dont want to defend remote work. I really dont. But Im a huge fan of common sense.
Its a little ironic that remote work accelerated with another mandatethat we all stay home for most of 2020 and a lot of 2021. I, for one, still cant believe that happened. But its what happened next that mattered.
As the pandemic restrictions lifted almost universally by 2022, the natural calls by employers for their employees to return to the office were met with an unexpected backlash.
No, thanks. Were more productive, our work-life balance is much better, we feel better, and anyway you said we could do this.
That backlash peaked in 2024, when a bunch of Dell employees, shockingly, chose to take the hit to their company future rather than come back to the office.
Thats fine. Wed rather do a better job in a more comfortable environment. By the way, weve moved to New Zealand.
Yeah, it got silly. And corporate tech did not take that silliness lying down. Employees needed to return to the office because . . . well, because its always been that way. Does it matter that in a post-pandemic internet business world, that physical proximity no longer matters? That doesnt matter.
As employers started stamping their feet over the mandates, I started talking about common sense. For one, the long-term hits these companies were taking to their talent candidate pool, their employee morale, and their productivity when measured from the employees perspective, were costs that were going to far outweigh their sunk real estate costs in the short term.
But then corporate tech got smart. Sort of. Employers started making the misguided assumption that the employees who were most dead set against returning to the office were the ones that the company could live without. RTO became a natural, if completely illogical, weeding-out mechanism.
And that kinda worked. But kinda didnt. Sure, the troublemakers all found the door and gave the finger on the way out, but the go-along-to-get-along crowd stopped performing and got performative, and the rest of the tech workforce got ready to revolt.
Then the employers got bailed out by the worst tech labor market in history.
When there are more job seekers than jobs, tech companies can mandate a company loyalty sing-along every morning, and the entire workforce will start warming up their vocal cords.
Whats next for the labor market and RTO?
Well, what does common sense tell us?
Productivity is in the eye of the beholder. In any position where creativity, innovation, or even decision-making matters, Id argue that there is no stable metric for productivity that goes beyond correlation to causation where employee performance is concerned.
So you have to go with simple, common-sense concepts. Evolution doesnt come wit introductory pamphlets. There is no title card for the next phase of the future of work. It just happens, and you evolve or die.
And if we couldnt connect the dots that the internet had made physical proximity irrelevant in every case where it wasnt mandatory (i.e., surgery, construction, airline pilot), the pandemic lockdowns ironically hammered that point home.
As an evolutionary concept, the productivity argument no longer even matters. Its the same productivity argument that was being made when we were deciding whether everyone still had to wear suits and skirts to work.
But if that kind of common sense doesnt sway the naysayers, I can make the argument even common-sensier.
Yo. 2022.
The job market was supposed to have recovered by now. It hasnt, and that has emboldened a lot of employers to lean into their leverage with their supply of scarce and valuable jobs. But the market will recover.
When it does, the first questions that are going to need to be answered are:
Why am I on a Zoom with the person down the hall?
Why can we only hire within a two-hour commute of some of the most expensive real estate in the country?
Why am I wearing this three-piece suit with matching fedora and a pocket watch? Im a database administrator.
Because when an employee has leverage, questions like that no longer make any sense. And the very same companies demanding RTO now will likely be forced to offer remote work again to compete for scarce, valuable talent.
Theyll be right back where they started, while their talent heads to those smart companies that see remote work as an evolutionary concept, and are creating solutions that accommodate both remote and in-office employees.
If you are also a fan of common sense, please join my email list and Ill shoot you a quick heads-up when I spout something close to it.
Joe Procopio
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
It’s the digital equivalent of a clogged drain. You boot up your computer, click the Google Chrome icon, and… wait.
You wait to type a search term. You wait for the page to load. You wait while your once-speedy gateway to the internet chugs along like a steam engine trying to keep up with a bullet train.
The problem: Chrome is a beast a powerful, functional beast, but a beast nonetheless.
Over time, it gets bloated, weighed down by all the digital detritus we pile onto it. But don’t despair. You don’t need a new computer, you just need a digital declutter. Here’s how we’re going to put some pep back in your browser’s step.
Note that though feature names and their locations may differ slightly, most or all of these fixes work for Chromium-based browsers as well, such as Microsoft Edge.
Disable (or remove) unused extensions
This is almost always the main culprit. You installed an extension that seemed like a good idea a year agoa coupon clipper, a niche productivity tool, a way to add a trail of sparkles to your cursorand now it’s silently sucking down your RAM like quicksand.
Every single extension needs a little slice of your computer’s brain to run, and they add up fast.
To access your extensions, do the following:
Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner.
Go to More Tools > Extensions.
Look at the list. Be brutal. If you don’t use it at least once a week, toggle it off or, better yet, click Remove.
You’ll be surprised how many extensions you forgot you even had.
Put dormant tabs to sleep
You have 37 tabs open right now. One is a work document, one is a recipe you’ll never try, one is a YouTube video you paused three days ago, and three are different iterations of fantasy football research.
Every single one of those tabs is demanding resources, even the ones you haven’t looked at in days.
Google knows we have this problem, which is why it created the Memory Saver feature. It essentially puts inactive tabs to sleep, freeing up system memory for the tabs you’re actually using.
Heres how:
Click the three-dot menu and go to Settings.
Click Performance in the left sidebar.
Make sure Memory Saver is toggled on.
You can also designate certain sites to always stay active (like a live chat or your email), so the important stuff stays awake, and the less important stuff gets a well-deserved nap.
Clear cache and cookies
This is the classic, “have you tried turning it off and on again?” of browser optimization.
Your cache stores parts of websites (images, code, etc.) so they load faster the next time. Your cookies store user data. Over time, these piles of tiny files get huge, slow down your browser’s ability to find what it needs, and generally get in the way.
Heres how to clear them.
Use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + Del (Windows/ChromeOS) or Command + Shift + Del (Mac).
Set the Time range to All time.
Make sure Cached images and files is checked. Cookies and other site data is optional: clearing it logs you out of everything, which is annoying, but can help.
Click Clear data.
It’s a quick blast that clears out the deep recesses of your browser. Do this once a month, and you’ll notice a difference.
Check for updates
Sometimes, the answer isn’t some clever hack or esoteric settingit’s just making sure you have the newest version.
Google is constantly tweaking Chrome to make it run faster and consume less power. If you haven’t closed your browser in a week, you’re probably running on old software.
Heres how to check for updates:
Click the three-dot menu.
Go to Help > About Google Chrome.
Chrome will instantly check for and apply any updates. You might be prompted to relaunch.
Even if youre not asked to relaunch, do it anyway. A clean relaunch can solve a world of problems.
On a recent vacation in Berlin, Emma Watkins, a marketing assistant working in the U.K., wrote a three-star review of a bar she visited. It was fine, but not amazing, and not what I expected from the high ranking reviewit was four-point-something, she recalls. Upon returning home, she noticed her middling review of the establishment was taken down. When they said it was defamatory I was confused, she says. I did some Googling, then realized what had gone on. And suddenly the high rating for what I thought was pretty average made sense. (Fast Company is not naming the bar so as not to fall foul of Germanys defamation laws itself.)
Watkins isnt alone in losing trust in reviews of German businesses on Google. For much of the world, Google is far more pervasive than Yelp. If you want to find the best tourist attractions, bars, or restaurants in a new city outside the United States, your first port of call is likely Google Maps.
The system works relatively well. The best restaurants are rewarded with good reviews, while would-be customers can make their own judgment on establishments that garner a two- or three-star rating. Some are weighed down by vicious one-star reviews from (likely?) nightmare customers while, in other cases, public judgment has rendered its verdict on the establishment.
Except, that is, in Germany, where practically every restaurant, bar, and tourist attraction appears to be suspiciously excellent. The country seems to be filled with four- and five-star establishments.
In Germany, an overly permissive defamation system means that any criticism of a business is likely to be wiped out by Googles takedown system. Fully 99.97% of Google Maps reviews taken down for defamation across the entire 27-country European Union are for businesses based in Germany, official European data shows. Social media is full of complaints that businesses in the country refuse to countenance negative reviews. There are German-language websites offering advice on how to strike negative reviews from Googles register. These articles themselves have ratings, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, receive a score of 4.3 out of 5.
This is all part of the job of search engine optimization (SEO), which often extends into reputation management, says Manick Bhan, CEO of Search Atlas, a global SEO software company. Removing negative reviews isnt new. But weaponizing Germanys defamation system in this way is.
As part of our work to provide trustworthy information on Google Maps, we remove reviews if they violate our content policies or local lawsnot simply because a business dislikes them, a Google spokesperson tells Fast Company. Reviewers get notified if their contributions are removed and have the option to appeal that decision.
Typically, removing a negative review involves reaching out to the reviewer and asking them to reconsider their feedback, Bhan says. But in places like Germany where the digital laws are particularly strict, some SEOs handle the process differently. They often classify negative content as defamation and file formal complaints, essentially using a legal loophole to have the content removed by Google or similar platforms, Bhan says.
Germanys stringent regulations make it possible for business owners to claim virtually any individual review as defamatory. Googles own support site highlights that its aware of the matter. In response to a Google product experts explanation of how the review matter is a known issue, everyday users are acknowledging the power imbalance. I get it, but it really skews the value that ratings in Germany really mean, one user wrote.
Google does not comment on how it handles takedown requests. But experts have observed that the company tends to take action against negative reviews reported as defamatory if the reviewers cant cough up evidence they were actually at the establishment in questionlike a check or bill for the meal allowing the business owners to claim that the reviews are fictional. Under German law, the legal burden of proof is on those making statements rather than on prosecutors bringing a defamation case needing to prove the statements are false.
Its why many users less-than-glowing reviews are taken down by Google.
Bhan points out that taking down reviews when asked, even if the review is likely legitimate but lacking documentary evidence the reviewer was there, is an easier route for Google than keeping it up. Google doesnt want to risk penalties or fines from European regulators, so it may comply with such requests automatically, sometimes even at the expense of search quality, Bhan says. Its less about doing whats fair for users and more about staying compliant. This is clearly whats happening here in Germany.
Of course, there are precedents for people to weaponize reviews to harm the reputation of businesses they disagree with. That’s why its seen as important to have the ability to dispute what are believed to be incorrect or non-factual reviews. But that weaponization can go both ways.
The SEO expert is frank about the practice of weaponizing takedowns for defamation in Germany. Its not ideal, its not moral, but if everyone else is playing by those rules, businesses may feel forced to do the same.
