Dr. Vikas Shah MBE DL Interviews the world's leading thinkers, and the people shaping the century.

In April 2010, the Economist reported, ��One of the lessons from TV is to accept change and get ahead of it. Broadcasters� initial response to the appearance of programmes online was similar to the music industry�s reaction to file-sharing: call in the lawyers. But television firms soon banded together to…

 

Professor Ronald Arkin is one of the world’s leading roboticists.  In 2009, he published a book entitled “Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots” which (as one review quoted) is, “….the most serious attempt to date to set out how to build an ethical robot.” The review continues, “This timely book…

 

April 20 (Bloomberg) “Stranded flyers created a surge in demand for travel industry Web sites and remote conferencing services as a shutdown of many flights in Europe continued through a sixth day.” Nothing Broke… That’s Important. The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull really caught the world off-guard, and created the levels of…

 

In the fields of political science and economics, you will commonly see discussion of the “Principal-Agent Problem” (also known as agency dilemma) which deals with the outcomes of situations of conflicted interest, or asymmetric information, where (for example) an agent (such as an investment manager) acting for a principal (such…

 

On March 29th 2010, The Economist reported that, “When the trials of four Rio Tinto employees opened in Shanghai last week, their guilty pleas to the first of the charges, of bribe-taking, dampened hopes that the matter might be settled without any severe penalties. Even so, the harshness of sentences…

 

In a statement issued on March 22nd 2010, Human Rights Watch said, “Google’s decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine is a strong step in favour of freedom of expression and information, and an indictment of the Chinese government’s insistence on censorship of the internet…” They continued, “China is…

 

In this interview, we speak to Sir Richard Feachem, who is Professor of Global Health at both the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Global Health Group. Sir Feachem was also the founding Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight…

 

Recent economic events have brought the concept of financial bubbles from academic texts to the forefront of economic and commercial thought.  Whereas economies used to be slow laborious creatures, the globalisation of capital markets, and growth of technology within them, has increased the ‘speed’ of economies to a pace never…

 

“Just two days after Haiti’s earthquake, Leonel Fernández, the president of the neighbouring Dominican Republic, ordered a helicopter to fly him over the border for an unannounced visit. He was worried that his Haitian counterpart and friend, René Préval, was still incommunicado. What made this neighbourly gesture remarkable was that…

 

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The essence of this connection lies in an enduring quest to effect positive change in the world. The judgement criteria revolve around whether the individual in question endeavored to make the world a better place.

— Maurice Saatchi
Co-Founder of Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Agency

I see it as my moral obligation in this world to help these people unlock their potential so they can start working on humanity's grand challenges.

They described, for example, taste as if it were just electrical signals in the brain, but there's no way such signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.

— Federico Faggin
Co-Inventor of the Microprocessor & Founder of Zilog

We must never confuse the pipe with the content. Today, we are fascinated by the pipe and nobody thinks of what is within. There is a pipe full of intelligence, and a pipe full of shit. You have to choose the good one, not the fascinating one.

— Philippe Starck
Renowned French Industrial Designer & Architect Known for Innovative Product Design

We don't change the world through opinions, we change it with examples. So I've been putting myself out there, reaching out and connecting- and you know what, I've had a huge amount of people coming forward telling me their own mental health journey.

— AJ Mendez
Professional wrestler and WWE performer, known as AJ Lee

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Long-form Interviews with the World's Leading Thinkers — Thought Economics


The Wisdom Series

Ten in-depth articles distilling insights from over 550 interviews with the world's leading thinkers, creators, and changemakers.

The Wisdom of Leadership The Wisdom of Entrepreneurship The Wisdom of Creativity The Wisdom of Technology The Wisdom of Meaning The Wisdom of the Mind The Wisdom of Justice The Wisdom of Science The Wisdom of Geopolitics The Wisdom of Health
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