 |
|
|
|||||
If youve ever been to a museum or on a school field trip, you may have had a tour guide walk you through a historical exhibit of 19th-century households or of ancient Mesopotamian agricultural tools. Now, a current TikTok trend suggests that one day in the future, those exhibits will be the modern workstationstanding desks, Zoom meeting headsets, and all. The viral series titled “Historical tour of a corporate workers desk,” by marketing professional and content creator Heike Young, imagines what that will look like. Now in those times, it would have been really common for a corporate worker to sit at a desk, much like this one, and be on calls all day, she says in the skit, now with over 116,000 views. Behind Young, a standing desk is set up with two screens, one for work and the other for online shopping, she says. The desk is scattered with an assortment of beverages, or brown liquids, plastic food containers, and packets. Believe it or not, this worker wouldve actually been considered very lucky to have a job like this, she continues. People would submit hundreds of applications and submit themselves to many humiliation rituals just to get a job like this one. In another video, Young highlights a few common tabs workers would have had open on their screens. Yes, Amazon. Thats the same name as the extinct rainforest, thats right, she replies to a question. We got some history buffs in here. She also educates on the linguistic practices of the period, more commonly known as business jargon or work voice. There was one sound that always got the laborers moving. It was a mild form of psychological torture, she explains in yet another skit. Our museum’s immersive effects team will play it now. And there were two common variations. One was more typical among workers who used Windows technology. And the next one is often for people who used Apple Mac. The comments are filled with corporate workers who feel horrifyingly seen by the series. With every video I watch, the more Im horrified by the reality of the life I currently live, one commenter posted. Others, though, had the opposite reaction. This made me feel really hopeful in a very strange way, another wrote, finding comfort in the fact that, for better or worse, the current economic reality cannot continue forever. Much of corporate landscape right now is pretty bleak, and its easy to get frustrated with it all, Young told Fast Company. But we are living in one moment. Theres so much history before and after us. With the series, she thought to zoom out and examine the corporate experience from an entirely different point of view, much the same as we might now look back on laborers in the past and their working conditions. When viewing it from the future as a detached museum docent, what is striking? Young continues. What little, mundane details seem quaint, absurd, or even grotesque? As for what anthropologists will be uncovering about the corporate worker experience centuries from now, Young says: A bunch of Amazon returns that may never go back. Chips, gotta have chips. A fork with an empty plastic container. Three different beveragessome for their caffeine and some for the illusion of hydration. And a picture of the people youre doing this for.
Category:
E-Commerce
AI has now arrived at the Treasury Department. Sam Corcos, a former startup leader and Department of Government Efficiency affiliate now serving as chief information officer at the Treasury Department, appears to have approved spending at least $1.5 million on up to 3,000 licenses for ChatGPT, the OpenAI platform, federal spending records show. The agency has obligations to spend $1.5 million on the services, and has already outlaid more than $500,000 for the technology, those records show. Fast Company obtained a user agreement showing that Treasury is allowing employees to use ChatGPT for authorized mission purposes. Such purposes include using the technology, in certain circumstances, with whats known as controlled unclassified information, a government designation thats given to information that isnt classified, but still requires some safeguarding. The expanded use of the tool comes amid growing pressure on federal agencies to adopt artificial intelligence systems, which advocates say can increase efficiency and cut down on excess bureaucracy. In this case, the rules laid out in the user agreement include strong limits on how AI systems might be usedparticularly, for example, with regards to personally identifiable information, market-sensitive economic information, and federal tax data. The rules also forbid Treasury staffers from trying to tamper with or evade an AI chatbots security measures without express authorization. Employees arent supposed to use the output of an AI system without a human reviewing that work, or obfuscate the role AI played in making a particular product, according to the user agreement. A violation of these rules could lead to someone being fired, the agreement states. One former Treasury official said department staff are probably using the tech on heavy lifting for tasks that would normally take a long time. Tony Arcadi, the official that Sam Corcos replaced, tells Fast Company that there were myriad use cases that could benefit from the technology, including automating administrative work. Done correctly and with robust controls, LLMs could be a force multiplier for intelligence, operations, finance, enforcement, and public engagement,” he says. The agency had previously invested in a smaller cache of ChatGPT licenses.The Treasury Department and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Still, in September, the agency released a compliance plan focused on promoting the use of AI, as well as a strategy spelling out its approach to the technology. Amid the move to speed up the use of AI throughout the government, including the militarys new GenAI.mil tool, theres still the serious risk of government officials putting too much faith in the far from faultless technology.For example, it seems like a recent report from the Department of Health and Human services may have been created using artificial intelligenceand included fake citations. Federal clerks have used ChatGPT and Perplexity and have ended up including misquotes and other errors in documents.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active inventory for sale is still rising year over year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent monthssomething weve been closely documenting for several months for our ResiClub members. The side-by-side maps below help you to see that decelerated rate of inventory growth. Left map: Year-over-year change in metro level active inventory between November 2023 and November 2024 Right map: Year-over-year change in metro level active inventory between November 2024 and November 2025 Click to expand Between November 2023 and November 2024, U.S. active housing inventory for sale rose by 26.1%. Between November 2024 and November 2025, U.S. active housing inventory for sale rose by 12.6%. Some of that percentage deceleration is a denominator effect (i.e., as U.S. active inventory rises, it takes an even larger increase to generate the same year-over-year percentage gain). That said, the deceleration is not only due to a denominator effect. In November 2024, there were 196,885 more U.S. homes for sale than in November 2023. In November 2025, there were 120,003 more U.S. homes for sale than in November 2024. The chart belowyear-over-year unit shift in inventoryhelps us to see the trend without the denominator effect. Why has U.S. active inventory growth slowed? Some of it is due to the number of days on the market not rising as quickly or stabilizing in some markets. Part of the slowdown reflects an increase in delistings in softer markets, as some sellers have thrown in the towel and pulled their listings. And, to a lesser degree, a handful of markets have seen a mild pickup in absorption as existing-home sales have edged up slightly from their multiyear troughs. What does decelerating inventory growth mean? Back in September, I published an article titled “The speed of housing market softening has slowedbut softness remains.” I think that framing still holds for what weve seen in recent months. On a nationally aggregated basis, as inventory growth decelerated in the second half of 2025, so did the pace of market softening. Since then, the U.S. housing market has largely stabilized, with national home price appreciation hovering close to 1% year over year and below U.S. income growth. Of course, there remains significant regional variation: Many pockets of the Midwest and Northeast continue to see mild year-over-year home value gains, while many areas in the Southwest and Southeast are experiencing mild year-over-year declines. What to watch in early 2026? As the nationally aggregated housing market transitions from its seasonally slower period into its seasonally busier spring window, a key question will be how inventory behaves. In particular, it will be important to watch whether the recent uptick in delistings in softer markets comes back online. For example, do homes that were pulled from the market in weaker areassuch as Southwest Floridaquickly reappear once seasonality shifts?
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||