What's on Your Mind?

Generative AI is radically reshaping the job market—creating new roles, changing some, and phasing out others. But here’s one effect of the transformative technology that’s not as widely talked about: It’s deepening long-standing workplace gender gaps. A double disadvantage According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn, women systematically face a two-part problem in the ongoing AI transformation. Relatively fewer women are currently in jobs that are being augmented by generative AI, and relatively more are in roles that are being disrupted. According to LinkedIn data for the US, 24.1% of men work in augmented occupations, while 20.5%…

I recently noticed a paradox among a team of developers. With AI, engineers started writing code faster and getting answers in seconds, yet they also reported feeling more exhausted than before. AI hasn’t actually reduced the amount of work that needs to be done. Instead, it has fundamentally changed its nature. We can now run multiple tasks in parallel and perceive this as productivity. Up to a point, it is. But eventually, managing tools and constantly switching between them becomes more draining than performing the original tasks themselves. In some cases, it even slows down the process of finding a solution. I’ve been managing developer teams for over 15 years…

Sports are entering a new era and it could be powered by artificial intelligence. Jeremy Bloom, CEO of the X Games, is placing a bold bet on AI to revolutionize how competitions are judged and scored. From reducing human error to enhancing fairness and accuracy, AI judges could redefine the future of professional sports. But can machines truly replace human judgment on the world’s biggest stages? View the full article

I founded my company nearly two decades ago. As a bootstrapper, it was initially just me, but soon enough we grew to a dozen people, then a few dozen, then a hundred, and so on. In the early days, I remember feeling confident in my hard skills, like product development and growth strategy. But soft skills were uncharted territory. So I did what you do: practiced the tough conversations and speeches in front of the mirror. It helped—preparation is half the battle—but sometimes I imagine how much faster my leadership skills would have developed if I had real-time feedback. That’s one of the features of AI-powered leadership platforms. For today’s businesses, …

I’m a writing professor who sees artificial intelligence as more of an opportunity for students, rather than a threat. That sets me apart from some of my colleagues, who fear that AI is accelerating a glut of superficial content, impeding critical thinking and hindering creative expression. They worry that students are simply using it out of sheer laziness or, worse, to cheat. Perhaps that’s why so many students are afraid to admit that they use ChatGPT. In The New Yorker magazine, historian D. Graham Burnett recounts asking his undergraduate and graduate students at Princeton whether they’d ever used ChatGPT. No one raised their hand. “It’s not that they’…

For most of modern finance, one number has quietly dictated who gets ahead and who gets left out: the credit score. It was a breakthrough when it arrived in the 1950s, becoming an elegant shortcut for a complex decision. But shortcuts age. And in a world driven by data, digital behavior, and real-time signals, the score is increasingly misaligned with how people actually live and manage money. We’re now at a turning point. A foundational system, long considered untouchable, is finally being reconstructed by using AI—specifically, advanced machine learning models built for risk prediction—to extract more intelligence from existing data. These are rigorously tested, wel…

The nonstop cavalcade of announcements in the AI world has created a kind of reality distortion field. There is so much buzz, and even more money, circulating in the industry that it feels almost sacrilegious to doubt that AI will make good on its promises to change the world. Deep research can do 1% of all knowledge work! Soon the internet will be designed for agents! Infinite Ghibli! And then you remember AI screws things up. All. The. Time. Hallucinations—when a large language model essentially spits out information created out of whole cloth—have been an issue for generative AI since its inception. And they are doggedly persistent: Despite advances in model si…

At a recent retreat I was attending, I found myself in one of those “hallway moments.” Walking out of a lecture, I was engaged in conversation with a fellow attendee. Soon it became clear we had differing opinions about the topic. As I felt myself getting tense, formulating my response in my mind, I caught a glimpse of myself in a wall of mirrors as we walked by a pilates studio on the property. I didn’t like what I saw—it was not my best self. I did not look calm, cool and collected; instead, I looked tense and ready to charge. The exact opposite vibe that was the goal of this retreat. That quick glimpse of myself helped me to check myself, adjust my face, slow down my t…

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. AI and energy are two of the most critical forces shaping the future of our planet—and their relationship is impossible to ignore today. From the significant power consumption of data centers to the growing energy requirements of AI-driven applications, the rapid adoption of AI is driving a surge in global energy demand that is outpacing the growth of renewable energy source…

Thank you once again for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In. A quick programming note: We will be taking the next two Fridays off. Happy holidays to all, and I look forward to resurfacing in your inbox next year. For any number of reasons, 2025 has hardly been my favorite year. But if I were to make a list of things that went well, my relationship with AI would be on it. This was the year I went from being an AI dabbler to a daily user. And while some of that usage still amounts to messing around—hello, Sora!—even more involves tasks that make me more productive. More importantly, it brings me better results, a goal I hold dear. (Sadly, not every AI enthusiast …

While headlines about AI replacing workers dominated 2025, behavioral health is charting a different path. The industry thrives on human connection, measuring success in trust, healing, and human relationships, not throughput. That’s not to say AI isn’t rapidly reshaping the industry—it is. Its role here fundamentally differs because it supports clinicians rather than sidelines them. Over the next year, I predict we’ll see a paradox play out: Behavioral health will become increasingly AI-enabled, and simultaneously, more human than it’s been in decades. The reason is simple. Burnout and administrative burdens have been increasingly limiting what clinicians can do. Pro…

Generative AI was trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans. But scientists and critics have wondered what would happen once AI became widely adopted and started training on its outputs. A new study points to some answers. In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström, and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomously—generating and interpreting their own outputs without human intervention. The researchers linked a text-to-image system with an image-to-text system and let them iterate—image, caption, image, caption—over and over …

To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation. Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow, or complete darkness. I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp, and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echol…

When someone opens the door and enters a hospital room, wearing a stethoscope is a telltale sign that they’re a clinician. This medical device has been around for over 200 years and remains a staple in the clinic despite significant advances in medical diagnostics and technologies. The stethoscope is a medical instrument used to listen to and amplify the internal sounds produced by the body. Physicians still use the sounds they hear through stethoscopes as initial indicators of heart or lung diseases. For example, a heart murmur or crackling lungs often signify an issue is present. Although there have been significant advances in imaging and monitoring technologies, t…

Megan Rapinoe, Caitlin Clark, Serena Williams, Mia Hamm, Lindsey Vonn—the list of high-profile, recognizable women athletes is growing. And track and field athletes may be the next to become household names. That’s the bet that Alexis Ohanian is making with Athlos, an all-women’s track and field league, which is hosting its second event in New York this week. Ohanian is perhaps best known as the cofounder of Reddit, but he’s also an investor who’s made no secret of his interest in investing in sports. During a press event in New York City this week, he said the idea for Athlos came to him while watching the Olympics, during which millions of people tune in to wa…

Under the rally cry of “Altadena Is Not for Sale,” the people of the multi-racial, middle-class town of Altadena, California, are aiming to take charge of their own recovery and rebuilding from the Los Angeles Eaton fires, which killed 17 people, burned more than 14,000 acres, and destroyed over 9,000 homes and businesses. Three community organizations and the local Native American tribes reflect the various perspectives, and collective unity, on how Altadena might avoid the fate of other communities whose recovery ended up being controlled by big developers. Altadena: Not For Sale, My Tribe Rise, and Altadena Strong are three community organizations who have cohosted…

When Hurricane Melissa began moving toward Jamaica earlier this week, Amazon’s chief meteorologist was watching closely—not just for the company’s global shipping operations, but also to see how its disaster relief team might need to act. “As soon as the hurricane formed, we had eyes on it,” says Abe Diaz, principal technical product manager for Amazon’s disaster relief team. “We’ve been tracking this for multiple days.” Inside an Amazon fulfillment center near Atlanta, pallets are stacked with disaster relief supplies, from medical supplies to solar-powered lights. It’s one of 15 massive “disaster relief hubs” that the company has stationed inside warehouses …

Amazon once seemed poised to wipe out the American bookstore. As online shopping exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, independent shops struggled to compete with endless inventory and lower prices. By 2009, many believed indie bookstores were on the brink of extinction. But instead of disappearing, they adapted. The future of books, it turns out, isn’t just online. It’s local. View the full article

A bartender makes a Brandy Alexander, pouring equal parts of a Courvoisier V.S.O.P brandy, Marie Brizard crème de cacao, and fresh cream. He shakes it with ice, strains through a fine mesh strainer, and finishes it off with a neat pile of freshly-grated nutmeg. This imagery may seem to be out of a bartending documentary, but it’s actually a scene from an anime series, Bartender: Glass of God. It’s this unavoidable, radical attention to detail in the animation itself that tells the story of a Japanese way of life–putting extreme care into one’s craft. During scenes inside the bar, the liquor wall features an elaborate selection of spirits, the labels of which are …

Monday night’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was missing something—an entire interview. But viewers weren’t left in the dark about why—host Stephen Colbert told his audience that CBS didn’t air his interview with Texas State Rep. James Talarico due to concerns it could run afoul of shifting FCC rules. “We were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said on the air Monday. That didn’t stop him from calling out the move in the episode and poking at FCC chair Brendan Carr and CBS—and it didn’t stop him uploading the entire interview to YouTube. But the incide…

All sense of survivors’ guilt was fleeting for those residents whose homes remained standing after wildfires ripped through the Los Angeles area three months ago. Many worried that smoke from the Eaton wildfire that destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 18 people may have carried toxins, including lead, asbestos and heavy metals, into their homes. But they struggled to convince their insurers to test their properties to ensure it was safe to return. Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, said embers burned more than half of her roof, several windows and eaves were damaged, and her house in Altadena was left filled with ash, debris, soot and damaged appliances. She…

The Bronx stands apart from New York City’s four other boroughs in stark ways. Home to 1.4 million residents and the nation’s poorest congressional district, it once flourished as fertile farmland. Today, we’re restoring this land—not to its agricultural roots, but as fertile ground for raising healthy, happy, and prosperous children. And in the process, we’re cultivating opportunity for a new generation of citizens. My wife Lizette and I founded and run Green Bronx Machine (GBM). Our nonprofit is dedicated to rewriting the narrative about the Bronx and its residents. Inside Community School 55, just across the tracks from rows of dilapidated public housing towers…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Typing isn’t always the best way to get your thoughts down. Sometimes talking through an idea leads to better clarity. New AI tools can reliably transform those spoken thoughts into clean, organized text. I’ve spent months experimenting with voice AI tools—first on my phone, and now on my laptop. They’ve been helping me pull ideas from my brain onto paper. The tools below have become crucial to my workflow. Why voice AI beats traditional transcription Traditional transcription simply converts speech to text. Mod…

The Oscars are less than a month away, but before Hollywood’s biggest night, the folks across the pond have their turn to celebrate. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards (BAFTAs) will take place on Sunday, February 16, at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Historically viewed as a strong predictor of the Oscars, the BAFTAs just might offer a sneak peak of what’s to come—especially in this unconventional year full of controversies, disasters, and shifting front-runners. Here’s everything you should know and how to tune in. What does Prince William have to do with it? As part of his royal duties, the prince of Wales is the president of BAFTA. He and…