Physicists Predict Earth Will Become a Chaotic World, With Dire Consequences [A] Humans aren't just making Earth warmer, they are making the climate chaotic, a stark new study suggests. [B] The new research, which was posted April 21 to the preprint database arXiv, draws a broad and general picture of the full potential impact of human activity on the climate. And the picture isn't pretty. [C] While the study doesn't present a complete simulation of a climate model, it does paint a broad sketch of where we're heading if we don't curtail climate change and our unchecked use of fossil fuels, according to the study authors, scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal. [D] "The implications of climate change are well known (droughts, heat waves, extreme phenomena, etc)," study researcher Orfeu Bertolami told Live Science in an email. "If the Earth System gets into the region of chaotic behavior, we will lose all hope of somehow fixing the problem." [E] Earth periodically experiences massive changes in climate patterns, going from one stable equilibrium to another. These shifts are usually driven by external factors like changes in Earth's orbit or a massive surge in volcanic activity. But past research suggests we are now entering a new phase, one driven by human activity. As humans pump more carbon into the atmosphere, we are creating a new Anthropocene era, a period of human-influenced climate systems, something our planet has never experienced before. [F] In the new study, researchers modeled the introduction of the Anthropocene as a phase transition. Most people are familiar with phase transitions in materials, for instance when an ice cube changes phase from a solid to a liquid by melting into water, or when water evaporates into a gas. But phase transitions also occur in other systems. In this case, the system is Earth's climate. A given climate provides for regular and predictable seasons and weather, and a phase transition in the climate leads to a new pattern of seasons and weather. When the climate goes through a phase transition, this means that Earth is experiencing a sudden and rapid change in patterns. [G] If human activity is driving a phase transition in Earth's climate, that means we are causing the planet to develop a new set of weather patterns. What those patterns will look like is one of the most pressing problems of climate science. [H] Where is Earth's climate headed? That depends significantly on exactly what our activity is over the next few decades. Drastically reducing carbon output, for example, would lead to different outcomes than changing nothing at all, the researchers wrote in the study. [I] To account for the different trajectories and choices that humanity could make, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called a logistic map. The logistic map is great at describing situations where some variable—such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere—can grow but naturally reaches a limit. For example, scientists often use the logistic map to describe animal populations: Animals can keep giving birth, increasing their numbers, but they reach a limit when they consume all the food in their environment (or their predators get too hungry and consume them). [J] Our influence on the environment is definitely growing, and it has been for over a century. But it will naturally reach a limit, according to the researchers. For example, the human population can only grow so large and can only have so many carbon-emitting activities; and pollution will eventually degrade the environment. At some point in the future, carbon output will reach a maximum limit, and the researchers found that a logistic map can capture the future trajectory of that carbon output very well. [K] The researchers explored different ways that the human logistic map could evolve, depending on a variety of factors like our population, introduction of carbon reduction strategies and better, more efficient technologies. Once they found how human carbon output would evolve with time, they used that to examine how Earth's climate would evolve through the human-driven phase transition. [L] In the best cases, once humanity reaches the limit of carbon output, Earth's climate stabilizes at a new, higher average temperature. This higher temperature is overall bad for humans, because it still leads to higher sea levels and more extreme weather events. But at least it's stable: The Anthropocene looks like previous climate ages, only warmer, and it will still have regular and repeatable weather patterns. [M] But in the worst cases, the researchers found that Earth's climate leads to chaos. True, mathematical chaos. In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet. Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth's climate is headed. [N] "A chaotic behavior means that it will be impossible to predict the behavior of Earth System in the future even if we know with great certainty its present state," Bertolami said. "It will mean that any capability to control and to drive the Earth System towards an equilibrium state that favors the habitability of the biosphere will be lost." [O] Most concerning, the researchers found that above a certain critical threshold temperature for Earth's atmosphere, a feedback cycle can kick in where a chaotic result would become unavoidable. There are some signs that we may have already passed that tipping point, but it's not too late to avert climate disaster.

Customer Experience in the Age of AI [A] Brinks is a 163-year-old business well-known for its fleet of armored trucks. The company also licenses its brand to a lesser-known, independently operated sister company, Brinks Home. The Dallas-based smart-home-technology business has struggled to gain brand recognition commensurate with the Brinks name. It competes against better-known systems from ADT, Google Nest, and Ring, and although it has earned stellar (优秀的) reviews from industry analysts and customers, its market share is only 2%. But its systems have generated a wealth of product usage information; its call centers have accumulated voluminous historical customer-level transaction data; and its field reps have been gathering competitive data since it began operations, in 1994. [B] Brinks wanted to find a way to use all this information to accelerate growth and optimize every customer touchpoint across all channels, especially in its messaging, personalization, and delivery of the user experience. In the fall of 2020, working with OfferFit, an AI start-up, the company tested thousands of combinations of messages and offers, varying the creative content, channel, and delivery times. It reorganized its structure around customer acquisition, service, and renewal and began using AI to optimize service-call scheduling, help cross-sell recommendations from call center reps, and conduct customer outreach (外展服务) for wireless system upgrades. In less than two years Brinks increased A/B testing from two or three tests a day to roughly 50,000 (with the capability to add more as needed). This process has dramatically reduced the need to wait for test results and has allowed Brinks to personalize every customer touchpoint. During the first half of 2021 its average direct-to-consumer (DTC) package size increased from $489 to $968. DTC revenue per user increased from an average of $42.24 to $45.95 during the same period. Overall revenue increased 9.5% compared with the same period in 2020. [C] Brinks Home is just one example of how brands can win by tapping a deep store of customer information to transform and personalize user experiences. From the pre-internet dawn of segment-of-one marketing to the customer journey of the digital era, personalized customer experiences have unequivocally become the basis for competitive advantage. Personalization now goes far beyond getting customers' names right in advertising pitches, having complete data at the ready when someone calls customer service, or tailoring a web landing page with customer-relevant offers. It is the design target for every physical and virtual touchpoint, and it is increasingly powered by AI. [D] We have supported more than 100 leading global companies in their large-scale personalization efforts (including several that we reference in this article). Over the past five years we have seen increases in their revenue of 6% to 10% and an increase in net incremental revenue attributable to personalization initiatives of anywhere from 40% to 100%. A joint survey we conducted with Google, involving thousands of consumers immediately following a personalized brand experience, revealed a comparable revenue effect. [E] Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. Recently Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen called seamlessness and personalization two of the key competitive "moats (护城河)" in which Kroger is investing. Likewise, companies in home improvement (such as Home Depot), banking (JPMorgan Chase), the restaurant industry (Starbucks), and apparel (Nike) have publicly announced that personalized and seamless omnichannel (全渠道) experiences are at the core of their corporate strategy. We are now at the point where competitive advantage will derive from the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and from the use of AI to understand, shape, customize, and optimize the customer journey. Digital-advantage supremacy has gone well beyond the boundaries of traditional marketing to become a much broader C-suite issue. The obvious winners have been the big tech companies, which have embedded these capabilities in their business models. But we also see challenger brands, such as sweetgreen in restaurants and Stitch Fix in apparel, that have designed transformative customer experiences based on first-party data. [F] In this article we explore how cutting-edge companies build what we call intelligent experience engines to assemble high-quality customer experiences using AI powered by customer data. They design end-to-end solutions—for example, finding a location, scheduling an appointment, sending appointment reminders, providing directions, and guiding users through any necessary follow-up—that proactively lead customers toward achieving their goals. They also combine human enablers (cross-functional, agile teams) with data and technology that allow for rapid self-learning and optimization. Although building an intelligent experience engine can be time-consuming, expensive, and technologically complex, the results allow companies to deliver personalization at a scale we could only have imagined a decade ago. [G] Most brands don't personalize customer experiences at the scale or depth necessary to compete with the world's leading companies. Personalizing an end-to-end customer experience requires orchestration (和谐的安排) across channels—a capability that no brand has fully mastered. But merging the flow of customers' physical and digital experiences may be the only way challenger brands can compete against digital natives like Amazon and Google. Early movers have tapped into newer technologies, such as the internet of things, machine learning, marketing tech (martech) platforms, and a growing number of digital media tools that can create formidable advantages when combined with agile methods. Brands that want to surpass—or simply catch up with— early movers need to think about their data and technology foundation. Are their organizational structures and processes up to the task? Do they have a rapid-test-and-learn mentality? [H] Despite the dizzying array of software tools that purport to enhance every aspect of the customer experience, no one platform can comprehensively manage end-to-end personalization. Nevertheless, key problems, such as creating a 360-degree view of a customer, are being solved with automation, AI-powered intelligence, and activation tools for delivering AI-driven recommendations. [I] The telecommunications giant Comcast uses Pointillist, a customer-journey analytics service, that logs each customer's footsteps across its ecosystem. It marks visitor's interactions and generates maps of each journey. Using AI to gather data and determine where journeys are failing, such as with its mobile app, Comcast quickly tackles experience issues. [J] Businesses are combining multiple AI, martech, and back-office solutions connected through common-application programming interfaces to better develop and use personalization data. Salesforce and Adobe provide channel delivery solutions; customer data platforms such as Amperity and mParticle help resolve identity issues; offer-optimization engines such as Formation and OfferFit help improve each ensuing offer; and platforms for content generation, such as Persado for creative copy and SundaySky for video, enable personalization at scale.