The viral teaching tool / game Any Human Ever asks a wonderfully big question: what did a typical human life actually look like? While we can’t quite cover all the 100 billion lives that have happened so far, we’re doing our best to profile the billions that are around right now.
Scroll down to read about smart glasses, Saxony, and the latest AI benchmark.
Stats to power your week
👓There’s a lot of talk about the privacy implications of smart glasses as society grapples with a device that can record without having to be taken out of a pocket. But that hasn’t stopped the devices staying in-demand: there are just as many consumers (37%) interested in buying a pair as they are concerned about their privacy issues (36%). GWI Pulse
🧠There’s a growing argument that we’ve overcorrected on mental health - that too much ordinary distress is now being diagnosed and medicalised. Consumers, though, aren’t there yet: just 14% think mental health conditions are diagnosed too often, compared with 50% who think they’re not diagnosed often enough. GWI Pulse
📉 Two early signals for how Christmas shopping might look this year. Tariff anxieties appear to have eased, with more consumers planning to increase their spending this year (21%) than in 2025 (17%).... GWI Pulse
⛽ …But one geopolitical pressure may have been replaced by another. The share planning to visit family has fallen from 41% to 33%, potentially reflecting higher fuel costs following the conflict in Iran. In other words: a year after Chris Rea died, some people won’t be driving home for Christmas. GWI Pulse
Meet the audience: US immigration sceptics
Without GWI data
With GWI data
Following a seismic result in Saxony-Anholt, a far-right party is on the verge of governing a German state for the first time since World War 2, polls indicate Marine Le Pen is in with a shout of becoming the next President of France, and protests against the UK’s small boats crisis have blocked the Port of Dover.
Across the world far-right politics is on the rise, with anti-immigration policies a cornerstone of their support. But looking to the US as a case study, we can see that concern about immigration is much more nuanced than the sight of masked men on blocked roads would suggest.
For one thing, concern about immigration in the US is split equally by gender, and Hispanics are just as likely as White Americans to be worried about it. And while immigration sceptics tend to be more socially conservative, they’re not especially patriotic. Flags and slogans might be important to the most hardcore activists, but they don’t represent the whole audience.
Chart of the week
There are many ways you can demonstrate how much AI has emerged as a concern in recent years - look at percentage growth, or change in ranking, or see what benchmark it’s cleared. With the latter approach in mind, you can see that it’s gone from a fringe concern to something that now sits ahead of racial relations, and just behind tensions with foreign countries.
And this opens up another interesting aspect of how AI concern has grown as well. The technology is often discussed in terms of its impact on something else: data centers worsening climate change, an arms race with China, algorithms reinforcing stereotypes. But AI is now a significant concern in and of itself.
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