Dear Reader,
It's the last day of July and the last edition of this newsletter for a few weeks as I head off to visit Australia and New Zealand for a combination of work and recreation. I will be back with all-new non-obvious stories the week of August 21st but until then this week you'll see stories about the rise and fall of drive-in theaters, a perfect example of why people ignore press releases and the book of AI fails that needs to be written. Plus some non-obvious media and book recommendations to keep you busy for the last month of the summer (or winter depending on your hemisphere!).
Enjoy the stories this week and remember to always stay curious and non-obvious!
Rohit
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The Book On How NOT To Use AI Is Being Written Right Now
European payment network Klarna was one of the first fintech companies to go all in on AI. They were even featured as a case study by OpenAI. Then after a flood of customer complaints, they tried to quietly backtrack and hire back many human assistants. Recently an author was called out after readers discovered that the text of AI prompts was published in her final book. A lawyer was caught using fake citations hallucinated by AI and failed to notice them. A tech company's AI coding tool deleted their full code database ... and then lied about it. This week, Hertz came under fire for using AI systems to assess rental car returns for damage and erroneously charging hundreds of customers for minimal or non-existent damages.
Altogether these stories, and many others to come are offering the fodder for an emerging collection of the ways to NOT implement AI. The frequency of these negative examples may be even more useful than positive tips ... but the evolution reminds me of the famous line from the second Jurassic Park movie where park creator John Hammond justifies sending another team back to the dinosaur island by telling Ian Malcolm that they are not making the same mistakes twice.
"Yeah," he says, "you're making all new ones." That's the story that is likely to keep unfolding with these AI implementations as well.
The Perfect Sandwich Making Guide (and Why People Ignore Press Releases)
This is a press release I just read which got me thinking: Kroger Crafts the Perfect Sandwich Making Guide
The release included a powerful reminder from one of their Vice Presidents of something that "every meal is an opportunity for creativity and enjoyment." I like sandwiches, so I was immediately hooked. Especially after they promised that there would be "endless possibilities in every bite." After all, who doesn't want that sort of optimism in a sandwich?
So I dived into their perfect guide, which revealed the following five unexpected steps:
- Choose your bread.
- Pick your protein.
- Add your cheese.
- Pile on the veggies.
- Finish with condiments.
This was stunning for me. I've never thought of building a sandwich like this. I always put the condiments on first. And then the veggies. Cheese and proteins are sometimes optional. I've also been known to leave out the bread altogether. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I'm not ashamed to admit that this guide caused a minor identity crisis for me. If I can't build a sandwich properly, what else have I been screwing up in my life?
Ultimately, the experience led me into a deep dark rabbit hole where I started watching hours of sandwich making videos on YouTube, feeling inferior to sandwich influencers on Instagram and paying $4.99 for a sandwich wellness app that would help me develop more positive and uplifting sandwich habits. I'm also thinking about hiring a sandwich coach to complete my personal degustatory transformation.
Or maybe I'm 24 hours away from vacation and just getting sassy. Also, this is why people ignore press releases. :-)
The Rise and Fall of Drive-In Theaters
The year 1933 brought the world's first drive-in theater. Since that moment, it's become one of those iconic American-style exports of entertainment. Today it's a nostalgic experience, still done at several hundred spots around the country and perhaps others around the world but much less than at its peak. The story of the rise and fall of the drive-in theater is a fascinating one. The fall, in particular, is blamed on the rising price of oil and a lack of green space due to rapidly developing suburbs. In a classic case of chicken and egg for which came first, there's another explanation that I kept thinking about while reading this quirky history.
With safety advances for cars in the 1970s, airbags and crumple zones meant front bench seats quickly became outdated. Without a front seat that mimics your couch at home, the romance and intimacy of the drive-in experience was lost. There continue to be some isolated reports of carmakers experimenting with bringing the bench seat back in some models. If they do, given the rise on nostalgic experiences in other spaces, will the drive-in theater trend make a comeback? Let me know what you think about it!
