Sony’s brand-new Xperia 1 VIII brings a larger telephoto sensor, Alpha-inspired camera tools, AI-assisted shooting suggestions, and premium pricing that keeps it firmly niche.
Genie Godula is pleased to welcome Bryce Warner, Canadian virologist and Research Scientist at Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. When reports emerged of suspected human to human transmission of the Andes virus, memories of the early days of COVID-19 were never far from public consciousness: Cruise ships, quarantine protocols, international evacuations, alarmist headlines. But according to Bryce Warner, the scientific reality is profoundly different. Joining us from the University of Saskatchewan, Warner offered a measured but unequivocal assessment of the outbreak, framing the current cases within decades of virological evidence while pushing back against pandemic comparisons. As Warner explains, “the Andes virus is the only hantavirus where we’ve had previous documented human to human transmission,” but he immediately tempers the alarm with a crucial scientific distinction: “that transmission efficiency is still pretty low.”
Artificial intelligence is expected to become a central issue during talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week, reflecting the growing strategic importance of advanced AI technologies. However, despite rising pressure for cooperation, analysts and officials say deep mistrust and intensifying technological competition make major breakthroughs unlikely. The […]
The post AI Rivalry and Distrust Limit Expectations for Trump Xi Summit appeared first on Modern Diplomacy.
Intelligence is one of the most consequential human traits. It is also one of the most socially awkward to discuss. Few topics trigger as much discomfort, denial, or moral posturing. Suggest that IQ matters and you risk being accused of elitism, determinism, or worse.
Yet the evidence is remarkably clear. Cognitive ability remains the single best predictor of educational attainment, even after controlling for parental socioeconomic status. Large-scale longitudinal studies and meta-analyses have consistently shown that IQ predicts grades, years of education completed, and academic progression across cultures. It is also the most robust predictor of job performance, with validity coefficients that outperform individual personality traits, experience, and even employment interviews in most contexts. In fact, the higher the complexity of the job, the stronger the predictive power of intelligence. This is no fringe science. It is among the most replicated findings.
Publicly, we prefer to celebrate more socially acceptable traits: emotional intelligence, grit, resilience, authenticity. These qualities are not irrelevant, but their predictive validity is often overstated. Privately, however, our behavior tells a different story. We assortatively mate on intelligence, meaning people tend to partner with others of similar cognitive ability. We invest heavily in education systems that select for or signal intelligence, from standardized testing to elite university admissions. We use proxies such as degrees, institutions, and job titles as shorthand for cognitive ability, even when we claim to reject the notion of IQ.
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In other words, we dismiss intelligence rhetorically while pursuing it relentlessly in practice. The result is a peculiar and consequential hypocrisy.
If intelligence matters this much, one might expect humans to be good at identifying it. We are not.
Decades of research show that unstructured human judgments of intelligence are noisy, biased, and often inaccurate. Brief interactions are particularly misleading. In a matter of minutes, we form impressions based on superficial cues that are only weakly correlated with actual cognitive ability.
Consider first the false positives.
Confidence is perhaps the most powerful illusion. Studies on overconfidence, including classic work by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, show that individuals with lower ability are often more likely to overestimate their competence. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect, creates a double disadvantage: the least capable are not only less skilled, but also less aware of their limitations.
In social and organizational settings, this translates into a systematic bias in favor of confident communicators. People who speak fluently, express strong opinions, and project certainty are often perceived as more intelligent than they are. Research on leadership emergence consistently shows that assertiveness and extraversion predict who is seen as a leader, even when they are unrelated to actual performance.
This helps explain a recurring organizational pathology: the overrepresentation of overconfident individuals in positions of power. In my own work, I have described how this dynamic contributes to the rise of incompetent leaders, particularly when organizations mistake charisma and self-belief for competence.
Now consider the false negatives.
Highly intelligent individuals are not always obvious. In fact, they can be systematically overlooked. People who think deeply often communicate with nuance. They hedge their statements, acknowledge uncertainty, and resist oversimplification. They may ask more questions than they answer, not because they lack knowledge, but because they are aware of complexity.
Unfortunately, these behaviors can be misinterpreted. Hesitation is seen as lack of confidence. Nuance is mistaken for ambiguity. Intellectual humility is confused with weakness. As a result, individuals who are actually more capable may be judged as less so.
The consequences of these misjudgments are profound. Hiring decisions are skewed. Promotions reward style over substance. Organizations end up with leadership pipelines that favor impression management over actual ability.
At a broader level, this dynamic reinforces inequality. Individuals who are better at signaling intelligence, whether through communication style, cultural capital, or sheer confidence, are more likely to succeed, regardless of their underlying capability: More often than not, substance is beaten by style, to everybody’s detriment.
If intelligence is both undervalued and poorly assessed, then perception becomes a critical currency. In many real-world contexts, appearing smart matters almost as much as being smart. Especially when your audience lacks the expertise to tell the difference, even if they also manage to appear smart!
The good news—or bad news, depending on your perspective—is that there are reliable ways to signal intelligence. These are not necessarily about becoming smarter, but about managing how your intelligence is perceived, or curating a reputation for being smarter than you actually are.
Here are five evidence-based strategies:
1. Speak less, but say more
Research on communication effectiveness shows that concise speakers are often judged as more intelligent. In one set of studies, participants rated brief, structured answers as more insightful than longer, rambling ones, even when the content was equivalent. Brevity signals clarity of thought. It suggests that you can distill complexity into essence. By contrast, verbosity is often interpreted as lack of structure or even lack of understanding.
2. Avoid unnecessary complexity (but signal precision)
A now-classic study by Daniel Oppenheimer found that using unnecessarily complex words makes people seem less intelligent, not more. Simplicity is often a better signal of mastery. However, this does not mean dumbing things down entirely. Strategic use of precise, domain-specific language can enhance perceptions of expertise. The key is balance: enough sophistication to signal competence, not so much that it feels like obfuscation.
3. Ask better questions
One of the most underrated signals of intelligence is the ability to ask insightful questions. Research on curiosity and learning shows that high-ability individuals tend to ask more diagnostic, forward-looking questions. In social settings, questions shift the focus from what you know to how you think. They demonstrate that you can identify gaps, challenge assumptions, and explore implications. In many cases, a well-crafted question signals deeper understanding than a superficial answer.
4. Display calibrated uncertainty
Contrary to popular belief, expressing some uncertainty can increase perceived intelligence, particularly among more sophisticated audiences. Studies on expert communication show that people who acknowledge limitations and probabilities (a common sign of metacognition) are often seen as more credible. Phrases like based on the available data or one interpretation is signal nuance and intellectual honesty. Overconfidence may be persuasive, but it is also fragile. Calibrated uncertainty, by contrast, signals depth.
5. Slow down your thinking
In an era of instant responses, speed is often mistaken for intelligence. But cognitive science suggests the opposite can be true. Drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman, we know that fast thinking is intuitive and automatic, while slow thinking is deliberate and analytical. Taking a moment before answering signals that you are engaging in deeper processing. It suggests reflection rather than reaction. In many professional contexts, this is interpreted as intelligence.
It is tempting to assume that AI tools (especially generative AI or large language models) can help us appear smarter. After all, they can generate articulate answers, summarize complex topics, and produce polished outputs in seconds, not to mention “hallucinate” (a technical euphemism for “bs”) at scale.
But there is a catch.
As AI becomes ubiquitous, its outputs are increasingly standardized. Everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, and often the same answers. This creates what I have elsewhere called “artificial certainty”: responses that sound coherent and confident, but lack true differentiation. In a way, AI is like the intellectual version of the fast food industry, and GenAI platforms like ChatGPT are like a microwave for ideas: synthetic, tasty, cheap, and addictive but not very nourishing or nutritious food for our hungry minds, let alone intellectually valuable content.
In this context, simply using AI does not make you appear smarter. If anything, it may have the opposite effect when overused. Generic, templated responses can signal lack of originality or depth. The real differentiator is not access to AI, but how you interpret, challenge, and build on its outputs.
In other words, the premium shifts from having answers to exercising judgment, especially backed by experience.
In a more rational world, we would be better at understanding intelligence, both in ourselves and in others. We would rely more on validated assessments and less on gut feeling. We would reward substance over style.
But humans are not purely rational. We are social evaluators, navigating environments where perception often substitutes for reality. Intelligence, like many other traits, is filtered through layers of bias, status, and impression management.
The deeper question, then, is not just how smart we are, but how well we recognize and value intelligence in others.
Because if we fail at that, we risk building organizations, institutions, and societies that reward the appearance of competence over the real thing. And in a world increasingly defined by complexity, that may be the most unintelligent outcome of all.
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The mouse pointer has sat at the center of personal computing for more than half a century. It tracks cursor position. It registers clicks. Beyond that, it does almost nothing. Google DeepMind researchers outlined a set of experimental principles and demos for an AI-enabled pointer that goes considerably further: one that understands not just where you are pointing, but what you are pointing at and why it matters.
The system is powered by Gemini and is currently in the experimental stage. Two demos are live in Google AI Studio today: one for editing an image and one for finding places on a map, both operable by pointing and speaking. A deeper integration called Magic Pointer is also rolling out inside Chrome, and a further integration is planned for Googlebook, Google’s new line of Gemini-powered laptops announced this week.
The frustration DeepMind researchers are addressing is a familiar one for anyone who has tried to use an AI assistant while already in the middle of work. Because a typical AI tool lives in its own window, users need to drag their world into it. The research team wants the opposite — intuitive AI that meets users across all the tools they use, without interrupting their flow.
In practice, today’s AI workflow often looks like this: you are working inside a document or a browser tab, you spot something you want to ask about, you switch to a chat interface, you re-describe what you were looking at, you run the query, and you paste the result back. This maps to a concrete technical gap: current LLM interfaces are largely text-in, text-out. They have no awareness of the screen state around them. The AI-enabled pointer is an attempt to close that gap by giving the model real-time visual and semantic context derived from cursor position and hover state — without requiring users to manually serialize that context into a written prompt.
DeepMind researchers have developed four principles that together shift the hard work of conveying context and intent from the user to the computer, replacing text-heavy prompts with simpler, more intuitive interactions.
The first is Maintain the flow. AI capabilities should work across all apps, not force users into ‘AI detours’ between them. The prototype AI-enabled pointer is available wherever the user is working. For example, they could point at a PDF and request a bullet-point summary to paste directly into an email, hover over a table of statistics and request a pie chart version, or highlight a recipe and ask for all the ingredients doubled. This is a direct architectural stance: instead of building AI assistance as a sidecar application, the capability lives at the pointer level and is present in whichever tool the user is already working in.
The second is Show and tell. Current AI models demand precise instructions. To get a good response, a user has to write a detailed prompt. An AI-enabled pointer would streamline this process by smoothly capturing the visual and semantic context around the pointer, letting the computer ‘see’ and understand what’s important to the user. In the experimental system, just point, and the AI knows exactly which word, paragraph, part of an image, or code block the user needs help with. From a technical standpoint, this means the system treats cursor hover state and the surrounding UI content as structured model inputs — comparable to how multimodal models process image and text together, except here the visual region is dynamically cropped and contextualized in real time around a moving cursor.
The third is Embrace the power of ‘This’ and ‘That‘. In everyday interactions with each other, humans rarely speak in long, detailed paragraphs. We might say, ‘Fix this’, ‘Move that here’, or ‘What does this mean?’ — while relying on physical gestures and our shared context to fill in any gaps in understanding. An AI system that understands this combination of context, pointing and speech would allow users to make complex requests in natural shorthand, no fiddly prompting required. The name of the principle is deliberate: deictic language (words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ that depend on physical reference to carry meaning) is how humans naturally communicate when they can point at something. The AI-enabled pointer is designed to handle exactly that class of instruction without needing the user to spell out what “this” refers to.
The fourth is Turn pixels into actionable entities. For decades, computers have only tracked where we are pointing. AI can now also understand what the user is pointing at. This transforms pixels into structured entities, such as places, dates, and objects, that users can interact with instantly. A photo of a scribbled note becomes an interactive to-do list; a paused frame in a travel video becomes a booking link for that cool-looking restaurant. For ML engineers, this is the most technically substantive of the four principles. It describes an entity extraction step that happens at inference time on whatever visual content is under the cursor — converting raw pixel regions into typed, actionable objects rather than leaving them as unstructured screen content.
Google DeepMind is now integrating these principles to reimagine pointing in Chrome and the new Googlebook laptop experience. Starting now, instead of writing a complex prompt, users can use their pointer to ask Gemini in Chrome about the part of the webpage they care about. For example, selecting a few products on a page and asking to compare them, or pointing to where they want to visualize a new couch in their living room.
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The post Google DeepMind Introduces an AI-Enabled Mouse Pointer Powered by Gemini That Captures Visual and Semantic Context Around the Cursor appeared first on MarkTechPost.
French prosecutors will announce on Wednesday their requested sentences for former president Nicolas Sarkozy as he appeals his conviction for accepting illegal campaign contributions from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Sarkozy became the first modern French president to serve time behind bars after spending three weeks in prison late last year.
China renewed its strong opposition to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan ahead of the high profile summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Taiwan is expected to be one of the most sensitive issues discussed during the two day meeting, alongside trade disputes, regional security, and the ongoing Iran […]
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USELESS has broken out of a three-month consolidation and could be ready to “go vertical.”
King Charles III will deliver the government’s legislative programme for the coming year in the traditional King’s Speech on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s job hanging in the balance following heavy defeats in local elections that have exacerbated divisions within the ruling Labour party. Watch the speech live at 12:30pm Paris time (GMT+2).
The meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing comes at a time of growing strategic rivalry between the world’s two largest powers. Although the summit may reduce tensions temporarily, analysts say the broader competition between Washington and Beijing is likely to continue for years across military, economic, technological, and […]
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