Arvind's Newsletter

1.Mercedes-Benz aims for 25% of car sales in India to be electric vehicles in next three years

Luxury automaker Mercedes-Benz is placing a significant bet on the burgeoning electric vehicle market in India. The company anticipates that its electric vehicle (EV) lineup, both existing and future models, will constitute a quarter of its total car sales within the next three years, marking a substantial increase from the current figures of three to four percent.

2.Why India will be the AI talent hub of the world according to Nasscom
According to Nasscom’s State of Data Science and AI Skills report, India has 16 percent of the world’s AI talent pool and one of the largest annual STEM supply lines, with 2.25 million graduates.

If there is one trend that has kept the technology world buzzing since the beginning of 2023, it is artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT and companies rushing to find their way in. The difference between the rising demand and existing supply of talent left a gaping hole in skilled resources globally to build these technologies.

The solution for this talent crisis may lie with India.

To be sure, the country also has one of the largest annual STEM supply lines, with 2.25 million graduates, who with upskilling and the right training, could quickly fill in this gap.

3.Panama Canal authorities extended restrictions on the number of vessels that can travel through the waterway in response to a prolonged drought. Much of Latin America has been combating drought for months, and conditions are likely to worsen due to El Niño, a warm-weather pattern, with potentially seismic impacts on the world economy. The region, for instance, is home to almost two-thirds of the world’s lithium, a mineral essential for electric vehicles but whose extraction requires vast amounts of water. “The ironic tragedy,” Rest of World reported, “is that many of the technologies aiming to help with climate change require practices that would exhaust a far more precious resource: water.”

4.A Pig Kidney Transplant

A genetically modified kidney taken from a donor pig has functioned normally after being transplanted into a brain-dead patient more than a month ago, doctors revealed yesterday. Researchers say the patient had both kidneys removed and was sustained in their vegetative state while relying on the new organ.

The success relies on advanced gene-editing techniques. The presence of a sugar molecule known as alpha-gal, produced by most mammals but not humans, causes acute organ rejection by the body after surgery. The recent news is the fifth demonstration of kidneys from pigs modified to not produce the molecules being used as transplants. Listen to a deep dive about alpha-gal—also the cause of red meat allergy. Last year, a terminally ill patient died two months after receiving a pig heart transplant, possibly due to the organ being infected with an animal virus

5.The rise of Kidulting ?

Experiences that let adults act like children are booming reports the Economist

A young woman slides herself gleefully into a fake bathtub filled with giant plastic “bubbles”. Snack bags of popcorn are handed out inside a room designed to look and sound like the inside of a popcorn machine. Friends snap selfies amid colour-changing lights before heading to the pillow-fight section and pummelling each other with feather-filled cushions.

Dopamine Land, a pop-up interactive museum with locations in Madrid and London, is colourful, creative and silly. Although it is family-friendly, most of the adults milling around on a recent Saturday at lunchtime have no offspring in tow. As the museum’s marketing makes clear, this is a place for the “inner child”.

Dopamine Land is just one example of a new cultural trend called “kidulting”, where adults engage in lighthearted activities traditionally designed for children.

In Amsterdam, Wondr invites patrons to “dive into a sea of pink marshmallows” and “write on the walls”. The Museum of Ice Cream, a multi-storey playground of pools filled with fake sundae toppings, has expanded from New York to several other American cities and Singapore. Bubble Planet, which started in Madrid, will soon have 13 locations in its orbit, including Brussels and Toronto.

Ballie Ballerson, which operates a giant ball pit for adults in three British cities, welcomes 25,000 visitors each month. Even museums and immersive exhibitions typically aimed at actual children now host adult-only evenings. This includes Kidzania, a model city in London that was (ironically) designed for children to play at grown-up activities, such as having a job. Enthusiasts say that such spaces heighten creativity, human connection and happiness, triggering the pleasure-seeking chemical that Dopamine Land is named after.

But kidulting spaces are not for everyone. Their tendency to claim the title of museum can feel spurious to people who think such institutions should impart knowledge.

Art exhibitions aim to leave participants seeing the world a bit differently, but venues like Dopamine Land try for little more than making visitors feel happy—and sometimes tipsy. That most attendees have smartphones glued to their hands reinforces the critique that these spaces are little more than selfie backdrops for people obsessed with their own image.

But perhaps the shallowness of these places is entirely the point. Negative emotions, including stress, sadness and anger, have reached record highs, according to Gallup, a research firm that started tracking this globally in 2005. When the world feels bleak, the appeal of distraction is stronger.

Meanwhile, millennials and Generation Z have found that growing up is not so easy to do. The milestones their parents achieved so effortlessly, such as buying a home and getting married, have become expensive affairs, out of reach for many.

This all explains the lure of kidulting. Dopamine Land, with its fancy-dress boxes and picture-perfect backgrounds, asks nothing of its visitors. There is no information to take in, no rules to follow, no goals to achieve. It is amusing and vapid and brainless. That is what makes it so fun.