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."

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Self-driving cars have been the future for some time now. They have followed the Gartner Hype Cycle in predictable fashion, peaking several years back when we could extrapolate the progress to perfection and before a few highly publicized fatal accidents, after which their apparent lack of progress seemed to consign them to the realm of revolutions that weren’t. But, true to Gartner, they’ve been steadily working their way up the Slope of Enlightenment in the form of self-driving taxis in large cities.

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Wellness is back! With your personal life coach and raw milk subscription and supplements regimen, you are on the vanguard of the new age of personal health empowerment. And now everyone’s favorite wellness guru, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is poised to take over as Secretary of Health and Human Services. We live in the healthiest of times. And - oh yeah - the unhealthiest of times, with chronic disease at record levels and all the trend lines going the wrong way.

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Ever since limes and sauerkraut were discovered as cures and preventatives for scurvy in the 18th century, food has been leveraged as a powerful tool for preventing disease and advancing health. In the 20th century, supplemented foods - adding iodine to sale, boosting milk with vitamin D, even adding fluoride to public water systems - created huge public health benefits, turning the ubiquity of mass-consumed foodstuffs to prevent common diseases.

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How might we reimagine online grocery services to be healthy by design? We wanted to explore this question, so we challenged a team of graduate students from the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program at the University of Washington, to create a speculative service design. The result: Social Grocer.

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“The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people ‘we should get together!’ before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out,” writes Olga Khazan in her article “The Friendship Paradox” for The Atlantic. Khazan delves into a recently published study in which 6,000 American adults were surveyed about their friendships, which showed that the loneliness epidemic that we’ve all been hearing about is actually quite complex.

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The big social media platforms have long been blasted for extractive business models that optimize for attention, engagement and time on the platform. We’ve almost become numb to stories about toxic behavior, misinformation, bots, growth hacking and all the cynical techniques that the platforms use to keep people coming back and staying on. What if there were a different story, one in which tech actually builds community, where the goal of online communication is to foster more in-person interaction?

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Nearly 15% of American adults now live with diabetes. That’s a 15-fold increase over the course of 2-3 generations. Nearly 30% of Americans over 65 now have it. As an epidemic it has grown consistently and relentlessly. It is a national tragedy. It is also a massive industry.

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Fast Company recently published an article, from researchers Scott Conger, David Basset and Lindsey Toth, looking at physical activity around the world over the past couple of decades. Fitness tracker sales soared for years without boosting physical activity, analysis shows. In the studies they examined, which covered eight industrialized nations and were conducted from 1995 to 2017, they observed a fairly consistent pattern of declining physical activity in both men and women and in each of the countries.

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The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation recently ranked the countries that would have the longest life expectancy in 2050. The list includes some usual suspects – rich nations like Switzerland, Norway and Singapore, perennial contenders like Japan – but also the less wealthy southern European nations of Spain, Italy, and Portugal. How these less affluent countries have created the conditions for longevity is the subject of a recent article in The Economist.

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