I’m in a coffee shop in Manhattan and I’m about to become the most disliked person in the room. First, I’m going to interrupt the man reading quietly near the window and ask for a drink of his latte. Next, I’m going to ask the line of people waiting to pay if I can cut to the front of the queue. This is how I chose to spend my last vacation. Here’s why.

Growing up, all I ever heard about was “EQ.” It was the mid-1990s, and psychologist Daniel Goleman had just popularized the concept of emotional intelligence. Unlike IQ, which tracked conventional measures of intelligence like reasoning and recall, EQ measured the ability to understand other people — to listen, to empathize (共情), and to appreciate.

My mother, an elementary school principal, prized brains and hard work, but she placed a special emphasis on Goleman’s new idea. To her, EQ was the elixir (万能药) that separated the good students from the great after they left school. She was determined to send me into the adult world with as much of this elixir as possible.

But when I finally began my first job, I noticed a second elixir in the pockets of some of my colleagues. It gave their opinions extra weight and their decisions added impact. Strangest of all, it seemed like the anti-EQ: Instead of knowing how to make others feel good, this elixir gave people the courage to do the opposite — to say things others didn’t want to hear.

This was assertiveness (魄力). It boiled down to the command of a single skill: the ability to have uncomfortable conversations. Assertive people — those with high “AQ”— ask for things they want, decline things they don’t, provide constructive feedback, and engage in direct confrontation (对峙) and debate.

A lifetime improving my EQ helped me empathize with others, but it also left me overly sensitive to situations where I had to say or do things that might make others unhappy. While I didn’t avoid conflict, I was always frustrated by my powerlessness when I had to say or do something that could upset someone. This is my problem and I’m working on it.

Any schoolchild knows that a whale breathes through its blowhole. Fewer know that a blowhole is a nostril (鼻孔) slightly changed by evolution into a form more useful for a mammal that spends its life at sea. And only a dedicated expert would know that while toothed whales, such as sperm whales, have one hole, baleen (鲸须) whales, such as humpback and Rice whales, have two.

Even among the baleen whales, the placing of those nostrils differs. In some species they are close together. In others, they are much further apart. In a paper published in Biology Letters Conor Ryan, a marine biologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, suggests why that might be. Having two nostrils, he argues, helps whales smell in stereo (立体空间).

Many types of baleen whales eat tiny animals known as zooplankton (浮游动物), which they catch by filtering (过滤) them from seawater using the sheets of fibrous baleen that have replaced teeth in their mouths. But to eat something you first have to find it. Toothed whales do not hunt by scent. In fact, the olfactory bulb—the part of the brain that processes smell—is absent in such creatures. But baleen whales still have olfactory bulbs, which suggests smell remains important. And scent can indeed give zooplankton away. Zooplankton like to eat other tiny creatures called phytoplankton (浮游植物). When these are under attack, they release a special gas called dimethyl sulphide, which in turn attracts baleen whales.

Most animals have stereoscopic senses. Having two eyes, for instance, allows an animal to compare the images from each in order to perceive depth. Having two ears lets them locate the direction from which a sound is coming. Dr Ryan theorized that paired blowholes might bring baleen whales the same sorts of benefits.

The farther apart the sensory organs are, the more information can be extracted by the animal that bears them. The researchers used drones to photograph the nostrils of 143 whales belonging to 14 different species. Sure enough, baleen whales that often eat zooplankton, such as the North Atlantic right whale, have nostrils that are farther apart than do those, such as humpback whales, that eat zooplankton occasionally. Besides allowing them to breathe, it seems that some whales use their blowholes to determine in which direction dinner lies.

When it comes to technology, never before have we been both more dependent, and more cautious. Society is more connected, but also more lonely ; more productive, but also more burnt-out; we have more privacy tools, but arguably less privacy. Would it be wrong to say we are becoming disappointed with it?

There’s no doubt that some tech innovation has been universally great. A new antibiotic that killed a previously deadly superbug was invented by an Al tool. Machines that can suck carbon dioxide out of the air could be a huge help in the fight against climate change. But on the other hand, tech-related scandals (丑闻) dominate headlines. Stories about cyberattacks and horrible online abuse are regularly on the news. “Like everything, tech has a dark side. It is a two-edged sword,” says veteran Silicon Valley watcher, Prof Mike Malone.

“Fundamentally, if there was a problem people would, should, stop using it,” Paolo Pescatore, an analyst, says . But he then goes on to talk about the peer pressure to remain plugged in -from colleagues, friends and family, and even from governments wanting to switch to digital services.

Mr Halgas, a young tech boss with big ambition, tells me that the industry has become a more easily affected place for its staff. “Tech workers were very comfortable in our jobs,” he explains. “People used to say , ‘Google isn’t a job; it’s a retirement plan’. Those days are long gone.” “Tech workers thought they were safe from automation: now we are among the people who might be replaced by code-writing Al tools,” he says.

A recent survey by PR firm Edelman suggested that 52% of people in the UK believed tech innovation was developing too fast, and 70% thought tech bosses should develop new tech slowly.

Realistically, there is practically zero chance of that happening. The money and power that is flooding in, particularly to the AI sector, speaks for itself. “But the outpouring of public debate that also centers around it is healthy”, argues Prof Malone.“ We’re not just blindly embracing new tech anymore and that’s a good thing,” he says.