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You’ve probably encountered the term uncanny valley somewhere or other. The concept refers to the feeling of discomfort one has when coming across some android representation—a robot, perhaps, or an AI-generated face—that looks remarkably human, but not quite. A robot can be cute, but if it looks similar to us, and we’re almost hoodwinked, it actually strikes us as off-putting. Consider your eerily sentient discussions with ChatGPT, or Tom Hanks’s CGI avatar in The Polar Express. I would like to offer the world a less important but related phenomenon: the uncomfortable valley. The uncomfortable valley is the effect one experiences when presented with some kind of imag…

OpenAI confirmed on March 6 that it is delaying the rollout of “adult mode” in ChatGPT, a feature that would give verified adults access to less-restricted content. The company first announced plans to begin age-gating users last year but has now pushed back the launch twice. Segregating adult users from minors could help in some of OpenAI’s legal and revenue challenges, but nailing the technology may not be easy. Adult mode had been expected this quarter and still is, just later than originally planned. OpenAI referred Fast Company to a comment it gave to Alex Heath’s Sources newsletter saying it was pausing the feature to focus on improvements to ChatGPT, inclu…

A few meters below the former site of Seville’s 1992 World Expo, a promising climate experiment blending ancient technology and modern science is underway. Rows of black pipes run along the ceiling and down the bare concrete walls. These, in turn, connect to bright blue and green tubes and enormous silver pumps. In a control room to the side, an array of monitors display the heat, humidity and wind speed above. “We have deployed several types of cooling systems here, each one used depending on climatic conditions,” says Maria de la Paz Montero Gutiérrez, a researcher at the University of Seville, from down in the building’s bowels where she is helping supervise th…

Digg is shutting down—at least for now. Just two months after relaunching with an open beta, the once-influential social news site says it is pulling the plug while it reassesses its strategy. The announcement came from CEO Justin Mezzell in a message posted to the site’s homepage. The relaunch has been scrapped, he wrote, and the company has decided “to significantly downsize the Digg team.” As the company figures out its next move, Mezzell said, Digg founder Kevin Rose will return to Digg on a full-time basis starting in April. The shutdown marks another twist in the long, uneven history of a platform that once helped define the early social web. Twenty-two year…

A new research note just named Waymo the “Kool-Aid man” of the ride-haling economy. And it might leave Uber, Lyft, and Tesla playing catchup. The study, published on March 16 by Wall Street research firm MoffettNathanson, is a 21-page exploration into how Alphabet’s self-driving car company is poised to disrupt the existing ride-sharing landscape as it continues to aggressively scale. “Waymo’s incursion into the U.S. rideshare narrative reminds us of the Kool-Aid commercials from our childhood,” the analysis begins. “The Kool-Aid man kicks down walls, causes havoc, screams ‘oh yeah,’ and runs off into the next scene.” In the case of Waymo, it continues…

Most organizations genuinely want to support their people. We invest in wellness apps, coaching programs, and leadership development, all with good intentions. Yet burnout rates keep climbing. Aflac’s WorkForces Report from November 2024 referenced that burnout affected nearly 3 in 5 American workers with employees experiencing high levels of stress rising to 38% in 2024, up from 33% in 2023. The issue isn’t effort or resources. It may simply be that we’re solving for the wrong problem. I recently sat down with Natallia Miranchuk, founder of SOULA, an AI-powered emotional support platform that combines neuroscience, health expertise, and artificial intelligence to add…

A daunting stream of testimony and evidence has been presented in a New Mexico case that explores what the social media conglomerate Meta knew about the effects of its platforms on children. State prosecutors allege Meta failed to disclose the risks that its platforms pose for children, including mental health problems and sexual exploitation. Meta’s attorneys have said the company has built-in protections for teenagers and weeds out harmful content but the company acknowledges some dangerous content gets past its safety nets. Attorneys prepared for closing arguments to jurors next week after Meta on Friday closed out its showing of testimony and evidence and the …

By now you may have heard about the so-called “Gen Z pout,” a selfie face pose that comes as a response to the now “cringe” millennial duck face made popular by the Olsen twins in the 2000s, who would purse their lips to look pouty and suck in their cheeks when posing. Here’s what to know about the newest Gen Z slang. What exactly is the Gen Z pout? This week, a bunch of articles came out about this new trend and the nuances surrounding it that the untrained eye might miss. The pose has been seen on the faces of celebs such as Love Island’s Iris Kendall, or actresses Rachel Sennott, Lily-Rose Depp and Ariana Greenblatt. “If millennials pursed and pointed ou…

When Rare Beauty, Bogg, and Goodles arrived in stores, they had to vie for shelf space with well-established brands making beauty products or beach bags or boxes of macaroni and cheese. But these brands quickly amassed cult-like followings by being very intentional with their missions to foster a sense of loyalty with customers. Although her legions of fans might have lined up to try the beauty products in Selena Gomez’s line, Rare Beauty, the company was founded with a bigger mission baked in: To support youth mental health by donating 1% sales to the Rare Impact Fund. While the company has found that customers will come for the products, they stay for the mission, E…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand was running so hot—and homes sold so quickly—that listings barely even registered as active inventory. Indeed, in February 2022, there were only 346,511 active homes for sale, according to Realtor.com’s data series. That was a staggering 68.5% below the 1,102,660 active listings in February 2019. At the end of February 2022, not a single one of America’s 200 largest housing markets had more inventory than in pre-pandemic February 2019. Fast-forward to the end of February 2026, and there were 914,86…

K-12 teachers and students across the country are increasingly using AI in and out of classrooms, whether it is teachers turning to AI to refine lesson plans or students asking AI to help them research a particular topic. An estimated 85% of K-12 public school teachers recently reported that they used AI during the 2024-2025 school year, often for curriculum and content development. In 2023, 13% of teens said they used ChatGPT to complete their schoolwork, while 26% of them said in 2025 that they were using ChatGPT for this purpose. Similarly, 86% of K-12 students shared in 2025 that they have used AI in general. An estimated 50% of students reported that they…

I recently met with 300 leaders at one of the country’s top-performing transit authorities. I asked them to raise their hands if they’d ever worked for a leader who truly cared about them. Nearly every hand rose. The room lit up with warmth, as people recalled a boss who’d looked after them. Then I asked: on that team, how many of you were pushed to truly exceptional results? Lots of hands dropped. Then I turned the question around: Who has worked for a leader who drove performance like no other? Hands shot up. And how many of you felt valued and understood as a member of that team? Many hands fell. Only a smattering of people kept their hands up through all four ques…

It’s still more than two years until the cauldron lights up for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but we now know what the multibillion-dollar global sports spectacle will look like. The design team at LA28, the local organizing committee for the games, has given Fast Company a preview of the concepts and visuals that will guide the look and feel of the 2028 Olympics. The design approach is conceptually based on the superbloom, a natural phenomenon sometimes experienced in Southern California when an unusually wet winter leads to an explosively colorful spring bloom of wildflowers. The LA28 design approach uses bright, almost neon tones and an abstract graphic …

Elon Musk runs an auto company. He oversees an aerospace company. And he controls a social media outlet. Now he wants to add chipmaker to his resume. The multi-hyphenate billionaire announced plans over the weekend to build a chip manufacturing factory in Austin, Texas, which will produce chips for SpaceX and xAI, which recently merged. Musk, at a presentation Saturday, said the project, dubbed Terafab, will be the “most epic chip building exercise in history by far.” Musk has been talking about Terafab for a while, but the event on Saturday marked the official start to the project. While xAI and other artificial intelligence companies have largely depended on TSM…

Another day, another Ford Motor Co. recall. This time, the company is recalling 254,640 vehicles due to a potential issue with the rearview camera image. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the affected cars all have an Image Processing Module A (IPMA) that might reset unexpectedly. This reset can cause people to lose the rearview camera image and their advanced driver assistance features. The latter includes tools such as blind-spot monitoring, lane-keeping assist, and pre-collision assist. The NHTSA warns that a person might have a greater risk of crashing without these features. Ford has not learned of any related incident…

Work stress has become one of the most common challenges in modern life. According to recent national reports, nearly seven in ten employees say work is a major source of stress, putting us right back where we were in the early months of the pandemic. No matter where you work—at a desk in an office, from your kitchen table, or bouncing between the two—the pressure to perform has never been higher. Burnout has reached a six-year high despite the fact that most of us are doing everything we can think of to get rid of stress. We sign up for wellness webinars. We shuffle schedules. We tell ourselves we’ll rest “as soon as things slow down.” But instead of helping, those …

Here’s a story you’re probably familiar with: You buy the reusable coffee cup. It’s beautiful, ethical, made from recycled ocean plastic, and you feel good about your purchase. But then it leaks in your bag, ruins a notebook, and by week two it’s sitting in a cabinet while you’re back to disposable cups and a vague sense of guilt. Or maybe it’s the “eco mode” on your washing machine that takes three hours instead of one. The sustainable packaging that requires scissors, sweat, and a YouTube tutorial. The electric vehicle charging app with six steps when a gas pump has one. We’ve all been there. But here’s what’s interesting: The problem isn’t that you don’t care a…

Having rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD, is physically painful, all-consuming, and disproportionate to the event that triggered it. While a neurotypical person is able to recognize rejection, rationalize it, feel bad about it, and then move on with their day fairly quickly, RSD feels like a bull has charged at you and headbutted you in the chest, and it comes with a tremendous amount of shame. RSD is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as “severe emotional pain because of a failure or feeling rejected,” and is a symptom of the emotional dysregulation often seen due to the extra criticisms a person with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will have enc…

As I walked into a Sunset Boulevard venue this past February, Luka Dončić’s face greeted me, flashing across a wall of old-school televisions. The TV screens flickered between a surreal reel of images: Dončić’s mug, a NTSC rainbow effect, a Valentine sweetheart candy image with the words “too small,” and a graphic with the words “Lil Luka’s Heartbreak Factory: Level 1.” For the uninitiated, this scene probably makes no sense. But for superfans of Dončić, star player of the Los Angeles Lakers, the messages are like a secret code to a new kind of fandom. Luka Dončić In February, Dončić celebrated the launch of his new direct-to-fans media company, 77X, by transfo…

Back in the 1980s, stack-ranking employees was seen as a state-of-the-art management practice. CEOs like Jack Welch at GE divided employees into three distinct segments: the top 20% of performers, the middle 70%, and the bottom 10%. Those at the bottom would be forced out to make room for new blood. The strange thing about stack ranking is that it’s long been shown to be ineffective and, in many cases, to undermine performance. The problem is that stack ranking doesn’t create a meritocracy. It creates a political system. The winners tend to be those most skilled at claiming credit, shifting blame, and building alliances. Yet still, the practice persists. The tru…