Working to

make everyday life healthy,

by design.

Spending time outdoors. It’s one of the five behaviors we use in our Building H Index framework to assess how products and services influence the health of their users. But let’s be honest – it’s not one of the more recognizable health behaviors like diet and physical activity. Yet we care about it because it does have significant health impacts. Spending time outdoors – and in nature – has been linked to a growing list of health benefits from lower blood pressure to avoiding myopia.

As regular readers know,  Building H developed a rating system — the Building H Index — that measures the affects of products on their consumers. It’s a 1-100 scale where 50 and above can be considered a “good” score - a net positive for human health - and below 50 would be a “bad” score, or a net negative for health.  We released the last index this past October, and we’ve been looking for ways to make it even more impactful. One idea: Might our Index be something that investors might use in evaluating their portfolios - especially so-called socially responsible investing?

There’s been a recent spate of commentaries arguing that we’re on the verge of artificial general intelligence (AGI, in the current jargon). New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose wrote recently, in his piece Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready: “I believe that very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year — one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as something like “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do."