Author: The Conversation

Gamification is rapidly reshaping how people consume information and engage with the world. It uses strategies such as clear goals, instant rewards and engaging visuals to make everyday tasks more enjoyable, often in a digital setting. The COVID-19 pandemic nudged consumers to embrace no-contact, instant gratification experiences in an increasingly digital world. Businesses found that gamification attracts new customers while keeping the existing ones engaged. As evidenced by the meteoric rise of the Robinhood investment app, even trading platforms haven’t been able to escape the pull of gamification. While trading gamification attracts new and younger investors to financial markets, a key question arises: do…

The giant Secunda complex of Sasol, South Africa’s biggest chemicals and energy company, provides the fundamental ingredients to South Africa’s petrochemical sector. It produces petrochemicals, plastics, chemicals essential to key industries such as agriculture (fertilisers) and mining (explosives), and 30% of the country’s liquid fuels. These value chains are very important to the economy. In 2021, this output accounted for 2.6% of GDP directly and 5.2% indirectly. Sasol also employs more than 28,000 South Africans. It makes significant contributions to corporate taxes, wages, and social investment. It sustains a whole town built specifically for its Secunda workforce. Sasol’s Secunda facilities are rare and interesting. Firstly,…

On Sunday, November 23 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline read: Finds Spiral Nebulae are Stellar Systems: “Dr Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’; Similar to Our Own”. The American astronomer at the centre of the article, Dr Edwin Powell Hubble, was probably bemused by the misspelling of his name. But the story detailed a groundbreaking discovery: Hubble had found that two spiral-shaped nebulae, objects made up of gas and stars, which were previously thought to…

In late 2024, more than 20 years after the birth of Facebook, the impact of social media on our lives cannot be overstated. Initially underestimated by many in business, social media eventually came to be recognised for its power to enable workers to share solutions, ideas and perspectives. While companies took time to see their potential, younger generations have been living part of their lives through social platforms for years. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey reveals that a majority of US youth aged 13 to 17 visit YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat at least “about once a day”, with roughly 15% saying…

It may sound strange, but future Nobel Prizes, and other scientific achievement awards, one day might well be given out to intelligent machines. It could come down just to technicalities and legalities. Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel established the prestigious prizes in his will, written in 1895, a year before his death. He created a fund whose interests would be distributed annually “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Nobel explained how to divide those interests in equal parts, to be given, “one part to the person who made the most important discovery or invention…

Earlier this year, a Hong Kong finance worker was tricked into paying US$25 million to scammers who had used deepfake technology to pretend to be the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call. Thinking the images on screen were his colleagues, the financier authorised the multi-million dollar transfer to fraudsters posing as friends. It’s a dramatic example, but the bamboozled office worker was far from alone in being fooled by generative AI. This technology, which relies heavily on large language models trained on vast amounts of data to learn and predict the patterns of language, has become increasingly widespread since…

Type text into AI image and video generators, and you’ll often see outputs of unusual, sometimes creepy, pictures. In a way, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding this aesthetic to create a new storytelling art form. The tools, such as Midjourney to generate images, Runway and Sora to produce videos, and Luma AI to create 3D objects, are relatively cheap or free to use. They allow filmmakers without access to major studio budgets or soundstages to make imaginative short films for the price of a monthly subscription. I’ve studied these new works as the co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling…

Imagine getting a live art class from Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland’s Engage XR and Sweden’s Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse. Tradition and technology have often been seen as distinct and even counterfactual, but clearly, these technologies are now blurring the lines in ways that can alter how humans engage with cultural heritage. Here are four emerging trends in this space: 1. New kinds of restoration Many…

In an era where digital devices are everywhere, the term “screen time” has become a buzzphrase in discussions about technology’s impact on people’s lives. Parents are concerned about their children’s screen habits. But what if this entire approach to screen time is fundamentally flawed? While researchers have made advances in measuring screen use, a detailed critique of the research in 2020 revealed major issues in how screen time is conceptualized, measured and studied. I study how digital technology affects human cognition and emotions. My ongoing research with cognitive psychologist Nelson Roque builds on that critique’s findings. We categorized existing screen-time measures, mapping them to attributes like…

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is credited with giving humans fire as well as the “spark” that spurred civilisation. One of the unintended consequences of Prometheus’s “gift” was that the need for celestial Gods diminished. Modern humans have been up to all sorts of things that present similar unintended consequences, from using CFCs that led to a hole in the ozone layer to building systems that they do not understand or cannot fully control. In dabbling with artificial intelligence (AI), humans seem to have taken on the role of Prometheus – apparently gifting machines the “fire” that sparked civilisation. Predicting the future is best left…