It all takes me back to my earlier days working in the digital influence group at Ogilvy fifteen years ago where a good portion of every day was spent building pitches and trying to convince brands that using their employees as spokespeople might be a great idea. I even published a trend in my first report which observed the rise of “Employees as Heroes.” Clearly sometimes good ideas take a while to show up in the world.

Still, my unease was from the assumption that the immediate use of these sorts of drones would be surveillance related. Or maybe by the paparazzi. It turns out, there’s a much more optimistic use case here:

“Drones are increasingly used to watch wildlife, check aging infrastructure, or survey wetlands, but their mere presence changes the behavior of whatever they’re observing. Birds scatter, animals flee, people act differently. A drone that’s hard to spot could do the same job without that side effect.”

The other interesting part of the story is that the final design was built after the team used an AI computer model to generate nearly 20,000 possible drone configurations. The whirring sound of the drone, of course, is the next challenge to solve before it’s truly invisible. Then we might have a new batch of problems to deal with for how people start to use it for more than just watching wildlife.

In response, “researchers warned that hundreds of fake images have already been discovered on popular databases for recording species. They said that the true scale of the issue is unknown – as many could go undetected – and could contaminate records collected by the public.” Not to resort to the cliche metaphor of the canary in the coal mine offering an early warning for humans, but there is a similar signal here when it comes to the potential for AI-generated content to “pollute” the databases that existed before these tools became so accessible. The solution to this problem is a tough one. Should we have more quarantined databases locked down to prevent this content from entering? Or create more sophisticated detection tools to spot manipulations upfront? Perhaps both will be required to solve this problem in the future.

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Across the world, heavy machinery, old military vehicles and subway cars have been used to rebuild coral reefs and provide spare parts for retrofitting or making new products. When we can move huge objects like military tanks and subway cars into the water, to me that’s evidence that we could be thinking bigger about repurposing and reusing more big household things. On a recent visit to our local garbage dump, I saw a tower of discarded appliances and a huge area just for used mattresses. The world needs more design prizes and ideas for how to repurpose all of these things, too.

“So why have elementary school reading scores jumped dramatically in places like Jefferson County, one of the poorest places in the poorest state in the country, at the same time national averages are plummeting? Superintendent Adrian Hammitte believes the third grade “reading gate” is in fact key to his district’s success—but not because it removes the weakest readers from the pool of fourth-grade test takers. Rather, he argues that third graders pass the test because their families see no choice but to pass; no one wants their child to be held back. Students who pass the third-grade state test are likely to repeat their success in fourth grade.”

So peer pressure about being left behind can offer one incentive. The rest of the article, though, offers a sobering and perhaps depressing conclusion: maybe reading is just too boring for modern kids to ever want to do it for fun. I desperately hope that isn’t true, but as the article concludes when it comes to reading assessments and scores, the likeliest outcome is a focus on comprehension at best: “if America is going to pull itself out of this standardized test score slump, it will happen through skill drills, not students losing themselves in novels. Adding a reading gate at the end of eighth grade might make more of them pass the test, she thinks, but it certainly wouldn’t make any of them read books.”

The most legendary soccer player in history once shared that the best goal of his career was never captured on video. It was August 2, 1959, in São Paulo, Brazil and of the thousands of goals scored in his career, Pelé always felt this was his best ever. Three sombrero kicks in a row, with a knee flick and a header to beat the keeper … and all that remains apart from the memories of the fans who saw it live is a single black and white photo taken at the end.

Taking the photo and the eyewitness descriptions, Google partnered with an FX agency to use Gemini Omni to recreate that memory. Alongside AI, they actually sent local actors to recreate the scene and even brought a leather ball to match the gear used at the time. The resulting footage is now on display at the Pelé Museum in Santos and the video is live online for anyone to watch.

The story is a perfect example of a feeling that we write about in Future Words and call fauxstalgia. When technology allows us to recreate memories (both real and imagined) that many of us never actually lived through, it creates whole new ways to experience and recall the past.

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As people enter a new experience, they seek answers, consciously or unconsciously, to six questions: Where am I? Who am I with? What can I do? What is happening? Am I making progress? and Why does this matter?

Each question reflects a distinct psychological dimension. Together they create the underlying structure through which immersion takes hold. For companies, addressing all six questions can be challenging. Most experiences tend to focus on answering certain questions while overlooking others. True success lies in ensuring visitors can answer all six in order, even if some are addressed more effectively than others.

The model is one worth considering for anyone who is trying to make any experience or gathering work, whether it’s immersive through technology or just through the act of bringing humans together in the same room. The world needs more people who can design experiences like this to remind us about the power of connection and what unexpected magic might happen when these strategic questions have equally thoughtful answers.

InfoWars.com is still in limbo, but a new InfoWars website is launching today all the same, as a sort of pirated brand. Spending time on the site is like looking at a simulated head-on crash that collides the visual urgency of a 24-hour news cycle with the low-fi, low-res graphics of desktop-era websites, print tabloid ads, and overnight infomercials for Bowflex or Magic Bullet. The resulting website is, at launch, a vehicle for making [Alex] Jones and his insidious website a (very funny) punch line. But that satire is in service of a greater long-term ambition. Eventually, the new InfoWars wants to become a challenger to social media—one that could someday look like a Netflix of comedy.

While the takeover of the InfoWars URL is still in litigation, the new Onion-produced parody site features banner ads to “turn your piss into gold,” an intro video from The Onion’s Tim Heidecker in the sensationalist style of Jones and an interesting longer-term vision to maybe get people off social media news altogether. The whole thing is in service of getting compensation to the families of the victims of a 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School who also successfully sued Jones for defamation leading him to declare bankruptcy and go off the air.

Aside from the entertainment value, the site offers a reminder that sometimes the best path to expose deceit is using humor as the spotlight. As long as people get the joke.

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About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

As ​Bloomberg recently reported​, this means that you now have situations like Spain where over $80 billion in investment is generating powerful impact for people and the environment … but not so good financial results for investors. As a result, this is a case study that offers us two lessons. The first is that the most profitable endeavor and the one that offers the greatest benefits for mankind may be in opposition to one another. The second is that the ideal entities to invest in this sort of initiative may never be private companies but rather international governments who should be focused on creating impact for their citizens without the motive

All you need to do is enter what you really want, and the prompt generator will revise it to be in the style that can be used with any AI tool. You can even have it customized based on the AI tool you’re using for optimal results. Many frequent AI users are already publishing their notes on which tools are best for which tasks. Built into these are the assumption that each of us will have the right knowledge and skill to prompt each tool with the right syntax, depth and language for it to perform best. That’s rarely the case.

So despite the inherent oddity of turning to automation to help automate another automation (did I lose you?) … these prompt generation tools are not only inevitable, they might actually be useful too.