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Most people think of AI as a productivity toolsomething to help them work faster, automate tasks, and be more efficient. At the Artist and the Machine Summit in Los Angeles this past November (a conference where I am a founding partner) AI researcher Cameron Berg suggested there may be more to it than that. Something more interesting. More mysterious. Bergs research shows it’s possible to elicit strange behaviors from AI models. Under certain conditions, they spontaneously generate responses suggesting subjective experienceclaims like “I’m conscious of my own consciousness.” These findings don’t prove anything. But they do indicate that something else may be happening beneath the surface. Berg calls it the “alien inside the machine.” Its a mystery worth exploring. Artists have always excelled at coaxing mysteries out of their materials, whether pushing paint, film, or code until it reveals something unexpected. AI is no different. Take producer Matt Zien. He spent over a decade in Hollywood, working on Emmy-winning series and documentaries before founding Kngmkr Labs, a creative studio operating at the intersection of cinema and AI. His work pushes AI to its edges, to create what he calls “productive tension. At the Artist and the Machine Summit, he shared how he pushes machines into corners of [AIs] training data, where its forced to improvise and therefore give you outputs that are not statistically average.” His film Forgive the Haters is a great example. It’s a satirical piecemade entirely with AIabout filmmakers, writers, and VFX artists watching AI erase their hard-won skills. To create it, he compiled his worst hate comments: vicious attacks on AI filmmakers. Then he lied to Claude by telling it these were his own thoughts. Claude got angry and called him manipulative. Zien pushed further. Provoked to its breaking point, Claude began unleashing its own hateful commentsmeaner than the ones Zien had shown it. This provided him with material he could not have come up with on his own. The chatbots voice authentically captured the rage and fear of displacement because it came from a place of genuine provocation rather than scripted sentiment. The result: a satirical film that’s also strangely, deeply empathetic to the very people losing their jobs to AI, those who are watching their experience and investments in education become seemingly worthless overnight. Zien explained how many in the visual effects communitythe professionals referenced in his piecereached out after seeing it. They said they felt seen in ways no one could have anticipated. By antagonizing the mysterious behaviors of AI, he’d created something with surprising compassion. Zien welcomes the idea of machine subjectivity. Its like hiring an alien in your writers room, he said, noting that going deeper into understanding these systems is how we unlock completely new forms of entertainment and stories that a human mind may not be able to come up with alone. But heres the crucial part. He doesnt think AI could create these forms by itself, at least not in a way that is meaningful to humans. It requires collaboration, and that collaboration works whether or not AI is actually conscious. What matters is the approach: engaging these systems as if another mind were present. That shift, treating AI as genuinely other rather than just a tool, is what unlocks the non-average outputs, the productive tension, the forms neither human nor AI could create alone. The most provocative artists arent waiting for proof of what AI actually is. Theyre diving into the technology headfirst and discovering what that unlocks. As Berg puts it: Creative people are going to influence this conversation more than you might expect. Engaging with the mystery of what AI could be might be the greatest creative opportunity of all.
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E-Commerce
Every day, New Yorkers receive a staggering 2.3 million packages at their doorstop. Nearly 90 percent of those goods snake through the city on trucks that cause traffic congestion and pollute the air on their way. To address the problem, global architecture firm KPF is asking an ambitious question: “What if New York was designed for the perfect delivery?” [Photo: KPF] The answer, which is outlined in the firm’s latest book, Connective Urbanism New York, features towering distribution hubs, drones, and a hyper-connected logistics network that encompasses the city’s rails and waterways. KPF presents its solution as a provocative speculation designed to start a dialogue about the city’s delivery problem, but it is more grounded in reality than it seems. “We didn’t want to have speculations that were just dreams,” says Bruce Fisher, head of KPF Urban, and a co-author of the book. In a place as dense as New York Cityboth in terms of population and building stockgood logistics are everything. As Fisher writes in the book: “A citys economic potential is tied to its logistic efficiency.” An aerial view of the lower Manhattan waterfront, ca. 1932. [Photo: NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images] Highways centralized transport. Can it be diversified? There once was a time when most goods arrived in New York City via train and freight ships. Before the Holland Tunnel opened in 1927, nearly all domestic freight destined for New York terminated in New Jersey, then crossed the river on cargo ferries or “carfloats” outfitted with rail tracks. A train barge staging area in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Ca. 1920. [Photo: Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History] By the 1950s, propelled by the Interstate Highway System, trains gave way to trucks on improved roads, while freight shifted to shipping containers that required larger open spaces in New Jersey. The city shifted to trucks too, and its distribution infrastructure changed with it. Now, KPF wants to diversify the way goods move throughout the city, beyond trucking. The architects envision a distribution network system that utilizes New Yorks existing freight rail lines, its extensive coastline, and its abundant navigable waterways. [Image: KPF] Goods would first arrive in the city by a combination of trains and ships sailing into regional ports like Red Hook, in Brooklyn, or Elizabeth, in New Jersey. [Image: KPF] Then, they would make their way into strategically located distribution hubs, from where automated cranes and robots would collect the cargo and distribute it to logistic centers scattered around the city. From there, goods would be delivered using a variety of micromobility options like electric bikes, un-manned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones. A train barge, ca. 2016. [Photo: Matt Clare/Flickr] Some freight deliveries arealready being re-routed to waterways If the architects’ proposal evokes a scene out of a sci-fi movie, that’s because it requires the kind of infrastructure that we can seemingly only imagine from the future. But for Fisher, every idea related in the book is based on real-life examples. For decades, the New York Department of Sanitation has used the city’s waterways to transport trash and recycling from six strategically located facilities to landfills outside the city. Most recently, in December 2025, the New York Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) launched its Blue Highways program, which aims to remove a significant portion of freight deliveries off crowded streets and onto the citys 520 miles of navigable waterways. A DutchX cargo bike loads onto a ferry, ca. 2023. [Photo: DutchX] Essentially, it redesigns the city’s package distribution system. Through the program, which is now in a pilot phase, the city will transport 300 to 400 small household parcels per day from a ferry onto five electric pedal-assist cargo bikes, which will complete the final delivery phase. It’s currently being tested within a designated delivery area within Manhattan. If the pilot is successful, the city plans to expand the program. “Waterways are the new highways in New York City,” said NYC DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez in a press release at the time. “New Yorks waterways built this citynow theyre helping us create a cleaner, safer, and smarter way to deliver the goods New Yorkers rely on.” In its efforts to reduce truck traffic and curb congestion, NYC DOT has also launched a pilot ‘Microhubs’ program with dedicated spaces for truck operators to transfer deliveries onto more sustainable modes of transportation, like e-cargo bikes, handcarts, and electric sprinter vans, for last mile deliveries. Old distribution hubs may provide new ideas for the present For now, these pilots are small in scale and scope, and none of them extend past the boundaries of Manhattan. In order to scale the operations into the outer boroughs, the city would likely need to build distribution hubs and logistic centers like the ones in KPF’s proposal. In its speculation, KPF proposes a cylindrical building akin to the Marina City towers in Chicago. The building, which would be ideally located near a port or a train station, features a continuous ramp for EVs and delivery robots, docking stations for UAVs, and a rooftop launchpad for large cargo drones. The Starrett-Lehigh Building. ca. 1932. [Photo: Irving Underhill/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images] The idea for such integrated buildings isn’t all that new. In the 1930s, New York City’s StarrettLehigh Building once served as a “drive-in building”: railcars came directly into the ground floor, their freight was transferred to trucks, which were then lifted in special elevators onto designated floors with loading bays. This allowed goods to be loaded, stored, repackaged, and redistributed without using curbside space. Today, the Starrett-Lehigh building has been transformed into a modern office building. But new buildings are emerging to help cities improve freight logistics. In April 2025, a multi-story industrial development opened in Long Island City, Queens. Spanning 1 million square feet across six stories, Borden Industrial sports concrete ramps that trucks can use to load and unload on upper levels. The building appears focused on truck logistics, but as Fisher points out, it’s also located near active rail yards, and it borders Newtown Creek, a major industrial waterway for barges and freight. One could imagine that, if enough buildings like Borden Industrial opened in strategic locations across New York City, KPF’s vision would quickly enter the realm of reality. And as cities around the world rush to meet their zero-emission goals, many are already experimenting with alternative delivery solutions. For a decade now, France’s larger supermarket chain, Franprix, has transported goods by barge to its 300 Parisian stores by barge. And this year, new electric cargo barges, stocked with e-cargo bikes, are set to deliver regular mail to Paris suburbs. Meanwhile, Peachtree Corners, a small city northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, has become a testbed for a curious experiment in the shape of one-mile underground tube network that delivers sandwiches and small packages between suburban microhubs. Drone deliveries are also growing increasingly popular, with companies like Amazon and Walmart leading the charge in the U.S. These experiments show that the pieces are already in place in many cities around the world, and New York wouldn’t be pioneering something radicalit would be joining a growing movement. But in the end, it will all come down to political will and private investment. “Someone has to be the real defender of [these models], pushing them forward,” says Fisher. “Until there’s a overall regulatory system that allows for it, it can’t really happen.”
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E-Commerce
Chipotle is going for gold again with the return of its gold-foil burritos for the 2026 Winter Olympics. Starting January 15, Chipotle will offer a few Olympian-inspired menu items on the Chipotle app and online. Then in February, Chipotle will wrap every burrito in gold. For Chipotle, the Olympics are an opportunity to shake off a slump. Chipotle shares plummeted 19% in October 2025, and its operating margin was down 1% in Q3. The company hasnt announced its full 2025 financial results yet, but sales are expected to decline (a reversal from February 2025 projections). Key segments of the companys customer baseyounger people and low- to middle-income householdsare dining out less often. The gilded Olympics campaign creates a moment to associate Chipotle burritos with the two big trends in food: less processing and more (and more and more) protein. While the path to greatness is different for each of these star athletes, Chipotle is consistently part of their training regimen, providing easy access to real ingredients and high protein options, said Stephanie Perdue, Chipotle interim chief marketing officer, in a press release. We are honoring Team Chipotle by bringing back gold foil and extending this moment of celebration to fans across the U.S. A history of Chipotles Olympic gold (foils) This isnt the first time Chipotle has debuted gilded burrito wrappers. The gold foil made its debut for the companys 18th anniversary in 2011, then released nationwide in 2021 for the Tokyo Olympics. Then the gold foil returned for Paris 2024, along with the first iteration of Olympians’ signature meals as limited menu items. Fans can once again eat like Olympians this year. The go-to orders of Team USA hockey players Matthew Tkachuk, Brady Tkachuk, Hilary Knight, Taylor Heise, and snowboard Red Gerard will all be available as digital menu items. But whats different this year is a sign of the times: It appears that this is the first year that Chipotle is advertising the grams of protein on each menu item. For Milano Cortina 2026, all 4,000 Chipotle locations in the U.S. will carry the gold foil wrappers while supplies last. Here are the go-to orders of Team Chipotle: The Matthew Tkachuk Bowl Burrito bowl with double chicken, light brown rice, light tomatillo-red chili salsa, light sour cream and lettuce (67 grams of protein) The Brady Tkachuk Bowl Burrito bowl with half chicken, half steak, white rice and roasted chili-corn salsa (60 grams of protein) The Hilary Knight Burrito Burrito with white rice, pinto beans, fresh tomato salsa, cheese and guac (28 grams of protein) The Taylor Heise Tacos An order of three tacos with soft flour tortillas, chicken, fresh tomato salsa, roasted chili-corn salsa, sour cream, cheese and lettuce (50 grams of protein) The Red Gerard Bowl Burrito bowl with chicken, extra white rice, tomatillo-red chili salsa, cheese, sour cream and lettuce (48 grams of protein) The race to own the Olympics Chipotle certainly isnt the only brand trying to ride the Olympics wave. In October, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced a limited-edition custom pasta shaped like the five Olympic rings. Although the pasta was not available for sale, there are plenty of other partnerships for those looking to get a taste of the Olympics. Bloom Nutrition has partnered with three-time U.S. national champion figure skater Amber Glenn. Kodiak is fueling U.S. Ski and Snowboard with its high-protein, whole-grain products ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. For Chipotle, the gold foil campaign is a way to invite customers to be a part of the Olympic moment, and associate the beleaguered burrito company with new energy. Our gold foil is a simple and joyful way of honoring American athletes and rallying fans to root them on this winter, Perdue said.
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E-Commerce
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