Continuing our annual tradition since our inception way back in 2010 (I know, right?), the Predictions Bucket comes back for another year. What we do is this: collect as many "Predictions for 2019" articles as possible, strip them down into themes, then cross-refer themes against their authors. The idea is that the more people/organisations ma...

The revolution started with a whimper. In the fall of 1998, a roughly 900-pound contraption with blinking lights, blaring music, and a raised platform that housed two "dance floors" was wheeled into a Japanese arcade, then lifted onto another raised platform. Four steps above the arcade floor, the first Dance Dance Revolution machine ever buil...

  Artificial intelligence is everywhere but it is considered in a wholly ahistorical way. To understand the impact AI will have on our lives, it is vital to appreciate the context in which the field was established. After all, statistics and state control have evolved hand in hand for hundreds of years. Consider computing. Its origins have bee...

There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality. The conflict is still being processed as a series of individual skirmishes – a colle...

Recently, one of my students at Stanford told me a strange story. His parents, who live in Palo Alto, Calif., had been receiving mysterious packages at their house. The packages were all different shapes and sizes but each was addressed to "Returns Department, Valley Fountain LLC." I looked into it and found that a company called Valley Fountain LL...

Not to be content with dominating the lives of most people in the Western world (at least), tax-avoiding aggressive retail-and-cloud behemoth Amazon is now going after teens, in a way which uses the age-old trick of pester power. A Twitter thread by Taylor Lorenz , a writer at  ​The Atlantic  explains more. There's now a dedicated Amazon ...

In 1856, an obscure-ish writer, frustrated by the non-recognition of his newest self-published oeuvre, took matters into his own hands. He sent copies of his book of poems, unsolicited, to the literary luminaries of his day. One luminary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replied with a polite thank-you note. "'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.' —...

The speed at which Internet-connected devices have been introduced to the consumer market has vastly exceed that of society and policy. For every domestic advantage, there is seemingly a tradeoff in policy and security. For its new exhibition "Never Alone: What Happens When Everything is Connected?" , the National Science And Media Museum explores ...

Stepping into a McDonald's in Dublin, the front window is covered with little yellow cut-outs of children's hands. Donation boxes are displayed prominently on the counter top when you order. By donating €1 with your Happy Meal order, McDonald's can transform you, body and soul, by putting tasty food in your child's belly and a warm glow in your hea...

AI art using GANs (generative adversarial networks) is new enough that the art world does not understand it well enough to evaluate it. We saw this unfold last month when the French artists' collective Obvious stumbled into selling their very first AI artwork for $450K at Christie's. Many in the AI art community took issue with Christie's selecting...

In 'Low Form' – the latest in a global swathe of exhibitions reflecting on the hype cycle of artificial intelligence – curator Bartolemeo Pietromarchi draws convincing affiliations between surrealism, computer simulation and new forms of algorithmic intelligence. Comprising works by 20 international artists, including many – such as Zach Blas, Ian ...

JWT‘s Intelligence unit has launched its annual trends report, The Future 100 . While much of it may be obvious to many of you, it‘s always good to see such predictions written down - something which we‘ll come back to in a few days‘ time, when we launch this year‘s Predictions Bucket. For 2019, highlights of The Future 100 include: Curators are bu...

"A geneticist, an oncologist, a roboticist, a novelist and an A.I. researcher walk into a bar." That could be the setup for a very bad joke — or a tremendously fascinating conversation. Fortunately for us, it was the latter. On a blustery evening in late September, in a private room at a bar near Times Square, the magazine gathered five brilliant s...

I was still in pigtails and barrettes when my mother told me the rules of shopping.  Don't touch anything. Don't put your hands in your pockets. When you get old enough to carry a purse, don't dig through it while you're in the store. Always get a receipt. Always get a bag. I thought she was overreacting. I just wanted to get a Berenstain Bear...

Friend, have you heard the good news? Bread is back. After a 20-year period of privileged carb-fearing in America, our hunger for hearty artisan bread has returned in a way that we haven't experienced since the '90s. It's once again romantic — healthful even — to eat preservative-free, crusty, craggy bread, the bread we call "naturally fermented so...

The Lexus ES, a rather angular looking beast from the company behind the Japanese Mercedes , is the subject of an ad written not by some talented louche scriptwriters in an agency, but by IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform. The ad itself, from The&Partnership, is pretty decent. It features a Toyot--- er, a Lexus engineer wistful...

​ When it comes to the internet, sex feels like it's everywhere – from porn sites to pop-up ads to men private messaging women on social media to send them unsolicited dick pics. But in the world of internet memes, however, sex has struggled to permeate the mainstream. While work lives, spending habits, and love of food have long been staples of th...

A Christmas advertisement for the UK supermarket chain Iceland, which tells the story of a young girl who tries to help a baby orangutan whose home has been destroyed to create palm oil, will not be broadcast on television. The short animation, voiced by actress Emma Thompson, highlights the devastating impact that deforestation for palm oil planta...

In early October, a publicist received an irresistible message via email. The publicist's client is a top "influencer"—someone who leverages a social-media following to exert influence and, usually, make money, often by selling sponsored posts. "We would be extremely interested in a business partnership," a man calling himself "Joshua Brooks" wrote...

In 1618, an aspiring alchemist in Constantinople named Avedis created his first copper alloy cymbals. In 2018, a few hundred products from his brand, Zildjian, one of the oldest companies in the world, are eligible for Amazon Prime shipping, just like Hanes underwear or Xerox copiers or Bounty paper towels or Chanel perfume or an Eames chair or Col...