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When plastic entered the design world in the 20th century, it was hailed as a wonder materialsomething strong, durable, lightweight, affordable, and malleable enough to sculpt into expressive, futuristic-looking forms. But the material lost its halo as the environmental consequences became apparent, plastic waste being one of them. The design industry has been figuring out what to do about this for years. Its tried recycling, reducing the amount of material in a product, developing bio-based compostable alternatives, or switching to something else entirely. But not all companies are able to easily switch up their production lines or find alternatives. Now, a growing body of research around plastic-eating microorganisms is reshaping how the industry is thinking about the material and its waste problem. Hellera furniture brand that produces high-end plastic furniture and home goods like Frank Gehry tables, Mario Bellini chairs, and Massimo and Lella Vignelli tablewareis now making all of its furniture with an enzyme that will accelerate the rate of biodegradation. The hope is that if its products wind up in a landfill or at the bottom of the ocean, that they wont be there for long. Ten years ago, we were all drinking out of plastic water bottles and nobody really cared, says John Edelman, the president and CEO of Heller. But we learned that plastics are bad for the world. The company began to make some products from recycled material, but we wanted to get to the next level and become more sustainable, Edelman says. How can we be good for the planet and create incredible design? He adds that the bioplastics and compostable plastics on the market now dont work for Hellers furniture because of performance requirements. Since everything is indoor-outdoor, it needs to withstand rain, snow, and the suns UV rays. [Image: courtesy Heller]Heres how it works: The powder enzyme, developed by a company called Worry Free Plastics, makes plastic more enticing for microorganisms to eat, essentially turbocharging a process that already takes place naturally. When the plastic is in a zero-oxygen environment, like a landfill, the enzyme activates and attracts anaerobic bacteria that break down its polymers. As they eat the material, they generate biogas and soil. If the plastic is exposed to oxygen, as it would be in everyday use, the material remains stable. According to Edelman, it will take approximately five years for a Heller product made with the enzyme to biodegrade.Philip Myers, the cofounder of Worry Free Plastics, says its enzyme works in fresh and salt water, commercial composting facilities, and soil. A third-party testing company using ASTM methods (which involve placing an item in a controlled environment for 45 or 90 days, measuring the material loss rate, then calculating how long it would take for the entire thing to degrade) found that Worry Frees enzyme could help a plastic bottle degrade, on average, in seven-and-a-half years and a plastic bag in five; the total time it takes depends on the density and thickness of the plastic and conditions in a landfill. Real-world environments are not as controlled as a labs and the actual degradation rate could be different. One landfill might be more potent than another one, says Stephen Andero, the vice president of science and innovation at Worry Free Plastics. After doing thousands of tests, no two are the same. That said, the estimated degradation time is significantly less than conventional plastic. A water bottle, for example, takes an estimated 450 years to decompose. The enzyme can also be added to all polymer plastics, including bioplastics like PLA, which arent composting as fast as manufacturers claim. Worry Free isnt the only entity to explore enzymatic technology and the role microorganisms play in accelerating the degradation of plastic. In 2016, a team of Japanese scientists discovered a natural bacteria that eats PET plastic, which changed how the industry thought of managing plastic waste. Some researchers are now trying to engineer extra-hungry, plastic-eating bacteria. A materials science professor at UC Berkeley recently developed an enzyme that can make plastic self-destruct when exposed to heat and water. All of this research is leading to a boom in the bioremediation business.Now, manufacturers are bringing this science into the products we use every day. To date, most of Worry Frees customers have been manufacturers of single-use plasticsitems like coffee cup lids and pallet film. Myers is just as eager to find more applications for his enzyme as Edelman is to address circularity at Heller.Most of Hellers furniture is rotationally molded, a process that involves putting a powder compound into a mold then heating it up. As it heats up, it coats the mold, and when it cools, it solidifies into the shape of the product. In order to make its furniture biodegradable, Heller mixes the enzyme into the power compound. Nothing else about its production line changes.Its a drop in technology, Myers explains. It doesnt require them to change their equipment, their processanything. Its plug and play. Heller began adding the enzyme to its production line in November last year. Its going to be in all of its rotationally molded LDPE products. As old inventory moves off the shelf, the biodegradable items will enter circulation. Theres nothing different aesthetically about the pieces, and the retail price is the same. Everybody talks a big sustainability game, but research shows they wont pay more for it, Edelman says. My goal is to do something that is sustainable and at the same price . . . We actually achieved our goal of not just using recycled products, not just being recyclable, but going back to the earth.While its not likely that people are buying $1,000 dining chair sets with the intent to throw them away, Edelman thinks that Hellers adoption of enzymatic tech can spark more brands to do the same. Sustainability is being applied to every product because the design firms are pushing it, he says. Theyre the catalyst.
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E-Commerce
A new scientific study warns that using artificial intelligence can erode our capacity for critical thinking. The research, carried out by a Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University scientific team, found that the dependence on AI tools without questioning their validity reduces the cognitive effort applied to the work. In other words: AI can make us dumber if we use it wrong. AI can synthesize ideas, enhance reasoning, and encourage critical engagement, pushing us to see beyond the obvious and challenge our assumptions, Lev Tankelevitch, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and coauthor of the study, tells me in an email interview. But to reap those benefits, Tankelevitch says users need to treat AI as a thought partner, not just a tool for finding information faster. Much of this comes down to designing a user experience that encourages critical thinking rather than passive reliance. By making AIs reasoning processes more transparent and prompting users to verify and refine AI-generated content, a well-designed AI interface can act as a thought partner rather than a substitute for human judgment. From ‘task execution’ to ‘task stewardship’ The researchwhich surveyed 319 professionalsfound that high confidence in AI tools often reduces the cognitive effort people apply to their work. Higher confidence in AI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking, the study states. This over-reliance stems from a mental model that assumes AI is competent in simple tasks. As one participant admitted in the study, its a simple task and I knew ChatGPT could do it without difficulty, so I just never thought about it. Critical thinking didnt feel relevant because, well, who cares. This mindset has major implications for the future of work. Tankelevitch tells me that AI is shifting knowledge workers from task execution to task stewardship. Instead of manually performing tasks, professionals now oversee AI-generated content, making decisions about its accuracy and integration. They must actively oversee, guide, and refine AI-generated work rather than simply accepting the first output, Tankelevitch says. The study highlights that when knowledge workers actively evaluate AI-generated outputs rather than passively accepting them, they can improve their decision-making processes. Research also shows that experts who effectively apply their knowledge when working with AI see a boost in output, Tankelevitch points out. AI works best when it complements human expertisedriving better decisions and stronger outcomes. The study found that many knowledge workers struggle to critically engage with AI-generated outputs because they lack the necessary domain knowledge to assess their accuracy. Even if users recognize that AI might be wrong, they dont always have the expertise to correct it, Tankelevitch explains. This problem is particularly acute in technical fields where AI-generated code, data analysis, or financial reports require deep subject matter knowledge to verify. The cognitive offloading paradox Confidence in AI can lead to a problem called cognitive offloading. This phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have long outsourced mental tasks to tools, from calculators to GPS devices. Cognitive offloading is not inherently negative. When done correctly, it allows users to focus on higher-order thinking rather than mundane, repetitive tasks, Tankelevitch points out. But the very nature of generative AIwhich produces complex text, code, and analysisbrings a new level of potential mistakes and problems. Many people might blindly accept AI outputs without questioning them (and quite often these outputs are bad or just plain wrong). This is especially the case when people feel the task is not important. Our study suggests that when people view a task as low-stakes, they may not review outputs as critically, Tankelevitch points out. The role of UX AI developers should keep that idea in mind when designing AI user experiences. These chat UX should be organized in a way that encourages verification, prompting users to think through the reasoning behind AI-generated content. Redesigning AI interfaces to aid in this new task stewardship process and encourage critical engagement is key to mitigating the risks of cognitive offloading. Deep reasoning models are already supporting this by making AIs processes more transparentmaking it easier for users to review, question, and learn from the insights they generate, he says. Transparency matters. Users need to understand not just what the AI says, but why it says it. You probably have seen this in an AI platform like Perplexity. Its interface offers a clear logical path that outlines the thoughts and actions that the AI takes to obtain a result. By redesigning AI interfaces to also include contextual explanations, confidence ratings, or alternative perspectives when needed, AI tools can shift users away from blind trust and towards active evaluation of the results. Another UX intervention may involve actively prompting the user for key aspects of the AI-generated output, prompting users to directly question and refine these outputs rather than passively accepting them.The final product of this open collaboration between AI and human is better, just like creative processes are often much better when two people work together as a team, especially when the strengths of one person complements the strengths of the other. Some will get dumber The study raises crucial questions about the long-term impact of AI on human cognition. If knowledge workers become passive consumers of AI-generated content, their critical thinking skills could atrophy. However, if AI is designed and used as an interactive, thought-provoking tool, it could enhance human intelligence rather than degrade it. Tankelevitch points out that this is not just theory. Its been proven on the field. For example, there are studies that show that AI can boost learning when used in the right way, he says. In Nigeria, an early study suggests that AI tutors could help students achieve two years of learning progress in just six weeks, he says. Another study showed that students working with tutors supported by AI were more likely to master key topics. The key, Tankelevitch tells me, is that this was all teacher-led: Educators guided the prompts and provided context, thus encouraging that vital critical thinking. AI has also demonstrated that it can enhance problem-solving in scientific research, where experts use it to explore complex hypotheses. Researchers using AI to assist in discovery still rely on human intuition and critical judgment to validate results, Tankelevitch notes. The most successful AI applications are those where human oversight remains central. Given the current state of generative AI, the technologys effect on human intelligence will not depend on the AI itself, but on how we choose to use it. UX designers can certainly help promote good behavior, but its up to us to do the right thing. AI can either amplify or erode critcal thinking, depending on whether we critically engage with its outputs or blindly trust them. The future of AI-assisted work will be determined not by the sophistication of the technology but by humans. My bet, as with every other technological revolution in the history of civilization, some people will get a lot dumber and others will get a lot smarter.
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E-Commerce
The generative AI revolution shows no sign of slowing as OpenAI recently rolled out its GPT-4.5 model to paying ChatGPT users, while competitors have announced plans to introduce their own latest modelsincluding Anthropic, which unveiled Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its latest language model, late last month. But the ease of use of these AI models is having a material impact on the information we encounter daily, according to a new study published in Cornell Universitys preprint server arXiv. An analysis of more than 300 million documents, including consumer complaints, corporate press releases, job postings, and messages for the media published by the United Nations suggests that the web is being swamped with AI-generated slop. The study tracks the purported involvement of generative AI tools to create content across those key sectors, above, between January 2022 and September 2024. We wanted to quantify how many people are using these tools, says Yaohui Zhang, one of the study’s coauthors, and a researcher at Stanford University. The answer was, a lot. Following the November 30, 2022, release of ChatGPT, the estimated proportion of content in each domain that saw suggestions of AI generation or involvement skyrocketed. From a baseline of around 1.5% in the 11 months prior to the release of ChatGPT, the proportion of customer complaints that exhibited some sort of AI help increased tenfold. Similarly, the share of press releases that had hints of AI involvement rapidly increased in the months after ChatGPT became widely available. Which areas of the United States were more likely to adopt AI to help write complaints was made possible by the data accompanying the text of each complaint made to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the government agency that Donald Trump has now dissolved. In the 2024 data analyzed by the academics, complainants in Arkansas, Missouri, and North Dakota were the most likely to use AI, with its presence in around one in four complaints; while West Virginia, Idaho, and Vermont residents were least likelywhere between one in 20 and one in 40 showed AI evidence. Unlike off-the-shelf AI detection tools, Zhang and his colleagues developed their own statistical framework to determine whether something was likely AI-generated that compared linguistic patternsincluding word frequency distributionsin texts written before the release of ChatGPT against those known to have been generated or modified by large language models. The outputs were then tested against known human- or AI-written texts, with prediction errors lower than 3.3%, suggesting it was able to accurately discern one from the other. Like many, the team behind the work is worried about the impact of samizdat content flooding the webparticularly in so many areas, from consumer complaints to corporate and non-governmental organization press releases. I think [generative AI] is somehow constraining the creativity of humans, says Zhang.
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E-Commerce
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