|
|
|
🗞️Diversity and inclusion news🗞️ |
|
|
|
🎓 DEI pullbacks are in the UK 🍱
Yep when the US sneezes (or in this case commits a mass destruction of laws, social norms and decency through the courts) the us catches a cold.
According to The Guardian, more than half of major UK businesses are changing or scrapping their DEI and sustainability policies because of Donald Trump. Yes, really. Interviews with 250 legal chiefs at UK firms found that Trump’s anti-“woke” crusade has spooked British boardrooms into quietly editing out words like “equity” and “inclusion” from their strategies — just in case Nigel Farage or Reform UK decide to quote-tweet them.
Twenty-eight percent of companies have made “wholesale changes” to DEI or ESG initiatives, while another third are “discussing” doing the same. Because nothing says “ethical leadership” like revising your values for overseas political alignment. The study, by law firm Freeths (of Post Office scandal fame), found 83% of corporate legal leaders think profit comes before principle — a number that feels low.
The irony? The very same week, Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg were calling to scrap the Equality Act, Helena Morrissey (a former City fund manager, who chairs the Diversity Project, a cross-company investment and savings industry initiative, said the report – the first she had seen of its kind – was depressing. “After every scandal that’s cost so much money and shareholders have suffered as well, why would people think, ‘Oh, now we can take the foot off the gas when it comes to being ethical,’” she said.) had to remind business leaders that ethics aren’t political. “How are ethics woke?” she asked. A good question, though apparently not one that fits neatly into next quarter’s bonus scheme.
So what?
This is what happens when boardrooms mistake culture wars for corporate strategy. Britain’s biggest companies, terrified of being accused of “wokeness,” are now voluntarily adopting Trump-era values they once claimed to resist. It’s not a rollback — it’s a retreat.
📚 Read more:
|
|
|
|
|
|
🧠Things that make you go hmmm🧠 |
|
|
|
🔞 Britain’s Great Firewall🔞
Turns out, nothing kills the mood like bureaucracy.
Pornhub says UK visits are down 77% since the new Online Safety Act kicked in — the law that forces adult sites to verify every visitor’s age using ID or facial recognition. Ofcom says it’s working: traffic to porn sites overall is down by a third, and minors can’t “stumble across porn” anymore. (The “stumble across” phrasing doing heavy Victorian work there.)
But not everyone’s convinced. VPN downloads in the UK have spiked past 10 million this year, as privacy-minded users learn that nothing says “forbidden fruit” like a digital border. Pornhub execs claim the crackdown only benefits unregulated sites ignoring the law — which, in classic internet fashion, are now booming.
The UK is effectively running a real-world experiment in moral tech regulation: can you legislate virtue without accidentally boosting the black market? And, given that Ofcom has managed to investigate fewer than 70 of the estimated 240,000 adult platforms online… the answer might be “not yet.”
It also raises bigger questions. Should the devices be doing the work. After if the big fish are always the ones that get the scrutiny that may be fair game, help competition and is the cost of being big, but if the objective is to really stop children accessing content that is illegal for them to do so, perhaps rather than encouraging them to go to the back ally top shelf equivalent on the internet, maybe their devices should be the portal though which they have to infiltrate.
📉 So what?
This isn’t just about porn. It’s about the internet growing up — and governments realising that “safety” and “surveillance” often look the same in the code. The result? A moral panic meets a market loophole, and VPN providers emerge as the (un)expected winners.
📚 Read more:
|
|
|
|
🤖Ai might just work🤖
After two years of existential is this a bubble about to burst and “the robots are coming,” the data says something that the markets will love: AI is actually making people more productive.
Wharton and GBK’s 2025 report finds 82% of enterprise leaders now use GenAI weekly, and nearly three-quarters are already seeing positive ROI. IBM’s global study says two-thirds of firms across EMEA report significant productivity gains, and the NHS’s Copilot trial just handed back 43 minutes a day to over 30,000 staff — about 400,000 hours a month saved on admin. Turns out the revolution looks less like Skynet and more like “your inbox, but shorter.”
The kicker? The biggest bottleneck isn’t tech — it’s people. Training confidence is sliding, AI-literacy is lagging, and leaders are realising you can’t automate culture. As IBM UK notes, only 38% of organisations are prioritising AI upskilling, meaning we might automate the easy stuff while ignoring the hard bit: teaching humans to use the tools properly.
📉 So what?
The AI bubble isn’t bursting — it’s maturing. The flashy demos are over; now it’s about boring, measurable efficiency. For the UK, that’s good news: if we get the skills piece right, the next productivity boom might not be a myth after all.
📚 Read more:
|
|
|
|
🙏🏾 AI, Morality & the Meaning of “Help”
In the same month OpenAI stopped ChatGPT from giving medical or legal advice, people started using AI to talk to God.
Across India, millions are now consulting GitaGPT, a chatbot trained on Hindu scripture that offers “divine” guidance (“focus on your actions, not their fruits,” it replies to one failed banker). Meanwhile, South Africa’s Zuzi, an “AI Auntie” built by women to combat gender-based violence, helps users record abuse and seek rapid help when police systems fail them.
Meanwhile in the US, Michael Bloomberg took to his own media empire to warn that AI tutors may be the new iPads — expensive, overhyped, and ultimately worse for learning. “The basics matter,” he wrote, cautioning that screens don’t teach critical thinking, even if they now claim to.
So in one week, Big Tech told AI to stop pretending to be a doctor; users asked it to become a priest; and policymakers started debating whether it should also raise our children. The contradictions are the point: AI is filling the gaps where our real-world institutions — education, healthcare, justice, faith — have already lost trust.
So what?
📉 So what?
AI’s moral frontier won’t be in courtrooms or classrooms, but in how we decide what “help” should look like. Do we want AI that’s safe, censored, and neutral — or one that’s imperfect but emotionally available when nothing else is? The question isn’t whether machines should have empathy — it’s whether we still do.
AI is reflecting the spaces we’ve left hollow. For some, that’s sacred; for others, it’s survival. But every “AI Auntie” or “digital Krishna” reminds us that the question isn’t whether machines can feel empathy — it’s whether we still do.
📚 Read more:
|
|
|
|
💈 Braidbot👩🏿🦱
Imagine: you walk into a salon for braids, 6 hours, £150+, your stylist’s wrists screaming… Now imagine a robot helping finish the job in half the time. That’s what Halo Braid, a start-up founded by Yinka Ogunbiyi and David Afolabi (both from Harvard Business School), just won with a hair-braiding robot in the 2025 US President’s Innovation Challenge.
The challenge: traditional protective braids are labor-intensive, expensive, and time-consuming—especially for millions of Black women and stylists globally. Halo Braid says it cuts styling time by ~75% by letting stylists start braiding and then the robot finishes. The result: stylists scale, clients wait less, arms don’t ache.
Here’s the cultural layer: This isn’t just about tech. It’s about industry innovation in a space long ignored. Black hair tech has lagged behind other “beauty tech” areas. A Black-founded robotics company winning Harvard’s top prize signals both a racial and industrial shift.
📉 So what?
Tech trends often skip the beauty rack. This story flips that script. Beauty-tech + robotics + inclusive design = a triple win. If Halo Braid delivers at scale, it could turn salons into growth engines, stylists into business owners, and push the lucrative Black hair market into serious innovation territory.
📚 Read more:
|
|
|
|
|
|
📈 The tools behind the tech📉
📦Product📦
📏Design📏
👩🏿💻Code👩🏿💻
🏢The business behind the tech🏢
|
|
|
|
|
|
😅Meme/AI video of the week 😅 |
 |
|
|
|
🌐Partner Events & Opportunties 🌐 |
|
Below are the top opportunities we want to highlight to you this week! If you want to see more, then check out our new website where we have a whole page dedicated to events and opportunities from us and our partners:
https://www.colorintech.org/events
|
|
|
|
|
|
🙌🏾The latest from the Colorintech team🙌🏾 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
