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Where are you regarding urgent skill set development? Excerpt? " AI is an extraordinary tool that amplifies our cognitive capacity. It can analyze, summarize, and generate content faster than any human. However, AI is only ever as good as the questions we ask it. It will never replace our capacity for thinking, and can, in fact, reinforce bias because it is learning what we teach it.    For this reason, the top skills of the future include thinking skills. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report , employers anticipate that beyond technical literacy, the most in-demand capabilities will be creative thinking, critical thinking, resilience, and the capacity for learning. Thinking is a premium, ... and yet it is also the very thing that is most at risk.

Repairing and rebuilding connections with colleagues Excerpt: Today’s employees aren’t just disengaged – they’re actively disconnecting from their colleagues, managers, and leaders at an alarming rate. The signs are everywhere: declining engagement, lower productivity, more people than ever seeking new roles, increasing isolation and burnout, and growing tensions over flexible work. Gallup calls this the “great detachment,” estimating its cost at £8.9tn – that’s 9 per cent of global GDP.  But this isn’t just about profit – it’s about people. A recent report by Telus Health found a third of UK workers have a high mental health risk driven by loneliness, highlighting that workers under 40 are 80 per cent more likely to lack trusted workplace relationships, compared to workers over 50. Many leaders want to pin the connection crisis on remote working and believe that forcing people back to the office will magically fix it. That’s a lie. The reality? The connection crisis started long before the pandemic. It’s about way more than physical location. And dragging employees back to their desks won’t bring it to an end. Related report

A free-range mind treking societal ideologies Excerpt: "It is why the Democrats can’t be a left-wing party if they want to survive. It is why they have to be the moderate, sane alternative to the authoritarian Republicans. It is why the true liberals sitting in the audience in Newport 1965 gasped with ecstasy when Bob Dylan plugged in and sang, “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine…” And giggled when Bob launched “Highway 61” with the wild whistle he’d bought on the street in Greenwich Village. That brilliant merger, the joining of literacy and electricity, was close to the heart of American music. For Dylan, there were sources in blues, folk, rock, country, church music, the American songbook; it was something the world had never heard before. The end product of true American music—still evolving—deals only tangentially with class or ethnicity. Woody and Dylan had that in common: they were about the fresh, wild spirit of This Land."

“Because we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most meaning to the things we can measure.” Perhaps its time to exit our numbers obsession Excerpt: "Numbers can have that effect on people. They turn feelings of restfulness and satisfaction into dust in the blink of an eye. They can also trick you into believing the complete opposite. Your wearable technology might measure a bad night’s sleep more favorably than you’d expect. At work, a shockingly mediocre work performance might result in a pay raise or bonus simply because you touted the corporate line. What is undeniable is that humans are magnetically drawn to abstractions of reality—both their own and those of others. Numbers is the true universal language that transcends cultures and geographies. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, quantification helps us measure and organize the world around us. It’s how we tell time, keep records, conduct financial transactions and scientific experiments, administer medications, and write computer code. Numbers have even changed the way we communicate. People find percentages and simple frequencies astonishingly persuasive—the more abstract they are, the more they capture attention. Here are two ways I could promote this Fast Company article to a broader audience: I could say, “Many people have read and enjoyed this article.” This version relies purely on qualitative evidence. I could also say, “The click-through rate for this article is 55%, with two-thirds of readers finishing the entire piece.” To our 21st-century sensibilities, the latter strangely sounds far more credible and captivating. Fred Hargadon, a former dean of admissions at both Princeton and Stanford, once said: “Because we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most meaning to the things we can measure.” We see this reflected in the cost-cutting efforts of  Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE ), or our obsessive monitoring of global stock market indexes."

A generation tries extended breaks from work Excerpt: "After working in a series of jobs in finance and technology, Ms. Kausar, 30, was feeling stressed and overworked. In December 2023, with a bit of savings built up, she quit without another position lined up to focus on things that had fallen to the wayside while she was focused on work. “I had more time to work out. I was eating better, sleeping better. It was just like a full reset,” said Ms. Kausar, who lives in Houston. “For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t have this looming cloud of ‘work.’” Eventually, she came across a term for her hiatus that resonated with her: “micro-retirement.” For most people in the United States, being able to save enough money to not have to work is a faraway ideal. That anxiety, especially for people closer to retirement, has only risen as stock markets have grown more volatile in response to President Trump’s global tariffs. Discontented employees who do not have the means to leave the work force have turned to “ quiet-quitting ,” “ acting your wage ” or simply using their vacation days.

Creating practical A.I. frameworks for any substantive endeavor KEY TAKEAWAYS Large Language Models (LLMs) are just one type of AI. Despite the hype, they have not superseded all other types and made them redundant. Many of the most promising applications of AI are emerging in areas of machine learning that have little to do with LLMs. We can consider the trajectory AI by thinking about the categories of AI capability: Narrow AI, Artificial General Intelligence, and Super AI. Related book

An introduction to the thinker's thoughts Excerpt: " Every time I have started a new project over the last 30 years, pretty much the first person I go to for advice is tech guru  Kevin Kelly . He is one of the most original thinkers I have ever met in a long career of talking to a lot of remarkable thinkers. I can honestly say that every time I talk with Kevin, I learn something that I had never thought about before. Kevin (no one who personally knows him ever refers to him as Kelly) was the person who got me to San Francisco in the early days of the digital revolution to work with him and the other founders of WIRED. He was the magazine’s founding executive editor, and his instincts on the next big story made it a must-read global brand in that era and made WIRED Digital a groundbreaking pioneer of the early web. After reading my first attempt as a young journalist to look 25 years into the tech future, he sent a two-sentence email to hire me. The man’s brain never stops churning and learning, so I keep going back to him as a mentor for insight into almost every iteration of the tech story, and in the last 10 years, many of our conversations have focused on artificial intelligence (AI). Whenever I launched a new event series or public-facing project, Kevin was one of the first guests I hosted to test the concept out. The images and videos in this essay capture Kevin in action. The video above shows him speaking at my series The AI Age Begins in 2023 — that series was trying to make sense of the surprise arrival of generative AI. Below you’ll find one from 11 years ago, when Kevin hosted one of the  first virtual roundtables  for my second company, which pioneered the interactive group video format that we now know as Zoom. The topic? Early AI."

Learn (and see) more Excerpt: " Using a laser technology known as lidar, Zimpel and his team have rediscovered the lost Portuguese colony — finding an intricate urban system of canals, roads and military fortifications, and the remains of stone structures. The breakthrough, announced in October, was the latest example of how lidar is ushering in a new era of discovery in the Amazon. The laser sensor, which can be mounted on an airplane or drone, have given scientists the equivalent of X-ray vision, enabling them to puncture the forest’s dense canopy like never before, and reveal the secrets of the world’s largest rainforest." Meanwhile under the Great Pyramids

The DARVO encounter Excerpt : "You knew the conversation would be tricky because you had to tackle someone about their misbehavior. Maybe it was a colleague who claimed your work idea as their own; maybe it was a new friend who said nasty things behind your back; or maybe it was a romantic partner who was unfaithful. The evidence is incontrovertible—so much so that, had the boot been on the other foot, you would be confessing your error and asking for forgiveness. But that’s not this person’s MO. No, in the face of clear wrongdoing, they denied everything. Instead of showing contrition, they counterattacked, maybe even accusing you of the very behavior they committed. To top it off, they played the victim and cast you as the real offender. The whole interaction left you upset and confused—even questioning your perception. Is it possible that you got the whole thing backwards? Congratulations, you have just been mugged by DARVO, an acronym that stands for “Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.” DARVO is a technique we may well encounter in our daily life when dealing with sociopathic personalities. This type of person-to-person psychological warfare is designed to deflect any penalty for misbehavior, and turn it instead into an opportunity to gain power over you. For a well-adjusted, mentally healthy person, to be DARVO’d is a bewildering and unsettling experience. But once you understand how the technique works, you’ll never have to be its victim again."

What will we learn from the events of April 9, 1865? Excerpt: But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”

For many, to be rich Excerpt: "President Donald Trump’s newly imposed tariff regime sent the market into free fall, wiping away trillions of dollars in a matter of days. Administration officials have largely dismissed the decline; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, labeled it a “short-term” reaction. Others have bristled at the idea of caring about a drop in the market: Senator Eric Schmitt responded to the financial panic by saying, “America isn’t an economic zone. America isn’t a strip mall with an airport attached to it. America is a place. It’s our home. It’s our people.” But Americans aren’t buying it. A majority —not just a wealthy few—opposed the tariffs even before they went into effect. More recent polling found a majority agreeing that “Republicans are crashing the American economy in real time and driving us to a recession.” The source of public fear and outrage is not only the 61 percent of Americans who own stocks, many of whom just saw much of their wealth evaporate. It is also the small businesses with razor-thin margins that just saw their input prices explode, and the consumers still recovering from the last round of inflation and fearful of the next. Millions of those now alarmed by surging tariffs voted last year for Trump to return to the White House. They did this not because they wanted tariffs, but because they thought a second Trump presidency would mean fulfilling that most American of desires—the desire to get rich."

Watch short intro video (also w/transcript) Excerpt: "Narrator: These may sound like random numbers, but they're all part of what is known as the Fibonacci sequence, a series of numbers developed by a 13th century mathematician.' Mario Livio: You start with the numbers one and one, and from that point on, you keep adding up the last two numbers. So one plus one is two, now one plus two is three. Two plus three is five. Three plus five is eight, and you keep going like this, five plus eight. Narrator: Today, hundreds of years later, this seemingly arbitrary progression of numbers fascinates many who see in it clues to everything from human beauty to the stock market. While most of those claims remain unproven, it is curious how evolution seems to favor these numbers."