Cursor Acquisition, Interruptions, Designing with Uncertainty, and Mosquitoes
Your Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
📊 AI in Healthcare
🤖 Cursor
💻 Interruptions
👩💼 Designing with Uncertainty
👨⚖️ Judgement
⚽ World Cup
🦟 Mosquitoes
Podcast
Harnessing AI in Healthcare: Insights from RJ Kedziora
In this episode of Product by Design, Kyle Evans interviews RJ Kedziora, co-founder of Estenda, a company specializing in custom software and data analysis for healthcare. We discuss RJ’s journey in technology and entrepreneurship, the importance of energy management over time management, and the role of AI in healthcare. RJ shares insights into the challenges and future of AI applications, the need for ethical considerations, and the potential for personalized healthcare solutions. He also offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to make a difference in the industry.
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News and Useful Reads
SpaceX to acquire Cursor for $60B in stock, days after blockbuster IPO
The deal is meant to help SpaceX’s AI division — built around Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, which SpaceX merged with earlier this year — catch up to the major AI labs. Despite being a centerpiece of its IPO promises, SpaceX’s AI division has been in the midst of a restructuring after running into repeated controversies, like allowing users to generate non-consensual deepfakes of women and children.
Research: What Interruptions Reveal About Company Culture
If you’ve been in a company where a few outspoken individuals dominate meetings, you’ll appreciate this research, which confirms who typically interrupts and who gets interrupted.
Our findings echoed what participants had described in our first experiment, but with a crucial difference. Many of the 164 senior leaders we originally interviewed interpreted interruptions as signals of efficiency and engagement. They saw them as evidence of a productive, participatory culture. The follow-up study painted a different picture: the same moments that felt energizing to some leaders were experienced by others as exclusionary and predictable.
Designing With Uncertainty: How AI Supercharges Probabilistic Thinking
As we continue to say, relying too heavily on AI is going to exacerbate problems rather than solve them.
Products operate in complex, nonlinear environments, and AI is accelerating that complexity. When designers and product teams treat AI outputs as the answer rather than one of many possible answers, they build fragile experiences, and in some cases, like medical diagnostics or financial forecasting, genuinely dangerous ones.
AI needs judgment, not a job description
It feels like AI has broken recruiting at many organizations, as more and more job seekers are being filtered out. While companies may want to rely on more technology, especially AI, to manage recruiting and hiring, most of us would agree that’s a mistake.
AI may identify qualifications, rank applicants, and surface relevant profiles, but Ronis points out that it cannot reliably determine a candidate’s level of commitment, career motivations, interpersonal style, or alignment with a company’s working environment.
Other Interesting Finds
‘Can U.S. win World Cup’ now not such a crazy question as America starts to believe
The US has had a dream start to the World Cup, winning both its games and showing that it can score and defend. I’ve personally been impressed, and wonder just how far we can go this year. Especially when some of the traditional powerhouses (looking at you Spain, Germany, and Brazil) have looked far less formidable than expected.
The U.S. feels on the verge of something special because they have taken care of two opponents that they were supposed to beat, first easily dispatching Paraguay and then controlling an Australian team that put up a physical fight, but not much of a soccer one.
Scientists Reveal Why Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others
If you feel like mosquitos are always feasting on you while leaving others alone, you’re not wrong.
A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another – mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale.