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Bernadette Berger is the director of innovation at Alaska Airlines, where she leads transformative initiatives that reimagine the travel experience for guests and employees. With a background in industrial design and a career path that spans dance instruction, stage performance, UX, and more than a decade spent designing aircraft interiors at Teague, Berger brings a unique blend of creativity, human-centered thinking, and technical insight to the aviation industry. Berger is on a mission to humanize travel. In my conversation with her, we discuss how design can foster dignity and independence in travel, and she shares how her team is using emerging technologieslike AI and automationto solve aviations hardest problems, not just for today but for years ahead. Have you always been a creative person? Yes! This is actually my fourth careerIve had a jungle gym of a career instead of a ladder. My first career was as a dance teacher. I taught kids and adults how to dance, choreographed recitals, and did competitions. I learned a lot about teaching creative skills and mastery to people of all ages. Then I thought, maybe Id be a performer. So I was an actress for many yearsmusicals, eight shows a week, the whole thing. I learned to sing, act, and develop a very specific creative skill. But I remember one lighting tech rehearsalI was standing there, waiting, and thought: Im spending all this time fulfilling someone elses creative vision. I think I could do this better. I want to be the one coming up with the creative ideas. So I went back to school and fell into industrial design and spent many years designing airplanes. Now, working at an airline, Im in a different rolebut Ive carried all those lessons with me. [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] How did you find your way into the airline industry? I studied industrial design at the University of Washington. At the time, industrial design was just starting to sneak into digital interfaces. It was the early days of what later became the entire UX design practice. I found myself leaning toward projects that had both physical and digital componentsor some sort of spatial element with a digital layer. That interest led to me connecting with the design consultancy Teague. For over a decade at Teague, I got to design aircraft interior architecture, which involves anything you touch, see, or interact with inside the airplane. I also got a chance to learn many other design skills: lighting design, audio design, haptics, materialityall the ways Id classify as experience design. Thats what got me into travel. But the thing thats kept me in travel is this: I think travel can be the best tool for fighting hate. It can be amazing for fighting discrimination, racism, xenophobia. Its really hard to hate another group of people when youve experienced their culturewhat they eat, how they move through their city, their town, their villagehow they relate to one another. I love working in the travel space because its about connecting people.Does that perspective influence your design? 100%. One of the jobs of a designer is to make sure you’re not designing for yourselfthat you’re really walking a mile in the shoes of the end users you’re designing for. There’s no better way to learn how to design a travel experience for someone who doesn’t speak English than to go to a country where you don’t speak the primary language. There’s no better way to learn how to design a better way to move bags around an airport than to go load bags for a full shift in the rain. You learn really fast when you experience those challenges yourself versus hearing about it secondhand or observing someone doing it. It changes the conversations you have, the ideas you think of, and the way you launch solutions. [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] How has the airline industry adapted to experiential design and service design? The ones that are adopting a user-centric approach wholeheartedly are the ones that are winning. It’s easy to see when decisions are made purely on what’s best for business without considering what’s best for humans. At Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines, care and customer care are central tenets of our business. Great customer care comes from our frontline employees. If we’re not creating great tools and experiences for our flight attendants, pilots, and customer service agents, they won’t be able to be their best for our guests. There’s as much focus on creating a well-designed employee experience as there is on the guest experience because they’re so related to each other. [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] What about designing for better interactions between airline staff and airport staff? Absolutely. Guests are constantly handed off from airline staff to TSA and back. If youre on an international flight, you may show your passport three times. We’re working closely with TSA to allow identity verification using your face or phone. Imagine not needing to dig out your wallet at bag drop, TSA, or the gate. This year, there will be 13 moments in the travel journey where you can use your face or phone instead. Wht role does your team play in shaping travel experiences at Alaska Airlines? As an airline, we look at how people are boarding in Asia, how guests take short flights in Europe, or how travel is booked in South America. We often examine our own industry, but as the innovation group, we also get to look outside of aviation. We’re trying to make the flight booking path as easy as buying something on Amazon. We want the day-of-travel experience to be as seamless and interactive as planning your day at Legoland or Disneyland. We study personalization from places like Sephoratheir app, stores, and online experience. We look both inside and outside our industry because the same traveler buying sunscreen on Amazon is coming to our airport with high expectations for personalization, seamlessness, real-time information, and self-service. Even though other companies dont have the same constraints we do in flying people across the world, our bar still has to be just as high. It sounds like senior executives are really invested in this. Did you have a lot of work to do to prove that this innovation group works? Yes. Working on moonshot ideas is not for the faint of heart. Its for people who get excited about what might be, and who arent held back by fear of what might go wrong. Our job is to prioritize the really gnarly challenges that we face as an airline and then ask over and over: What would need to be true for this challenge to go away? What tasks can we do that are fast and inexpensive so we can learn more, whether it’s that a technology isnt ready yet or that a process could be automated, or that we should communicate differently with guests? We constantly ask ourselves: Are there different ways to tackle this problem? What are the hard-and-fast rules, and where can we think differently to get different results? [Photo: courtesy Alaska Airlines] What are some of the challenges that design has helped the airline industry overcome? Design has helped more people travel. Historically, aviation was expensive and not accessible to everyone. But design has changed that. Now, more people can travel safely, independently, and with dignity. Think about booking a tripan airline, a hotel, a car, fun activities. Design helps deliver not just information, but the right, relevant information for each person. It helps guests who are blind, deaf, traveling with a service animalit helps them enjoy travel with the same independence and dignity as anyone else. Theres still more work to do, but one of the major successes of design in this industry is making travel more accessible to more people. How are you using AI in your work? Do you think AI can improve designs contribution to the travel industry? AI is a big part of our innovation strategy and really, almost every departments strategy. Its well integrated across the airline to elevate how we work. Right now, were using AI where it excels: looking at lots of data sources and synthesizing them for humans. AI is great at pattern recognition, prediction, detecting things, and using rules to make quick decisions. We use AI for complex scheduling, improving safety, rerouting aircraft around storms, and in computer vision. Its already being applied in machine learning and automation. But the next level Im excited about is AI as your best team member where it helps humans make nuanced decisions, use intuition, and observe when automated processes are going wrong. Thats where well start to see jobs improve in quality. Were currently using automation on the ramp to help move bags from plane to plane more effectivelyespecially with tight connections. AI can track bags, planes, and people, and find the best routes for bag transfers. That frees up human ramp agents to focus on the complex problem-solving theyre experts in. You work with both creative and noncreative people. How do you motivate themespecially people who dont consider themselves creative? I have a spicy take. I believe, deep in my soul, we are all creative. Creativity is a form of problem-solvinga trial-and-error process. My heart breaks when people say, Im not creative. I want to say, Who told you that? Because almost everyone I work with is a great problem solver. They may use analytical tools, but theyre still making creative choices. How do I motivate people? A lot of it is looking at problems from a different perspective. Asking, What if? What would need to be true for this to work? When you invite people into that way of thinking, they can contribute using their own methodssketches, words, process flows, or whatever it may be. The killer of creativity is fearfear of embarrassment, fear of failure. Most of what we try doesnt work out, but we learn so much from the process. Thats the point. To me, thats creativity. What advice do you have for aspiring designersespecially students? I used to teach at the University of Washington, my alma mater. I loved seeing lightbulbs go off when students finally got something. Id assign them to go somewhere and experience a challenge firsthand. Want to design for a user group? Be that user for a day. Dont just observe them. If youre ambitious and want to be a senior designer or creative director, spend time around those people. Watch how they carry themselves. Learn from their presence. One of my mentors walked into a room with confidenceheels clicking, bag down, commanding attention. You cant learn that on Teams. So my advice is to get in front of people in real life. Experience what they experience. Sit with coworkers. Build bonds. Learn from mentorshow to be and how not to be. That all requires showing up in person. Working from home is efficientand I love the flexibility with my kids. But creative teams need bonds. You need trust to have honest conversations about work without it feeling personal. You have to apologize when you mess upbe transparent. When I show vulnerability, my team can too. Vulnerability is a requirement for trust.
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In the new edition of my book, The Simulation Hypothesis, released in July, Ive updated my estimate of how likely we are to be in a simulation to approximately 70%, thanks to recent AI developments. This means we are almost certainly inside a virtual reality world like that depicted in The Matrix, the most talked about film of the last year of the twentieth century. Even young people who werent born in 1999 tend to know the basic plot of this blockbuster: Neo (Keanu Reeves) thinks hes living in the real world, working in a cubicle in a mega software corporation, only to discover, with the help of Morpheus (Laurence Fishburn) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), that hes living inside a computer-generated world. The AI Factor What makes me so sure that we are living in a simulation? There are multiple reasons explored in the book, including a new way to explain quantum weirdness, the strange nature of time and space, information theory & digital physics, spiritual/religious arguments, and even an information-based way to explain glitches in the matrix. However, even while discounting these other possible reasons we may in a simulation, the main reason for my new estimate was because of the rapid advance of AI and virtual reality technology, combined with a statistical argument put forth by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In the past few years, the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Xs Grok has proceeded rapidly. We now have not just AI which has passed the Turing Test, but we already have rudimentary AI characters living in the virtual world with whom we can interact. One recent example includes prompt-generated video from Google Veo. Recently, Google has introduced the ability to create realistic-looking videos on demand, complete with virtual actors and landscapes that are completely AI generated, and speak real lines of dialogue, all based on prompts. This has led to prompt theory, a viral phenomenon of AI-generated video of realistic characters exhorting that they were definitely not generated by AI prompts. Another recent example is the release of AI companions from Grok, which combine LLMs with a virtual avatar, leading to a new level of adoption of the rising wave of AI characters that are already serving as virtual friends, therapists, teachers, and even virtual lovers. The sexy anime girl in particular has led to thousands of memes of obsession with virtual characters. The graphics fidelity and responsiveness of these characters will improveimagine the fidelity of the Google Veo videos combined with a virtual friend/boyfriend/girlfriend/assistant, who can pass what I call, the Metaverse or Virtual Turing Test (described in the new book in detail). The Simulation Point All of this means we are getting closer than ever to the simulation point, a term I coined a few years ago as a kind of technological singularity. I define this as a theoretical point at which we can create virtual worlds that are indistinguishable from physical reality, and with AI beings that are indistinguishable from biological beings. In short, when we reach the simulation point, we would be capable of building something like the Matrix ourselves, complete with realistic landscapes, avatars and AI characters. To understand why our progress in reaching this point might increase the likelihood that we are already in a simulation, we can build on the simulation argument that Bostroms proposed in his 2003 paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Bostrom surmised that for a technological civilization like ours, there were only three possibilities when it came to building highly realistic simulations of their past (which he called ancestor simulations). Each of these simulations would have realistic simulated minds, holding all of the information and computing power a biological brain might hold. We can think of having the capability of building these simulations as approximately similar to my definition of the simulation point. The first two possibilities, which can be combined for practical purposes, were that no civilization ever reaches the simulation point (i.e. by destroying themselves or because it isnt possible to create simulations), or that all such civilizations who reached this point decided not to build such sophisticated simulations. The term simulation hypothesis was originally meant by Bostrom to refer to the third possibility, which was that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. The logic underlying this third scenario was that any such advanced civilization would be able to create entirely new simulated worlds with the click of a button, each of which could have billions (or trillions) of simulated beings indistinguishable from biological beings. Thus, the number of simulated beings would vastly outnumber the tally of biological beings. Statistically, then, if you couldnt tell the difference, then you were (much) more likely to be a simulated being than a real, biological one. Bostrom himself initially declined to put a percentage on this third option compared to the other two, saying only that it was as one of three possibilities, implying a likelihood of 33.33 % (and later changed his odds for the third possibility to be around 20%). Elon Musk used a variation of Bostroms logic in 2016, when he said the chances of us being in base reality (i.e. not in a simulation) were one in billions. He was implying that there might be billions of simulated worlds, but only one physical world. Thus statistically, we are by far highly likely (99.99%+) in a simulated world. Others have weighed in on the issue, using variations of the argument, including Neil deGrasse Tyson, who put the percentage likelihood at 50%. Columbia scientist David Kipping, in a paper using Bayesian logic and Bostroms argument, came up with a similar figure, of slightly less than 50-50. Musk was relying on the improvement in video game technology and projecting it forward. This is what I do in detail in my book where I lay out the 10 stages of getting to the simulation point, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), BCIs (Brain Computer Interfaces), AI, and more. It was the progress in these areas over the past few years that gives me the conviction that we are getting closer to the simulation point than ever before. The Equation In my new book, I argue that the percentage likelihood we are in a simulation is based almost entirely on whether we can reach the simulation point. If we can never reach this point, then the chances are basically zero that we are in a sim that was already developed by anyone else. If we can reach this point, then the chances of being in a simulation simply boil down to how far from this theoretically point we are, minus some uncertainty factor. If we have already reached that point, then we can be 99% confident about being in a simulation. Even if we havent reached the simulation point (we havent, at least not yet), then the likelihood of the simlation hypothesis, Psim , basically simplifies down to Psimpoint, the confidence level we have that we can reach this point, minus some small extra uncertainty factor (pu). Psim Psimpoint pu If we are 100% confident we can reach the simulation point, and the small factor pu is 1, then the likelihood of being in a simulation jumps up to 99%. Why? Per the earlier argument, if we can reach this point, then it is very likely that another civilization has already reached this point, and that we are inside one of their (many) simulations. pu is likely to be small because we have already built uncertainty into our Psimpoint for any value less than 100%. So, in the end, it doesnt matter when we reach this point, its a matter of capabilities. And the more we develop our AI, video game, and virtual reality technology, the more likely it is that at some point soon, we will be able to reach the simulation point. Are we there yet? So how close are we? In the new book, I go through each of the 10 stages and estimate that we are more than two-thirds of the way there, and I am fairly certain that we will be able to get there eventually. This means that todays AI developments have convinced me we are at least 67% likely to be able to reach the simulation point and possibly more than 70%. If I add in factors from digital and quantum physics detailed in the book, and if we take the trip reports of mystics of old and todays near-death experiencers and psychonauts (who expand their awareness using DMT, for example) at face value, we can be even more confident that our physical reality is not the ultimate reality. Those who report such trips are like Platos philosopher who not only broke his chains, but also left Platos allegorical cave. If you read Platos full allegory, it ends with the philosopher returning to the cave to describe what he had seen in the world outside to the other residents, who didnt believe him and were content to continue watching shadows on the wall. Because most scientists are loath to accept these reports and are likely to dismiss this evidence, I wont include them in my own percentage estimation, though as I explain in the book, this brings my confidence level that we are in a virtual, rather than a physical reality even higher. Which brings us back to the inescapable realization that if we will eventually be able to create something like the Matrix, someone has likely already done it. While we can debate what is outside our cave, its our own rapid progress with AI that makes it more likely than ever that we are already inside something virtual like the Matrix.
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Lush forests and crisp mountain air have drawn people to New Yorks Adirondack Mountains for centuries. In the late 1800s, these forests were a haven for tuberculosis patients seeking the cool, fresh air. Today, the region is still a sanctuary where families vacation and hikers roam pristine trails. However, hidden health dangers have been accumulating in these mountains since industrialization began. Tiny metal particulates released into the air from factories, power plants and vehicles across the Midwest and Canada can travel thousands of miles on the wind and fall with rain. Among them are microscopic pollutants such as lead and cadmium, known for their toxic effects on human health and wildlife. For decades, factories released this pollution without controls. By the 1960s and 1970s, their pollution was causing acid rain that killed trees in forests across the eastern U.S., while airborne metals were accumulating in even the most remote lakes in the Adirondacks. In the early 1900s, sanatoriums such as the New York State Hospital at Ray Brook, near Saranac Lake, were built to house tuberculosis patients. The crisp mountain air was believed to help their recovery. [Photo: Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection/Library of Congress] As paleolimnologists, we study the history of the environment using sediment cores from lake bottoms, where layers of mud, leaves, and pollen pile up over time, documenting environmental and chemical changes. In a recent study, we looked at two big questions: Have lakes in the Northeast U.S. recovered from the era of industrial metal pollution, and did the Clean Air Act, written to help stop the pollution, work? Digging up time capsules On multiple summer trips between 2021 and 2024, we hiked into the Adirondacks backcountry with 60-pound inflatable boats, a GPS and piles of long, heavy metal tubes in tow. We focused on four pondsRat, Challis, Black and Little Hope. In each, we dropped cylindrical tubes that plunge into the darkness of the lake bottom. The tubes suction up the mud in a way that preserves the accumulated layers like a history book. Back in the lab, we sliced these cores millimeter by millimeter, extracting metals such as lead, zinc and arsenic to analyze the concentrations over time. An illustration of the authors shows how lake sediment cores capture the history of the region going back thousands of years. [Image: Sky Hooler] The changes in the levels of metals we found in different layers of the cores paint a dramatic picture of the pristine nature of these lakes before European settlers arrived in the area, and what happened as factories began going up across the country. A century plagued by contamination Starting in the early 1900s, coal burning in power plants and factories, smelting and the growing use of leaded gasoline began releasing pollutants that blew into the region. We found that manganese, arsenic, iron, zinc, lead, cadmium, nickel, chromium, copper, and cobalt began to appear in greater concentrations in the lakes and rose rapidly. At the same time, acid rain, formed from sulfur and nitrogen oxides from coal and gasoline, acted like chemical shovels, freeing more metals naturally held in the bedrock and forest soils. Acid rain damaged trees in several states over the decades, leaving ghostly patches in forests. [Photo: Will & Deni McIntyre/Getty Images] The result was a cascade of metal pollution that washed down the slopes with the rain, winding through creeks and seeping into lakes. All of this is captured in the lake sediment cores. As extensive logging and massive fires stripped away vegetation and topsoil, the exposed landscapes created express lanes for metals to wash downhill. When acidification met these disturbed lands, the result was extraordinary: Metal levels didnt just increase, they skyrocketed. In some cases, we found that lead levels in the sediment reached 328 parts per million, 109 times higher than natural preindustrial levels. That lead would have first been in the air, where people were exposed, and then in the wildlife and fish that people consume. These particles are so small that they can enter a persons lungs and bloodstream, infiltrate food webs, and accumulate in ecosystems. A wind map shows how pollution moves from the Midwest, reaching the Adirondacks. The colors show the average wind speed, in meters per second, and arrows show the wind direction about 3,000 meters above ground from 1948 to 2023. Average calculated using NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data. [Image: Sky Hooler] Then, suddenly, the increase stopped. A public outcry over acid rain, which was stripping needles from trees and poisoning fish, led to major environmental legislation, including the initiation of the Clean Air Act in 1963. The law and subsequent amendments in the following decades began reducing sulfur dioxide emissions and other toxic pollutants. To comply, industries installed scrubbers to remove pollutants at the smokestack rather than releasing them into the air. Catalytic converters reduced vehicle exhaust, and lead was removed from gasoline. The air grew cleaner, the rain became less acidic, and our sediment cores show that the lakes began to heal through natural biogeochemical processes, although slowly. By 1996, atmospheric lead levels measured at Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks had declined by 90%. National levels were down 94%. But in the lakes, lead had decreased only by about half. Only in the past five years, since about 2020, have we seen metal concentrations within the lakes fall to less than 10% of their levels at the height of pollution in the region. Our study is the first documented case of a full recovery in Northeast U.S. lakes that reflects the recovery seen in the atmosphere. Its a powerful success story and proof that environmental policy works. Looking forward But the Adirondacks arent entirely in the clear. Legacy pollution lingers in the soils, ready to be remobilized by future disturbances from land development or logging. And there are new concerns. We are now tracking the rise of microplastics and the growing pressures of climate change on lake ecosystems. Recovery is not a finish line; its an ongoing process. The Clean Air Act and water monitoring are still important for keeping the regions air and water clean. Though our findings come from just a few lakes, the implications extend across the entire Northeast U.S. Many studies from past decades documented declining metal deposition in lakes, and research has confirmed continued reductions in metal pollutants in both soils and rivers. In the layers of lake mud, we see not only a record of damage but also a testament to natures resilience, a reminder that with good legislation and timely intervention, recovery is possible. Sky Hooler is a PhD student in environmental science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Aubrey Hillman is an associate professor of environmental sciences at the University at Albany, State University of New York. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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