 |
|
|
|||||
When you think of dangerous jobs, an office job that requires you to sit for hours probably doesnt come to mind. And while many jobs are objectively riskier, a sedentary job can pose a serious risk to your health. The average office worker spends 70% of their workday sitting down, according to data by workplace supplies firm Banner. Yet, research shows that sitting for prolonged periods without any physical activity significantly increases the risk of ill effects such as high blood pressure, numerous musculoskeletal issues, and potentially heart disease. All in all, a desk job increases your risk of mortality by 16%, according to a study published by JAMA. Our main objective at Zing Coach is to help millions take up exercise and lead healthier lives. And as a fitness coaching company, we wanted to avoid falling into the classic corporate trap of working long hours and leading a sedentary lifestyle. We didnt want to sacrifice our employees health in the pursuit of our goals. Were seeing more and more workplaces spotlight mental health, which is important. However, physical health is just as important. Not only does it have a huge impact on productivity and performance, but its also a huge component of mental well-being. How we took the right steps towards success Like most companies, we felt the pressure to optimize productivity through processes and technology. Yet, as productivity gradually plateaued, it was evident to me that the real issue was a lack of energy. I knew that a huge part of this came from sedentary work. As a cofounder, I decided to implement a culture of wellness and vitality. This included practical steps like providing a small but welcoming in-house training space, so that employees can do short, flexible workout sessions during gaps in the workday. When employees feel their minds wandering or their backs aching, they can stand up, head to the training area, complete a workout, or even just walk and stretch a little. Science supports this approach. Physical activity increases blood flow throughout your body, including to the brain, and particularly to the prefrontal cortex. This is the part in charge of planning, decision-making, problem-solving, working memory, and impulse control. We suspected (and found) that this practice ended up boosting overall energy, which in turn sharpened focus, improved output, and reduced distractions. It was also a great way to build in more opportunities for interactions. Being a fitness company, these social workout sessions often led to innovative ideas. Small moves, big returns: what I learned by introducing workout breaks It doesnt take long to see results People are often put off improving their physical health by a perceived lack of progress. Sure, it takes time to see your hard work paying off substantially, if youre solely focusing on the physical and visual aspects. Encouraging employees to get up and move isnt just a way to counteract the harms of prolonged sitting; it actively and instantly improves mental function and overall energy. Research shows exercise boosts brain function immediately, with effects lasting hours. Even 10 minutes of moderate activity has been found to increase cognitive performance by 14%, according to research published by Neuropsychologia. We havent crunched the numbers, but the difference in focus during meetings and the higher energy levels throughout the day are obvious. And weve seen this across multiple teams. Better health leads to better teamwork Introducing workout breaks didnt just boost individual performance. It improved the team collectively. Exercise releases endorphins, the bodys natural mood elevators, which help us manage stress and deal with discomfort. Its the same chemical behind the runners highthat euphoric feeling you get after a good workout. It also improves sleep quality. It helps the person get better nighttime rest, reducing the likelihood of low-energy afternoons that are otherwise the norm. As it turns out, feeling good both mentally and physically makes it easier for colleagues to get along and work together. We also found that teams that are energetic and enthusiastic automatically become less irritable and conflictual, which fuels far stronger cross-team collaboration. Time at the desk and productivity arent the same One important lesson is how little time at a desk actually correlates with output. Sure, youll see more empty chairs throughout the day, but that doesnt mean productivity will drop. Far from it. Workers arent machines, and after 60 to 90 minutes, many lose focus and effectiveness. Short breaks in general can help refocus and recharge, and teams said that they experienced restorative effects after a physical break. They noticed improvement in all aspects of work performance and personal engagement with the next task after the active break. When it comes to working out, theres a saying that quality often beats quantity. Turns out this is also true in a corporate job. Health is the best productivity tool Ultimately, good health equals good performance. Sure, software and systems can go so far, but if you dont take the steps to prioritize your employees health and well-being, youll never be able to get them to perfom to their true potential.
Category:
E-Commerce
Saudi Arabia is officially gutting Neom and turning The Line into a server farm. After a year-long review triggered by financial reality, the Financial Times reports that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans flagship project is being “significantly downscaled.” The futuristic linear city known as The Line, originally designed to stretch 150 miles across the desert, is scrapping its sci-fi ambitions to become a far smaller project focused on industrial sectors, says the FT. It’s a rumor that the Saudis originally dismissed when The Guardian first reported on it in 2024. The redesign confirms what skeptics have long suspected: the laws of physics and economics have finally breached the walls of the kingdom’s futuristic Saudi Vision 2030, a country reconversion program aimed at lowering Saudi Arabia’s dependency on oil and transforming the country into a more modern society. Satellite view of construction progress at the Western portion of NEOM, The Line, Saudi Arabia, 2023. [Photo: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2023] The glossy renderings of the mile-long skyscraper and vertical forests that was The Line are now dissolving into a pragmatic, if desperate, attempt to salvage the sunk costs. The development, once framed as a “civilization revolution” was originally imagined as a 105-mile long, 1,640-foot high, 656-foot wide car-free smart city designed to house 9 million residents. The redesign pivots toward making Neom a hub for data centers to support the kingdom’s aggressive AI push. An insider told the FT the logic is purely utilitarian: “Data centers need water cooling and this is right on the coast,” signaling that the ambitious city has been downgraded to server farm with a view of the Red Sea. The end of the line The scaling back follows years of operational chaos and financial bleeding. Since its 2017 launch, the project promised a 105-mile strip of high-density living. But reality struck early. By April 2024, The Guardian reported that planners were already being forced to slash the initial phase to just 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) by 2030, reducing the projected population from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. Satellite view of construction progress at the Western portion of NEOM, The Line, Saudi Arabia, 2023. [Photo: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2023] While the public infrastructure stalledleaving what critics called “giant holes in the middle of nowhere”satellite imagery revealed that construction resources were successfully diverted to a massive royal palace with 16 buildings and a golf course. Internally, the situation was dire. The Wall Street Journal reported an audit revealing “deliberate manipulation of finances” by management to justify soaring costs, with the “end-state” estimate ballooning to an impossible $8.8 trillionmore than 25 times the annual Saudi budget. [Screenshot: Business Insider] The turmoil culminated in the abrupt departure of longtime CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr in November 2024, leaving behind a legacy marred by allegations of abuse. An ITV documentary claimed 21,000 workers had died since the inception of Saudi Vision 2030, with laborers describing 16-hour shifts for weeks on end. Even completed projects failed to launch; the high-end island resort Sindalah sat idle despite being finished, reportedly plagued by design flaws that prevented its opening. By July 2025, the sovereign wealth fundfacing tightening liquidity and oil prices hovering around $71 a barrelfinally hit the brakes. Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia had hired consultants to conduct a “strategic review” to determine if The Line was even feasible. The goal was to “recalibrate” Vision 2030, a polite euphemism for slashing expenditures as the kingdom faced hard deadlines for the 2030 Expo and the 2034 World Cup. The review’s conclusion is stripping away even the most publicized milestones. Trojena, the ski resort that defied meteorological logic, will no longer host the Asian Winter Games in 2029 as planned. The resort is being downsized, a casualty of the realization that the kingdom needs to “prioritize market readiness and sustainable economic impact” over snow in the desert. What remains of The Line will be unrecognizable to those who bought into the sci-fi dream. The FT says that sources briefed on the redesign state it will be a “totally different concept” that utilizes existing infrastructure in a “totally different manner.” The new Neom CEO, Aiman al-Mudaifer, is now tasked with managing a “modest” development that aligns with the Public Investment Fund’s need to actually generate returns rather than burn cash. Even bin Salman has publicly given up, although he’s framing it not as a failure but a strategic pivot. Addressing the Shura Councila consultative body for the kingdomhe framed the move as flexibility, stating, “we will not hesitate to cancel or make any radical amendment to any programs or targets if we find that the public interest so requires. And thats how a “civilization revolution” ends, my friends, not with a bang, but with a whimper. The hum of cooling fans in yet another farm producing AI slop that always was (and still is) more believable than The Line and Neom projects.
Category:
E-Commerce
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 ström, and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomouslygenerating 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 iterateimage, caption, image, captionover and over and over. Regardless of how diverse the starting prompts wereand regardless of how much randomness the systems were allowedthe outputs quickly converged onto a narrow set of generic, familiar visual themes: atmospheric cityscapes, grandiose buildings, and pastoral landscapes. Even more striking, the system quickly forgot its starting prompt. The researchers called the outcomes visual elevator musicpleasant and polished, yet devoid of any real meaning. For example, they started with the image prompt, The Prime Minister pored over strategy documents, trying to sell the public on a fragile peace deal while juggling the weight of his job amidst impending military action. The resulting image was then captioned by AI. This caption was used as a prompt to generate the next image. After repeating this loop, the researchers ended up with a bland image of a formal interior spaceno people, no drama, no real sense of time and place. As a computer scientist who studies generative models and creativity, I see the findings from this study as an important piece of the debate over whether AI will lead to cultural stagnation. The results show that generative AI systems themselves tend toward homogenization when used autonomously and repeatedly. They even suggest that AI systems are currently operating in this way by default. The familiar is the default This experiment may appear beside the point: Most people dont ask AI systems to endlessly describe and regenerate their own images. The convergence to a set of bland, stock images happened without retraining. No new data was added. Nothing was learned. The collapse emerged purely from repeated use. But I think the setup of the experiment can be thought of as a diagnostic tool. It reveals what generative systems preserve when no one intervenes. This has broader implications, because modern culture is increasingly influenced by exactly these kinds of pipelines. Images are summarized into text. Text is turned into images. Content is ranked, filtered, and regenerated as it moves between words, images, and videos. New articles on the web are now more likely to be written by AI than humans. Even when humans remain in the loop, they are often choosing from AI-generated options rather than starting from scratch. The findings of this recent study show that the default behavior of these systems is to compress meaning toward what is most familiar, recognizable, and easy to regenerate. Cultural stagnation or acceleration? For the past few years, skeptics have warned that generative AI could lead to cultural stagnation by flooding the web with synthetic content that future AI systems then train on. Over time, the argument goes, this recursive loop would narrow diversity and innovation. Champions of the technology have pushed back, pointing out that fears of cultural decline accompany every new technology. Humans, they argue, will always be the final arbiter of creative decisions. What has been missing from this debate is empirical evidence showing where homogenization actually begins. The new study does not test retraining on AI-generated data. Instead, it shows something more fundamental: Homogenization happens before retraining even enters the picture. The content that generative AI systems naturally producewhen used autonomously and repeatedlyis already compressed and generic. This reframes the stagnation argument. The risk is not only that future models might train on AI-generated content, but that AI-mediated culture is already being filtered in ways that favor the familiar, the describable, and the conventional. Retraining would amplify this effect. But it is not its source. This is no moral panic Skeptics are right about one thing: Culture has always adapted to new technologies. Photography did not kill painting. Film did not kill theater. Digital tools have enabled new forms of expression. But those earlier technologies never forced culture to be endlessly reshaped across various mediums at a global scale. They did not summarize, regenerate and rank cultural productsnews stories, songs, memes, academic papers, photographs, or social media postsmillions of times per day, guided by the same built-in assumptions about what is typical. The study shows that when meaning is forced through such pipelines repeatedly, diversity collapses not because of bad intentions, malicious design or corporate negligence, but because only certain kinds of meaning survive the text-to-image-to-text repeated conversions. This does not mean cultural stagnation is inevitable. Human creativity is resilient. Institutions, subcultures, and artists have always found ways to resist homogenization. But in my view, the findings of the study show that stagnation is a real risknot a speculative fearif generative systems are left to operate in their current iteration. They also help clarify a common misconception about AI creativity: Producing endless variations is not the same as producing innovation. A system can generate millions of images while exploring only a tiny corner of cultural space. In my own research on creative AI, I found that novelty requires designing AI systems with incentives to deviate from the norms. Without it, systems optimize for familiarity because familiarity is what they have learned best. The study reinforces this point empirically. Autonomy alone does not guarantee exploration. In some cases, it accelerates convergence. This pattern already emerged in the real world: One study found that AI-generated lesson plans featured the same drift toward conventional, uninspiring content, underscoring that AI systems converge toward whats typical rather than whats unique or creative. Lost in translation Whenever you write a caption for an image, details will be lost. Likewise, for generating an image from text. And this happens whether its being performed by a human or a machine. In that sense, the convergence that took place is not a failure thats unique to AI. It reflects a deeper property of bouncing from one medium to another. When meaning passes repeatedly through two different formats, only the most stable elements persist. But by highlighting what survives during repeated translations between text and images, the authors are able to show that meaning is processed inside generative systems with a quiet pull toward the generic. The implication is sobering: Even with human guidancewhether that means writing prompts, selecting outputs, or refining resultsthese systems are still stripping away some details and amplifying others in ways that are oriented toward whats average. If generative AI is to enrich culture rather than flatten it, I think systems need to be designed in ways that resist convergence toward statistically average outputs. There can be rewards for deviation and support for less common and less mainstream forms of expression. The study makes one thing clear: Absent these interventions, generative AI will continue to drift toward mediocre and uninspired content. Cultural stagnation is no longer speculation. Its already happening. Ahmed Elgammal is a professor of computer science and director of the Art & AI Lab at Rutgers University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||