Fast Five

SWC’s Fast Five

What exactly have our brains gone through in the last year? One thing is for sure, we’re still bad at apologizing, companies are giving us wider berth, AI in medicine could stomp on the “do no harm” ethic and you can learn all about that and more on Neeva, a new ad-free, for-pay search engine.

So, here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1 Neeva, a new search engine from ex-Googlers

Neeva is a new search engine, extremely similar to Google in many respects, but it dumps the web giant’s venerable ad-based business model in the interest of avoiding distractions, privacy quandaries and other compromises.

2 Neuroscience reveals how a year of social distancing broke our brains

While we can’t know exactly what our brains have gone through over the last year, neuroscientists have some insight into how social isolation and resocialization affect the brain.

3 A Hippocratic oath for your AI doctor

When it works, AI holds the promise of helping human clinicians provide better and cheaper care. But if something goes wrong, a mistake in a single algorithm risks doing far more widespread harm than any single doctor might do.

4 Offices after Covid: Wider hallways, fewer desks

Many companies are making adjustments to their offices to make employees feel safer as they return to in-person work, like ditching desks and building more conference rooms to accommodate employees who still work remotely but come in for meetings.

5 Stop just saying “I’m sorry”

We tend to misuse apologies. Whenever someone bumps into us in public, we automatically blurt out a “sorry.” Apologies are not a one-size-fits all. The intensity of the apology will reflect the intensity of the indiscretion. Perhaps Elton John was on to something: sorry does seem to be the hardest word.