Throughout time, technology has empowered humans to boost their productivity. The wheel, likely invented around 3500 BCE, began as a potter’s tool but soon revolutionized transportation. With rudimentary wheelbarrows, people could haul crops more efficiently, freeing time for other activities — like inventing the earliest writing systems. Today’s tech is light years more sophisticated, but the idea is the same: less input, more output.
AI is the latest disruptive technology sending ripples across industries. Just as the wheel transformed transportation and agriculture, AI is reimagining the way teams work — and AI is becoming more accessible every day. The Economist recently estimated that 80% of organizations in the U.S. and China already rely on AI daily. For companies, the question is no longer whether you adopt AI — it’s how smartly you integrate it into your business processes.
Research shows that AI tools like ChatGPT facilitate faster, better teamwork — 12.2% more tasks completed; 25.1% faster task completion; and 40% higher quality work. At Jotform, we aim to leverage AI to help our teams reallocate their energy to more meaningful collaboration, not ... Continue Reading »
“During Q&A sessions, readers sometimes refer to it as a novel,” journalist and author Nathan Thrall tells Big Think, “and I have to clarify it’s entirely nonfictional.” Thrall is referring to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (2023), which tells the story of a horrific car accident in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of six Palestinian children, including Abed’s five-year-old son, Milad.
That so many readers mistake A Day in the Life for fiction is a testament to Thrall’s skills as a writer, to his ability to describe complicated events and identify with his subjects. However, these kinds of mix-ups also raise important questions about the craft and ethics of nonfiction writing. What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction, and literary nonfiction from ordinary journalism? How do you produce a page-turner without distorting the facts, which may not always lend themselves to an easily digestible narrative? Is it okay for nonfiction writers to take creative liberties, and — if so — when?
Thrall’s insights are not only relevant for aspiring Pulitzer contestants — ... Continue Reading »
Our biases have far-reaching consequences for others, and when constantly reinforced, they can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. By age six, research suggests, American children have absorbed the association of intellectual brilliance and genius with men more than women. Heartbreakingly, six-year-old girls are already less likely than boys to believe that members of their gender are “really, really smart.” These stereotypes have a direct influence on children’s behavior: girls are less likely than boys to express interest in novel games that are intended for children “who are really, really smart.”
In a similar vein, economist Michela Carlana showed that in Italian middle schools, girls underperformed in math when they were assigned a math teacher with strong unconscious beliefs that boys are better at math than girls (as measured by the most widely used tool, the Implicit Association Test). Furthermore, these girls ended up self-selecting into less demanding high schools, which influenced their career options going forward. The gender stereotypes of the teachers induced the girls—especially those whose math skills were lower to begin with—to doubt themselves, leading them to fail to ... Continue Reading »
Where do the heaviest elements in the Universe come from? If you were like most astrophysicists during the 20th century, you might’ve said from supernova explosions: stellar cataclysms that occur either within the cores of massive stars or from stellar corpses (white dwarfs) that undergo destructive, energy-releasing events that trigger a rapid succession of nuclear fusion reactions. Unfortunately, a comprehensive study of these classes of events — including both type II (core-collapse) and type Ia (exploding white dwarf) supernovae — showed that, although they do produce large sets of fusion reactions, they really only produce elements up to about zirconium (element #40) on the periodic table.
Beyond that, or for more than half of the known elements that exist, a different set of processes are required. While the slow neutron capture process (s-process) can occur within evolved, Sun-like stars, accounting for large fractions of certain elements, such as niobium, tin, barium, and lead, the majority of heavy elements require another process to explain their observed abundances.
In 2017, a new candidate rose to the top of everyone’s mind: colliding neutron stars. A ... Continue Reading »
Worldwide, organizations are contending with ever-escalating expectations from multiple stakeholders: customers, employees, stockholders, and regulators, to name a few. For multinational enterprises, however, such expectations are exponentially more difficult to meet. Growth, operations, capital investment, and talent development and deployment are all essential market factors influenced by not only global objectives but also local conditions.
L&D leaders in these organizations face correspondingly unique challenges. They must strive to meet current talent development needs while anticipating future demands. They must also coordinate within a multinational structure to ensure that learning options are high quality, measurable, easily accessible, and aligned with the needs and interests of teams in different countries and, potentially, cultures.
Increasingly, L&D has incorporated e-learning technologies to expand its reach around the globe while supplementing the scope and variability of its portfolio. In 2024, the projected value of the worldwide online education market was $185 billion. By 2029, that value is estimated to increase to $279 billion.
However, not all e-learning is created equal, and technology alone should not be the deciding factor. E-learning choices, regardless of the subject matter and ... Continue Reading »
In a series of experiments described in Science Magazine in 2011, a trio of researchers found evidence to support a sneaking suspicion bubbling up in the minds of many Google aficionados: Frequent users of internet search engines didn’t retain information gleaned through online sleuthing as well as individuals who learned information offline. As the scientists posited, it was almost as if people and their computers were becoming “interconnected systems,” with basic memory functions delegated to search engines.
Over the ensuing years, this “Google effect” has taken on a new moniker: “digital amnesia.” It’s the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online via search engines. After all, why would the brain waste resources storing information available at the click of a button? Instead, people better recall how to access the information.
Google is now the most trafficked website in the world, and the internet itself is the definitive repository of human knowledge. If the brains of Googlers and their invaluable search engine were interconnected back then, they’ve essentially merged now. The myriad effects are up for speculation.
Now, artificial intelligence is ... Continue Reading »
In 2022 Deloitte reported that from a comprehensive study of 2,100 employees and C-level executives across USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, nearly 70 per cent of the C-suite were seriously thinking about leaving their current position in favor of one that better supported their well-being. Roll on to 2024 and not much has changed. In fact, it’s got worse. The 2024 Global Talent Trends report by Mercer of 12,000 participants including 845 C-suite leaders and 1,900 HR leaders reveals that more than 80% of employees are at risk of burnout.
Fractional leadership is a practical, alternative vision of the future of work for senior executives (aka “CxOs”) that might hold a solution to leadership burnout. For leaders at risk of burnout engaging with fractional leadership brings the extra bandwidth they need in terms of skills, capacity, and knowledge… and fast.
Fractional Leadership is starting to gain significant interest and is being adopted by businesses globally. It disrupts and challenges the traditional full-time employment model providing firms with access to the functional, emotional, and collective intelligence they need by moving positions from the ... Continue Reading »
The story of how our own Sun was born remains a cosmic mystery.
This glimpse into the stars found in the densest region of the Orion Nebula, near the heart of the Trapezium Cluster, shows a modern glimpse inside a star-forming region of the Milky Way. However, star-formation properties vary over cosmic time, from galaxy to galaxy, at different radii from the galactic center, etc. All of these properties and more must be reckoned with to compare the Sun with the overall population of stars within the Universe. Note that our Sun, born 4.6 billion years ago, is younger than 85% of all stars.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M. Robberto et al.
Formed 4.6 billion years in the past, we can only see what presently survives.
Although we now believe we understand how the Sun and our Solar System formed, this early view of our past, protoplanetary stage is an illustration only. While many protoplanets existed in the early stages of our system’s formation long ago, today, only eight planets survive. Most of them possess moons, and there are ... Continue Reading »
Intelligence on Earth did not appear until almost 4.5 billion years after the planet formed. On the other hand, the Sun is slowly heating up and that means there’s just a billion or so years left before life becomes impossible on Earth. Is there any conclusion that can be drawn from these two seemly unrelated facts?
According to a popular theory called the “Hard Steps Model,” the answer is a definitive “yes.” The model’s quite stunning conclusion is that intelligence is exceedingly rare. If the model is true, then we are certainly alone in the Universe. That might sound depressing to you, and if so, you’re in luck. That’s because, according to a new paper, the Hard Steps Model is based on a deeply flawed logic and can’t say much of anything about the prevalence of intelligence in the cosmos. Understanding what goes wrong with this popular theory is important though because it reveals a whole new way of looking at life, evolution, and planets.
I covered the Hard Steps Model in detail more than a year ago because (big reveal) that’s ... Continue Reading »
A name is a cage. It binds you to a type and casts you in this role or as that person. It shrivels your complexity and jams it into an artificial vice. A name says to the world, “This person is this thing, and this is what I’ll call it.” But no person who has ever lived is ever just one thing. Even the fullest names we give one another will capture only a tiny fraction of our depth. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
The world is often unkind to this kind of Whitmanian complexity. It might be easier than ever to “be yourself,” but this implies that there is one, single “yourself” to be. It implies you have an essence — an authentic filament to who you are that defines you. So, being happy — and being modern — is to stay true to yourself.
But life is not like this. A human cannot be explained by a name or entombed under a single identity. We need a better way to understand the contradictions and ... Continue Reading »
Throughout time, technology has empowered humans to boost their productivity. The wheel, likely invented around 3500 BCE, began as a potter’s tool but soon revolutionized transportation. With rudimentary wheelbarrows, people could haul crops more efficiently, freeing time for other activities — like inventing the earliest writing systems. Today’s tech is light years more sophisticated, but the idea is the same: less input, more output.
AI is the latest disruptive technology sending ripples across industries. Just as the wheel transformed transportation and agriculture, AI is reimagining the way teams work — and AI is becoming more accessible every day. The Economist recently estimated that 80% of organizations in the U.S. and China already rely on AI daily. For companies, the question is no longer whether you adopt AI — it’s how smartly you integrate it into your business processes.
Research shows that AI tools like ChatGPT facilitate faster, better teamwork — 12.2% more tasks completed; 25.1% faster task completion; and 40% higher quality work. At Jotform, we aim to leverage AI to help our teams reallocate their energy to more meaningful collaboration, not ... 
“During Q&A sessions, readers sometimes refer to it as a novel,” journalist and author Nathan Thrall tells Big Think, “and I have to clarify it’s entirely nonfictional.” Thrall is referring to his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (2023), which tells the story of a horrific car accident in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of six Palestinian children, including Abed’s five-year-old son, Milad.
That so many readers mistake A Day in the Life for fiction is a testament to Thrall’s skills as a writer, to his ability to describe complicated events and identify with his subjects. However, these kinds of mix-ups also raise important questions about the craft and ethics of nonfiction writing. What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction, and literary nonfiction from ordinary journalism? How do you produce a page-turner without distorting the facts, which may not always lend themselves to an easily digestible narrative? Is it okay for nonfiction writers to take creative liberties, and — if so — when?
Thrall’s insights are not only relevant for aspiring Pulitzer contestants — ... 
Our biases have far-reaching consequences for others, and when constantly reinforced, they can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. By age six, research suggests, American children have absorbed the association of intellectual brilliance and genius with men more than women. Heartbreakingly, six-year-old girls are already less likely than boys to believe that members of their gender are “really, really smart.” These stereotypes have a direct influence on children’s behavior: girls are less likely than boys to express interest in novel games that are intended for children “who are really, really smart.”
In a similar vein, economist Michela Carlana showed that in Italian middle schools, girls underperformed in math when they were assigned a math teacher with strong unconscious beliefs that boys are better at math than girls (as measured by the most widely used tool, the Implicit Association Test). Furthermore, these girls ended up self-selecting into less demanding high schools, which influenced their career options going forward. The gender stereotypes of the teachers induced the girls—especially those whose math skills were lower to begin with—to doubt themselves, leading them to fail to ... 
Where do the heaviest elements in the Universe come from? If you were like most astrophysicists during the 20th century, you might’ve said from supernova explosions: stellar cataclysms that occur either within the cores of massive stars or from stellar corpses (white dwarfs) that undergo destructive, energy-releasing events that trigger a rapid succession of nuclear fusion reactions. Unfortunately, a comprehensive study of these classes of events — including both type II (core-collapse) and type Ia (exploding white dwarf) supernovae — showed that, although they do produce large sets of fusion reactions, they really only produce elements up to about zirconium (element #40) on the periodic table.
Beyond that, or for more than half of the known elements that exist, a different set of processes are required. While the slow neutron capture process (s-process) can occur within evolved, Sun-like stars, accounting for large fractions of certain elements, such as niobium, tin, barium, and lead, the majority of heavy elements require another process to explain their observed abundances.
In 2017, a new candidate rose to the top of everyone’s mind: colliding neutron stars. A ... 
Worldwide, organizations are contending with ever-escalating expectations from multiple stakeholders: customers, employees, stockholders, and regulators, to name a few. For multinational enterprises, however, such expectations are exponentially more difficult to meet. Growth, operations, capital investment, and talent development and deployment are all essential market factors influenced by not only global objectives but also local conditions.
L&D leaders in these organizations face correspondingly unique challenges. They must strive to meet current talent development needs while anticipating future demands. They must also coordinate within a multinational structure to ensure that learning options are high quality, measurable, easily accessible, and aligned with the needs and interests of teams in different countries and, potentially, cultures.
Increasingly, L&D has incorporated e-learning technologies to expand its reach around the globe while supplementing the scope and variability of its portfolio. In 2024, the projected value of the worldwide online education market was $185 billion. By 2029, that value is estimated to increase to $279 billion.
However, not all e-learning is created equal, and technology alone should not be the deciding factor. E-learning choices, regardless of the subject matter and ... 
In a series of experiments described in Science Magazine in 2011, a trio of researchers found evidence to support a sneaking suspicion bubbling up in the minds of many Google aficionados: Frequent users of internet search engines didn’t retain information gleaned through online sleuthing as well as individuals who learned information offline. As the scientists posited, it was almost as if people and their computers were becoming “interconnected systems,” with basic memory functions delegated to search engines.
Over the ensuing years, this “Google effect” has taken on a new moniker: “digital amnesia.” It’s the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online via search engines. After all, why would the brain waste resources storing information available at the click of a button? Instead, people better recall how to access the information.
Google is now the most trafficked website in the world, and the internet itself is the definitive repository of human knowledge. If the brains of Googlers and their invaluable search engine were interconnected back then, they’ve essentially merged now. The myriad effects are up for speculation.
Now, artificial intelligence is ... 
In 2022 Deloitte reported that from a comprehensive study of 2,100 employees and C-level executives across USA, UK, Canada, and Australia, nearly 70 per cent of the C-suite were seriously thinking about leaving their current position in favor of one that better supported their well-being. Roll on to 2024 and not much has changed. In fact, it’s got worse. The 2024 Global Talent Trends report by Mercer of 12,000 participants including 845 C-suite leaders and 1,900 HR leaders reveals that more than 80% of employees are at risk of burnout.
Fractional leadership is a practical, alternative vision of the future of work for senior executives (aka “CxOs”) that might hold a solution to leadership burnout. For leaders at risk of burnout engaging with fractional leadership brings the extra bandwidth they need in terms of skills, capacity, and knowledge… and fast.
Fractional Leadership is starting to gain significant interest and is being adopted by businesses globally. It disrupts and challenges the traditional full-time employment model providing firms with access to the functional, emotional, and collective intelligence they need by moving positions from the ... 
The story of how our own Sun was born remains a cosmic mystery.
This glimpse into the stars found in the densest region of the Orion Nebula, near the heart of the Trapezium Cluster, shows a modern glimpse inside a star-forming region of the Milky Way. However, star-formation properties vary over cosmic time, from galaxy to galaxy, at different radii from the galactic center, etc. All of these properties and more must be reckoned with to compare the Sun with the overall population of stars within the Universe. Note that our Sun, born 4.6 billion years ago, is younger than 85% of all stars.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Feigelson & K.Getman et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M. Robberto et al.
Formed 4.6 billion years in the past, we can only see what presently survives.
Although we now believe we understand how the Sun and our Solar System formed, this early view of our past, protoplanetary stage is an illustration only. While many protoplanets existed in the early stages of our system’s formation long ago, today, only eight planets survive. Most of them possess moons, and there are ... 
Intelligence on Earth did not appear until almost 4.5 billion years after the planet formed. On the other hand, the Sun is slowly heating up and that means there’s just a billion or so years left before life becomes impossible on Earth. Is there any conclusion that can be drawn from these two seemly unrelated facts?
According to a popular theory called the “Hard Steps Model,” the answer is a definitive “yes.” The model’s quite stunning conclusion is that intelligence is exceedingly rare. If the model is true, then we are certainly alone in the Universe. That might sound depressing to you, and if so, you’re in luck. That’s because, according to a new paper, the Hard Steps Model is based on a deeply flawed logic and can’t say much of anything about the prevalence of intelligence in the cosmos. Understanding what goes wrong with this popular theory is important though because it reveals a whole new way of looking at life, evolution, and planets.
I covered the Hard Steps Model in detail more than a year ago because (big reveal) that’s ... 
A name is a cage. It binds you to a type and casts you in this role or as that person. It shrivels your complexity and jams it into an artificial vice. A name says to the world, “This person is this thing, and this is what I’ll call it.” But no person who has ever lived is ever just one thing. Even the fullest names we give one another will capture only a tiny fraction of our depth. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
The world is often unkind to this kind of Whitmanian complexity. It might be easier than ever to “be yourself,” but this implies that there is one, single “yourself” to be. It implies you have an essence — an authentic filament to who you are that defines you. So, being happy — and being modern — is to stay true to yourself.
But life is not like this. A human cannot be explained by a name or entombed under a single identity. We need a better way to understand the contradictions and ...