Hollywood Needs a Whole New Business Model, Return-to-Office Mandates are Bad, 5 Meta-Skills, & More
Hollywood Needs a Whole New Business Model, Return-to-Office Mandates are Bad, 5 Meta-Skills, & More
Future Essentials - Edition 44
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Hope you enjoy this edition. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Misha
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What you’re getting today:
Why Hollywood needs a new business model
How the Grammys are adjusting to AI in music
Return-to-office mandates harm productivity
Hospitals are a major privacy risk
The entire universe may be a single quantum object
The Kapok tree could be the answer to sustainable fashion
Drug to grow new teeth heads to human trials
5 meta-skills to supercharge every aspect of your life
Eleven of the most popular approaches to being happier
How meditation can change your life and mind
FUTURE OF FILM & TV
Hollywood needs a whole new business model.
Hollywood is BROKEN. Striking alone won't fix it. Instead, a whole new business model needs to be put in place.
Click on the image to read the thread on Twitter. Extra points for retweeting and commenting.
FE Take: Hollywood is just another example of a system that has been upended by the current centralized internet. The decentralized internet—web3—provides new possibilities and business models. It’s time to embrace them.
FUTURE OF MUSIC
Music made with AI will be eligible for Grammys, but only humans will be awarded.
THE GRAMMY AWARDS are getting ahead of the curve when it comes to dealing with artificial intelligence in the music industry. A change to the ceremony’s guidelines last month opened the door for music created with AI to be eligible for awards, however, “a work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any category,” according to the rules. Recording Academy CEO and President Harvey Mason Jr. recently explained the bar of eligibility set for the new rule, including a firm definition of what they consider to be meaningful human contributions.
“We don’t want to see technology replace human creativity,” he added. “We want to make sure technology is enhancing, embellishing, or additive to human creativity. So that’s why we took this particular stand in this award cycle.” LINK
FE Take: This is barely scratching the surface. Much more needs to be done to ensure that music is not overrun by an abuse of AI.
FUTURE OF WORK
A flurry of new research shows that blanket return-to-office mandates, especially for full-time in-office work, harm productivity by decreasing employee engagement.
A new white paper by researchers from Stanford University, University of Chicago, and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, provides a new and definitive level of insights from a meta-analysis including who is working remotely vs. the office or hybrid, what trends have taken hold, and the levels of productivity experienced in each location (spoiler alert: “Fully remote working appears to lower average productivity by around 10% to 20%,” according to research).
The researchers find the rhythm of hybrid working more harmonious. As though conducting an orchestra with precision, hybrid work schedules allow employees to strike a balance between remote and in-office work. The recent research sings in its favor. LINK
FE Take: As we move forward into the 21st, individuals will have many more options for making a living. If companies want to survive, they need to respect and value their employees. In fact, every employee should be part-owner at their place of work.
FUTURE OF PRIVACY
Hospitals are a major privacy risk.
In June 2022, STAT and The Markup published an investigative report revealing that 33 of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals had installed tracking code on their websites that surreptitiously transferred sensitive health information to Facebook.1 Data transfers included details about health conditions, prescriptions, and physician appointments, often linked to patients’ internet protocol (IP) addresses, which, like a name or Social Security number, are considered a personal identifier under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). As troubling as these findings were, emerging research suggests that they captured only a portion of the privacy risks patients encounter on hospital websites.
Amid mounting evidence of tracking, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) recently issued guidance clarifying its view of HIPAA’s application to tracking technologies.2 A growing number of patients have also sued hospitals under state laws for unwanted exposure to tracking.3
FE Take: Privacy is a human right that we have all but lost. At WhoTracksMe you can learn about tracking technologies, market structure and data-sharing on the web. And more importantly, begin to protect your privacy online.
FUTURE OF REALITY
Is the entire universe a single quantum object?
In the face of new evidence, physicists are starting to view the cosmos not as made up of disparate layers, but as a quantum whole linked by entanglement.
FE Take: We know much less than we think about reality. There is so much to explore and learn about. And that’s a great thing.
FUTURE OF FASHION
The Kapok tree could be the answer to sustainable fashion.
Tentree is a sustainable fashion brand that is using kapok as an innovative solution to fashion.
Kapok fibers are great for clothing — say goodbye to scratchy materials and hello to silky soft-to-touch clothes that are breathable, lightweight, hypoallergenic, and super resilient.
To transform the fibers into clothes, the kapok is blended with cotton, with the company claiming that this saves lots of water during production compared to normal methods.
“Producing four T-shirts with a kapok-cotton blend can save 3,000 liters of water,” says the tentree website. “In general, kapok needs very little processing and is a great option for sustainable clothing, which is why we’re excited to add it to our family of fabrics.” LINK
FE Take: Fashion is one of the most wasteful industries. Any opportunity to address this is welcome. Also, let’s try the Kapok clothing and see what we think.
FUTURE OF TEETH
Drug to grow new teeth heads to human trials.
A drug that causes animals to grow new teeth is heading to clinical trials. If it proves safe and effective in people, it could one day allow us to regenerate teeth lost to injury, disease, or old age.
In 2007, the researchers reported the discovery that mice with underexpressed USAG-1 genes also had extra teeth. The gene’s protein plays a role in the development of many body parts, though, so simply knocking it out to trigger tooth growth wasn’t an option.
Instead, the researchers started testing different monoclonal antibodies — lab-made proteins designed to bind to certain molecules — on mice with a condition that caused them to be born with fewer teeth than normal. Their hope was that they’d find one that could disrupt the USAG-1 protein’s activity in a way that would let the animals grow new teeth while remaining healthy.
In 2021, they reported the discovery of such an antibody, noting that it also triggered tooth growth in ferrets, which, according to Takahashi, have “similar dental patterns to humans.” LINK
FE Take: This is long overdue!
FUTURE OF SUCCESS
5 meta-skills to supercharge every aspect of your life: FEELING, SEEING, DREAMING, MAKING, LEARNING.
Being a specialist used to be the way forward, but the future belongs to people who can adapt to any given scenario on a dime.
It used to be the case that learning a particular trade or skill meant you could land a reliable career. These days, however, constant learning is both expected and required to stay afloat. Rather than developing competency in, say, analysis or communication, modern life demands that we become more agile and able to shift on a dime towards the particular skills that challenges require.
That is why cultivating meta-skills is so important. Meta-skills are broad capabilities that help you to develop other skills and can be applied across a wide variety of domains. As more jobs become automated, possessing these skills will be more important than ever. LINK
FE Take: It’s the era of the generalist. It’s about being more human, more creative, a deeper thinker, and tapping into your zone of genius.
FUTURE OF HAPPINESS
How to be Happier: Eleven of the Most Popular Approaches
This condensed guide cuts through the noise by taking you on a curated tour through the key ideas behind popular techniques for achieving happiness, spanning from ages-old philosophical reflections to contemporary psychological strategies.
Positive Psychology
Stoicism
Common Sense
Christianity
Insight Meditation
Traditionalism
Introspection
Self-Help Books
Hedonism
Altruism
Community
Dive in here: How to Be Happier
FE Take: Happiness is a core human need that will never go out of style.
FUTURE OF YOU
How meditation can change your life and mind.
FE Take: Just do it.
Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.