Ebrahim Alareqi, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, IncortaMarch 19, 20254 Min ReadCagkan Sayin via Alamy StockTechnology is transforming every industry, but the biggest roadblock isnt the technology itself -- its communication. Engineers and executives often dont speak the same technical language, which means big ideas get lost in translation, budgets get wasted, and projects fail before they even get off the ground. Thats where what I like to call tech translators come in. They connect the dots, helping technical teams and leadership stay aligned.I know this struggle all too well. At my previous job at Volvo, I led AI initiatives and saw firsthand how technical ideas were misunderstood in executive meetings, leading to misalignment and missed opportunities. This experience highlighted the need for better communication between technical and business teams. Recognizing this challenge, I decided to deepen my understanding of business by pursuing an MBA, which gave me the tools to communicate technologys impact in a way that resonates with executives. That decision completely changed my approach, and its why I believe tech translators are critical to every company investing in data and technology.If you want to future-proof your career and make a bigger impact, heres how you can become an indispensable tech translator.1. Learn the business basicsRelated:Too often, tech teams build amazing solutions that never get adopted because they dont tie back to business priorities. Understanding core business principles -- finance, operations, and strategy -- helps you connect the dots between technology and real-world results.At Volvo, my team worked on an AI-powered recommendation system for the online cars configurator. While we focused on accuracy and relevance from a technical perspective, business leaders cared more about cost savings and efficiency. Once we demonstrated how much the system could reduce stockout of cars, it became a priority.My tip: A few online business courses, some reading on corporate finance, or even an MBA can go a long way in strengthening your ability to bridge the gap between technology and business. In this case, knowledge is power --and connection.2. Be a bridge between tech and strategyBeing a tech translator means having a foot in both worlds. You need to understand the business objectives while also keeping up with technical developments. That means showing up to both business strategy meetings and technical standups.At my current company, I work with product managers, engineers, and marketing teams. I help marketing craft messaging thats both engaging and accurate while ensuring our data and automation strategies align with business needs.Related:My tip: Sitting in on meetings outside your core team -- whether it's product roadmap discussions, business reviews, or shadowing sales calls -- can help you understand customer pain points and the bigger business picture. Offer to explain technical projects to business leaders and vice versa.3. Make technology understandable through storytellingEven the most technical discussions benefit through storytelling.Humans remember stories more than raw data, and in a room filled with both technical engineers and business leaders, finding the right balance is key.For example, rather than simply stating, We reduced processing time from weeks to days, tell the story of a customer who struggled with inefficiencies, how a specific integration challenge was solved, and what that meant for their business.This approach maintains technical depth while making a tangible impact.My tip: Structure technical discussions as narratives.Whether its a case study, an engineering challenge, or a breakthrough, frame the details within a story that connects the dots for everyone in the room.4. Stay ahead of tech and business trendsTechnology is evolving fast and staying relevant means keeping up with both technical advances and business trends. I balance deep dives into research with staying plugged into industry conversations to make sure I see the full picture.Related:I run internal knowledge-sharing sessions where we break down new trends and discuss how they apply to our business.My tip: Staying ahead means keeping up with research papers, following business news, and participating in industry forums. Engaging with different perspectives can provide valuable insights into emerging trends. Consider exploring a mix of sources -- hackathons where young developers adopt zeitgeist technologies, technical blogs, leading tech publications like MIT Technology Review, and innovation-focused communities. Following influential thinkers on social media and monitoring leaderboards on platforms like Hugging Face and Hacker News can also help you stay ahead. The more perspectives you have, the better.The most successful professionals in the data-driven future wont just build systems.Theyll be the ones who can explain them, align them with business goals, and push them into real-world use. Becoming a tech translator isnt just a nice skill -- its a game-changer for your career.For companies, the message is clear: If you dont have tech translators, youre wasting your technology investment. For individuals, the opportunity is huge. Master these skills, and youll be indispensable in any data-driven organization.About the AuthorEbrahim AlareqiPrincipal Machine Learning Engineer, IncortaEbrahim Alareqi is a principal machine learning engineer at Incorta. With a PhD in Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering and an MBA, he specializes in making data science and business strategy work together. Connect with him on LinkedIn.See more from Ebrahim AlareqiWebinarsMore WebinarsReportsMore ReportsNever Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.SIGN-UPYou May Also Like

Join the JMI Reports national team of Field Reporters and start earning money this week!Nows your chance to choose your hours and workload while earning supplemental income from a national insurance services company. Plus, there are no selling or certifications required. We pay weekly for all jobs completed. In most cases, you can start earning money this week!JMI Reports has an immediate demand for field reporters nationwide to complete residential and commercial property insurance surveys as needed. Experience in insurance isnt essential to handle this role. All jobs are delivered on our easy-to-use mobile app, and you can accept or decline the order after seeing the location and fee.Our typical assessments are as easy as using your phone to take pictures of the property and answer a few basic property questions through our user-friendly BlueSkyVUE app (available for free on the App Stores). Well combine the data you collect with many other data elements to produce the final comprehensive product for our customers.Apply NowLet's start your dream job Apply now

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March 19, 20257 min readShocking Dark Energy Findings Challenge the Standard Model of the UniverseA new map of cosmic expansion suggests that dark energy evolves over time, hinting that the universe doesnt work the way we thought it didBy Zack Savitsky edited by Clara MoskowitzDESI's 3D map of the universe can show how dark energy may have evolved over time. Earth is at the center in this animation, and every dot is a galaxy. DESI collaboration and KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. ProctorAt a beachfront convention center in Cancn, Mexico, last December, Seshadri Nadathur presented a confidential growth chart of the universe. Seated in the audience, hundreds of his fellow scientists silently processed that the cosmic chronicle as they had come to know it may need revising. Its the most exciting thing thats happened in cosmology in 25 years, says Nadathur, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in England.For almost three decades, astronomers have believed that the universe is expanding faster and faster and that the acceleration of this growth is constant over timedriven by a mysterious force they call dark energy. Last April a survey by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) published hints that dark energy may not be as constant as theyd assumed, adding to a pile of concerns that are already threatening the standard model of cosmology. Today Nadathur and his DESI collaborators unveiled their follow-up results publicly at the American Physical Societys Global Physics Summit and in multiple preprint papers, further validating the omen.After nearly tripling the researchers collection of galaxy coordinates, the new DESI analysis provides the strongest evidence yet that the rate of cosmic expansion fluctuatesfinally shedding some light on dark energy, which scientists think constitutes about 70 percent of everything in the universe.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Although the evidence still falls short of physicists benchmark for a discovery, experts say the new result leaves the standard model in dire straits. Making sense of an evolving dark energy would almost certainly involve amending the foundations of physics in order to unlock the true history and fate of our universe.Its like hitting a vein of gold, says Adam Riess, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of dark energy and was not involved in the new work. Assuming the result holds up, it says this investment that weve all been making that there was still more to learn is going to pay off.Cosmic Tug-of-WarAround a century ago scientists began to realize that the universe is expanding outward from what they now call the big bang, the explosion of energy that birthed space and time. In the late 1990s scientists set out to measure how the growth of the universe gradually slows as it spreads outonly to realize that its not slowing at all. Studying the light from burst stars called supernovae, Riesss group and another independent team confirmed in 1998 that the farther objects are from us, the faster theyre receding. In other words, space is accelerating outward.In the years since then, scientists have remained in the dark about whats causing the universes prolonged growth spurt (hence the name dark energy). To construct their standard model of cosmology, theorists tagged onto their equations of gravity a cosmological constanta value Albert Einstein first proposed in 1917 to explain why the universe doesnt gravitationally collapse. Although physicists dont understand the origin of this figure, their best guess has been that the vacuum of space itself is imbued with a constant energy that pushes outward relentlessly.Today the canonical story of cosmic evolution describes this tug-of-war between the unwavering push of dark energy and the gravitational pull of matter (including the vast reservoirs of invisible cold dark matter that supposedly glue galaxies together). This standard model paints a crazy successful picture of how the universe evolved from one second to 14 billion years old, despite the fact that 95 percent of the models contents are utterly unfamiliar, says Kevork Abazajian, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine. But its also broken. A series of conflicting measurements about the expansion rate and the clumpiness of the cosmos have thrown cosmology into a conundrum.As a result, cosmologists have been measuring the rate at which nothingness expands with increasing precision. The acceleration had proven steadfastuntil they started looking at sound.Frozen Ripples in SpaceShortly after the big bang, the universe was a fireball of free-flying particles and light that sloshed around, creating pressure waves like those youd get from tossing a rock into a pond. After around 380,000 years, everything had cooled enough for atoms to form, allowing light to flow freely without constantly bumping into other particles (this light is the cosmic microwave background radiation that we can still see today). Suddenly, the primordial pond froze over, preserving a patchwork of ripples, all about 490 million light-years across. These waves, known as baryonic acoustic oscillations, sowed the seeds for galaxies to comeoffering astronomers today a handy standardized touchstone.The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) maps the universe by collecting spectra from millions of galaxies and quasars.Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley LabPerched on the Quinlan Mountains in southern Arizona, DESI is designed to pick up those sound waves frozen in time. Its 5,000 dancing robotic arms trace out the patterns of galaxies, capturing more than 200,000 in a night. It then spits their light out into a spectrum, revealing the relative age of different clusters of galaxies. For objects more than nine billion light-years away, DESI detects matter by the way it soaks up light from supermassive black holes glowing in the background. At each slice of cosmic history, the team looks for traces of the ripples in the distribution of matter. Finally, by overlaying those measurements with observations of the cosmic microwave background and various supernovae surveys, the researchers can reconstruct a three-dimensional map of the universes expansion over the past 11 billion years.Last April the 900-member DESI collaboration released the analysis of its first year of data, which showed some hints that the cosmic expansion rate didnt line up perfectly with the standard model. But experts were hesitant to trust the signal from a brand-new experiment with limited observations. In this round, DESI has pinpointed nearly 15 million galaxies from more than 24,000 exposuresa few of which, observers suspect, were accidentally triggered by the telescopes resident cat Mimzi stepping on the keyboard.To avoid subconsciously biasing their interpretation, the researchers cleverly shuffled the real locations of galaxies such that their analysis wouldnt reveal the true underlying cosmology to them while they were still working on it. After months of study, hundreds of DESI collaborators met in Cancn to unblind the results.Days before the big reveal, a select few researchers quietly swapped in the true measurements and watched the plots slowly take shape. Uendert Andrade, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, spent the following days mustering his best poker face and dodging colleagues attempts to pry the answer out of him. Its really kind of magicalyoure one of the few people in the world that know this, he says.As Nadathur clicked through his presentation, the message became clear: The deviation wasnt a fluke. The cracks in the standard model had only widened. Something has to break somewhere, says DESI collaborator Claire Lamman, a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.On their own, the new DESI observations show a slight but statistically insignificant preference for an evolving dark energy. But when they are combined with other experiments data from supernovae surveys and the cosmic microwave background, the confidence that dark energy is indeed wavering approaches 99.997 percenta compelling indication thats just shy of the bar usually required to claim a physics discovery. Crucially, no matter which of those datasets are omitted, the results all point in the same direction. You can remove one leg of the stool, and it still stands, Riess says. It passes the sniff test that I have for [taking] a result very seriously.Rewriting PhysicsThe analysis seems to suggest that dark energy transforms over timeappearing a tad weaker today than Einsteins prediction and a tad stronger in the early universe. This progression has implications for the ultimate destiny of the universe: a dark energy that is too strong could eventually rip apart all atoms, and one that is too weak could lure everything to crunch inward.Fate aside, the changeable nature of dark energy would pose deep problems for fundamental physics today. An acceleration greater than that described by the cosmological constant evokes what cosmologists call phantom energy, which has an ever increasing density over timesomething forbidden by our current understanding of gravity.Assuming the results stand, this incongruence could spark an era of chaos cosmology, says Abazajian, who recently posted a preprint paper that showed how even the previous DESI results prefer a fluctuating dark energy. Reconciling this, he suggests, would require either uncovering an entirely new fundamental force or realizing that our universe has more than four dimensions. No matter what, we are discovering new physics here, Abazajian says. Theres nothing in the standard physics that allows for an evolving dark energy.Although the results dont directly help to resolve the existing tensions in cosmology (relating to the universes stretching and smoothing), researchers are hopeful that the new insights could point them toward a sturdier model. Over the next few years, experiments with the Euclid satellite and the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory should chime in with complementary pointers.Researchers are already starting to mine the DESI data for clues. Riess is intrigued by why an evolving dark energy would hover around the value of the cosmological constant that Einstein predicted rather than any other arbitrary value. Its almost like an Easter eggsomething is hidden in there, he says.For many senior members of DESI, the new results bring a feeling of relief. In graduate school, Alexie Leauthaud, now at the University of California, Santa Cruz, watched as fellow cosmologists debated whether their field was destined to die. They feared cosmology experiments would only measure the cosmological constant with greater precision to no avail. It felt to many people that we were chasing these decimal points, she says. At least now we are headed somewhere.The significance rings differently for junior researchers. Lamman notes how ever since shes been able to read, the cosmology textbooks havent changed. This field has always been the same, and Ive kind of taken that for granted, she says. I dont think I ever fully internalized that we could actually find something new.After the unblinding, Lamman and a few dozen of her colleagues ran out to the beach to celebrate. Floating in the ocean, she gazed up at the blanket of stars and cried out at the sky, We know your secret!

Wizs $32 billion all-cash acquisition by Google parent Alphabet promises a colossal payday for the cybersecurity startups early-stage investors.The deal is a big win for Sequoia, one of the best-known VC firms, which stands to make $3 billion, about 25x the money it invested in the company, Bloomberg reported. Despite substantial returns for Sequoias limited partners, their percentage gains will be far less than those of another early Wiz backer: Israel-based VC Cyberstarts.Cybersecurity-focused Cyberstarts invested $6.4 million from its first $54 million fund towards Wizs seed round in February 2020. Today, that fund owns 4.1% of Wiz, which means its poised to make a whopping $1.3 billion on the deal, according to a person familiar with the firms performance. Cyberstarts also previously sold $120 million shares of Wiz in secondary transactions, bringing the funds total return to $1.42 billion a remarkable 222x return on the original investment.Cyberstarts also participated in Wizs later-stage rounds, investing a total of $40 million from its opportunity fund. Those investments are now worth $128 million, a more modest 3.2x return on invested capital, a person familiar with Cyberstarts performance told TechCrunch.Cyberstarts is going to have one of the best returning funds in VC history, Shai Goldman, a partner at Next Wave NYC, wrote on X. This investment was done out of their inaugural fund, a good reminder that Fund 1 can be amazing one to back as a LP.Cyberstarts wasnt an ordinary emerging VC manager when it closed its inaugural fund in 2018. The firm was started by Gili Raanan, who previously spent nearly nine years as a Sequoia general partner leading its Israel investment strategy.The small $54 million fund has already achieved a 26x multiple on its limited partner capital. And thats not even counting other potential exits, such as Island, a startup reportedly raising capital at a valuation of $4.5 billion. Index Ventures, which owns a 12% stake in Wiz, is poised to make over $3.8 billion once the sale is complete, Reuters reported.

OpenAI has launched a more powerful version of its o1 reasoning AI model, o1-pro, in its developer API. According to OpenAI, o1-pro uses more computing than o1 to provide consistently better responses. Currently, its only available to select developers those whove spent at least $5 on OpenAI API services and its pricey. Very pricey.OpenAI is charging $150 per million tokens (~750,000 words) fed into the model and $600 per million tokens generated by the model. Thats twice the price of OpenAIs GPT-4.5 for input and 10x the price of regular o1.OpenAI is betting that o1-pros improved performance will convince developers to pay those princely sums. O1-pro in the API is a version of o1 that uses more computing to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems, an OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch. After getting many requests from our developer community, were excited to bring it to the API to offer even more reliable responses.Yet early impressions of o1-pro, which has been available in OpenAIs AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT for ChatGPT Pro subscribers since December, werent incredibly positive. The model struggled with Sudoku puzzles, users found, and was tripped up by simple optical illusion jokes.Furthermore, certain OpenAI internal benchmarks from late last year showed that o1-pro performed only slightly better than the standard o1 on coding and math problems. It did answer those problems more reliably, however, the benchmarks found.

When George Lucas came up with the concept for Star Wars, he was inspired by his inner child who loved watching Saturday matinee adventure serials. So, its appropriate that Christopher Ford and Jon Watts channeled a Goonies-vibe into the franchise with LucasfilmsStar Wars: Skeleton Crew.Now streaming on Disney+, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew follows the journey of four kids who make a discovery on their seemingly safe home planet, then get lost in a strange and dangerous galaxy. Finding their way home will be a greater adventure than they ever imagined. The live-action series stars Jude Law as the mysterious Jod Na Nawood.Brought on to oversee the digital wizardry was Production VFX Supervisor John Knoll as well as an alliance of visual effects vendors that included DNEG, who provided 150 shots across three episodes involving futuristic currency (gold credits), destroyed cities, security droids, atmospherics, and the elephantine principal character Neel.I grew-up watching Star Wars, Goonies, and Amblin; all those films were given to us as key references for Skeleton Crew, states Chris McLaughlin, VFX Supervisor, DNEG. It was exciting to be brought into that world. Some of the practical techniques from Lucas original trilogy were utilized. John Knoll was driving the visual effects to the point that I believe he had his own motion control rig and shot some the spaceship miniatures himself, McLaughlin continues. John comes from that mindset and was very clear about achieving the filmic look. The way that our work was critiqued, it was about something that was filmic and photographic. There was a lot of discussion about contrast ratio and how light was defocused correctly. As we went through the project, John shared shots from ILM and Hybride, so we could visually see what was going on in the rest of the show and match the look. My favorite shot of ours is the spaceship landing on At Achrann in Episode 104, remarks McLaughlin. It comes out of this fog into a dusty environment. The engines are gunning with smoke and sparks flying into the camera. At Achrann is populated with villages that have been ravaged by war. There were some on-set pieces of destroyed buildings that we had to model and match, he adds, noting that the buildings construction had to be kept in mind. But then we built up a kit of destroyed building pieces and scattered that around. It was mostly a CG environment. We considered, is it reenforced concrete and steel beams? As for the texture, you have to give it a story of how it got destroyed. Was it a bomb that went off? Is there an area that looks burned because that is where the explosion impacted? They discover what is clearly a school that is destroyed and if you look at that you can make out exactly where all the missiles hit. You get an idea of what has gone on there. Atmospherics were an important component. We added a lot of rolling mist and volumetrics, McLaughlin says. A lot of that is simulated and constantly moving. It gives a lot of texture and is a lighting tool. We had a library of clouds with different simulations that we would scatter throughout the scene. Another major series environment is the Mint, which can be found in Episodes 107 and 108. According to McLaughlin, The Mint can be broken down into three main areas. The spaceship lands on this grassy knoll, which opens up. They are actually on top of a lift platform that starts to move down under the ground. We had to build that massive spaceship lift shaft. As theyre going down, they see on one side the credit maker, which is a massive machine that makes the currency which the galaxy uses. They stop at the bottom, come out, and go into one of 1,130 vaults filled with stacks and stacks of these credits, which were key props. The moment when Jod Na Nawood walks up to a pile of credits, picks one out, and that pile starts to crumble, falls apart, and flows through his hand, all of those credits were completely CG. There were also a few little set pieces like the ramp that came down from the spaceship and the grounds of the platform. But pretty much everything there was bluescreen. We had to fill a lot in with CG. Extensive work went into conveying a sense of scale for the vaults. The door was heavy and made of thick, solid steel, adds McLaughlin. The space inside there was cavernous and dusty. We looked at numerous references of huge spaces. The Boeing Everett Factory was a key reference for us. Par for the Star Wars course, there is no shortage of alien species and droids. In Episode 104, the army walking through has these four-legged horse-like creatures with them called eopies, states McLaughlin. That asset came from ILM. We had a few of those marching through and then also the security droids in Episode 107. What was cool about the security droids was on-set in a lot of shots they have a full-size security droid manned by puppeteers standing behind them. When the puppeteer walks, the foot and leg movement of the droid matches their movement; their arms and head were operated by rods. In animation, we had to match their awkward, shuffling style of walking. In several of our shots there are three or four droids. One of them is real, so you have a perfect reference to match. You know when its right. You have to give them a little bit of life and ambient movement even when theyre standing and guarding. You cant have them completely static. The majority of the shots with Neel were accomplished practically. That is a young actor with an animatronic elephant head that is puppeteered by people offscreen, reveals McLaughlin. There is a little panel on the front that he can see out of, which we took out on every shot where you could see it. That was a straightforward job. But when he had to do things like run down a spaceship ramp, he couldnt see that well. For his safety, we would take it off and completely replace the head in CG. We had to match the animatronic completely. ILM was leading on that asset, so we ingested their asset and had to match their textures and shaders, McLaughlin continues. We tracked the actor tightly around the neck and shoulders so that we got a good lock on the head. We made sure the animation rig had the same capabilities as the animatronic. No more, no less. We had a lot of reference to match that performance. Then the color matching was tricky. Its a complex mixture of colors. Its blue but also has grey and pink. Noting that certain facial nuances were digitally enhanced, McLaughlin concludes, We ran a skin and hair simulation to give us deformation and get some swinging of the ears and trunk. But we couldnt go over the top because then your shots start to stand out. We couldnt make them look too perfect! And in the end, you would struggle to tell what shots are CG or just the animatronic. Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.

Built in 1887 for Charles Odell and his wife, Alice, this Queen Anne houseon Winter Street in Salem, Massachusetts, stands out as a high-style example of Victorian architecture on the street notable for early-mid 19thcentury architecture. The house lot was purchased by the Jewett Family who lived in the brick house next door and long used the lot as a garden. Charles andAlice Odellmarried in 1888, so this Victorian home was built for the newlywed couple to raise their family. Charles A. Odell (1863-1931) worked at his fathers insurance and real estate business, later assuming ownership of business upon death of his father and was a district agent for New England Mutual Life Insurance Company. Sheathed in a combination of wood clapboards and shingles in a variety of patterns, the house has a steeply hipped, slate roof punctuated by cross gables and hipped dormers. The predominant window sash style consists of a distinctive sash in which the upper displays a triangle with central muntin over a conventional two-light lower sash. The property has been lovingly preserved for well over a century and is a landmark example of a Queen Anne style house in Salem.

Happiness is an elusive experience. Awareness of the aspects that matter to us, offline can help us ... [+] curate happiness in a hybrid world, for ourselves and others.gettyAs we commemorate the International Day of Happiness 2025, we find ourselves at an intriguing crossroads. Artificial intelligence has begun to infuse ever more arenas of being and becoming human, permeating everything from work to relationships. This begs the question: in this age of accelerating technological advancement, is AI a potential pathway to greater human happiness, or is it taking us further away?The pursuit of happiness has been a central theme of human existence since the dawn of civilization. Yet, happiness remains notoriously elusive, a fluid state in a world defined by constant change. Neither we as individuals nor the society we constitute are fixed, ever. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed, "No man ever steps in the same river twice," a metaphor for the ever-shifting nature of life and happiness. It's not an asset to be acquired but rather a dynamic process to be navigated.Are You happy? Throughout history, humanity has explored diverse avenues for lasting well-being covering a spectrum of perspectives.Hedonism, championed by figures like Aristippus, equated happiness with the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. While intuitively appealing, this pursuit of sensory gratification often proves fleeting and can lead to what some call the "hedonic treadmill."Eudaimonia, in contrast, pursued by Plato emphasized the fulfillment of one's inner potential and the pursuit of virtue. This concept, detailed in his Nicomachean Ethics, links happiness to living a meaningful life in accordance with reason.The Stoics, such as Seneca and Epictetus, proposed that true happiness lies in acceptance, inner peace, and living in accordance with nature. They advocated for detachment from external circumstances and focusing on what is within our control.In Buddhism, happiness equates freedom from suffering, or Nirvana, which is achieved by understanding and ending the cycle of attachment and craving, which are seen as the root causes of suffering. The quest is to let go not only for the things we desire, but desire itself.Beyond Philosophy To PracticeBeyond these philosophical schools, happiness has been historically associated with power and possessions. The accumulation of political, social, or economic power has often been seen as a means to control one's environment and achieve desired outcomes, theoretically leading to happiness. Yet, an increase in status, fame, or money does not automatically correlate with an increase in happiness.It is also helpful to remember that individuals from different countries and cultures regard, seek after, and define happiness differently. For example, citizens of the United States tend to relate happiness to personal achievements, feelings of elation and excitement, success, and freedom, while many Asian cultures equate happiness with social harmony, moderation, good luck, personal relationships, and feelings of calm and relaxationHappiness From The Inside Out, Or Vice-Versa?The world has enough resources to achieve freedom from material want, but we never seized the opportunity to translate that potential into practice. Unfortunately, to quote Gandhi, there is enough for everyones needs, yet never enough for everyones greedArticulated in Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech on freedom from want, could be seen as a contemporary political interpretation of the pursuit of happiness. It suggests that providing individuals with the basic necessities of life food, shelter, security is a fundamental step towards enabling them to pursue happiness themselves. It is an approach that is incomplete by leaving aside the immaterial features of wellbeing, yet offers a path to increase the quality of life for billions. It may seem naive or idealistic to do good for others. Yet in an interconnected world it is a win-win-win-win; for the person who benefits directly, the one who is taking action, the community both evolve in, and the society they are part of.To thrive in an interconnected world requires we develop a holistic understanding of self and society. This becomes more pressing in a hybrid society where physical distances, borders and cultures enter a virtual melting pot. True happiness cannot be achieved in isolation. It requires recognizing our interconnectedness with others and the world around us. This is where the multidimensional influence of AI comes into play.The Multidimensional Impact Of AIAI is no longer a futuristic fantasy. In high and middle-income countries, it's a reality that touches nearly every aspect of life, whether we know it or not.AI algorithms curate the information we consume, shaping our perceptions of the world.AI-powered tools are transforming industries, impacting our economic well-being and the nature of work.AI is changing the scope and nature of education, making personalized learning possible everywhere, anytime.AI is even entering the realm of human relationships with the rise of virtual assistants and social robots.This pervasive influence raises uncomfortable questions about its impact on our happiness.Can AI enhance our well-being by automating mundane tasks, freeing time for more meaningful pursuits?Does it diminish our sense of agency and connection, leading to a more superficial and ultimately less fulfilling existence?Do algorithm-curated realities limit our exposure to diverse perspectives, hindering our personal growth and societal progress?Are we willingly delegating tasks that are part of our identity to our AI assistants?The answers to these questions are not straightforward and might differ from person to person. The impact of AI on our happiness will depend on how we develop and deploy our expanding artificial assets.Takeaway: 4 As To Navigate AI And HappinessTo explore this complex landscape with serenity, four principles are helpful:Awareness: Identify what makes you happy. Cultivate a critical understanding of how AI is influencing your life. Recognize the algorithms that shape your information consumption, the AI-powered tools that impact your work, and how AI affects your relationships.Appreciation: Value the unique capabilities of both human and artificial intelligence. Appreciate AI's efficiency and problem-solving power, but recognize the irreplaceable role of human compassion, creativity, and critical thinking in pursuing happiness.Acceptance: Embrace the reality of change and the ongoing evolution of technology. Accept that AI will continue to transform our world, and focus on adapting to these changes in a way that promotes your well-being.Accountability: Take responsibility for how you use AI and advocate for its ethical development and deployment. Hold yourself and others accountable for ensuring that AI serves humanity's best interests and contributes to a more just and fulfilling world.By embracing these principles, we can harness the potential of AI to enhance our lives and move closer to a more genuine and sustainable form of happiness. Maybe this World Happiness Day is an invitation to configure a glocal approach to happiness, in which everyone gets a fair chance to thrive free from material want, equipped to harness AI as a catalyst of their own best self. Can we commit to a hybrid future where technology empowers us to flourish locally as individuals and as a global community?