From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
This is a race to the future, a future powered by renewable energy sources and underpinned by efficient energy use. The winning nations, corporation and citizens will reap enormous benefits in terms of jobs, sustainable economic development, energy security and vastly improved local environments.
BitCoin might not be the final model but it is definitely here to stay. Many have criticized BitCoin because it enables illegal transactions. I think the critique is lame. Did you know that 75% of the value of all U.S. cash is in $100 bills? Cash is the problem.
One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.
Over this 99.9% of human existence, when technology advances, population advances and counterbalances any potential increase in human prosperity. Suddenly once technological progress reaches a tipping point, families start to invest in education, they economise on the number of children, and technological progress is converted into richer people rather than into more people.
Being 'online' does feel sort of 'godlike', it does make you feel that the limitations of material human existence don't apply quite so much. This godlike feeling explains some of the terrible behaviour on anonymous social media. It also gives you this sense that you somehow could become one with the metaverse.
My perspective, which I term 'evolutionary intelligence,' stems from the observation that humans often misconstrue their surroundings. The sheer number of cognitive biases we possess is staggering; Wikipedia lists over 200. If we could address even the top 10 of these biases and harness advisory tools like Waze for traffic, it could significantly benefit us.
Consider for a moment residents of the city of Jerusalem in the Roman period and whisk these individuals in a time machine nearly 2000 years forward to Ottoman Jerusalem. Those individuals from the Roman period will be able to adapt nearly instantaneously. But if you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft.
In my view, all the big existential risks are anthropogenic, arising out of human activity. More specifically, the biggest existential risks in this century arise out of anticipated future technological advances. Humanity has survived all kinds of natural hazards over a period of over one hundred thousand years; it seems unlikely, then, that any natural hazard would do us in within the next hundred.
Our boredom threshold has declined to the point where we're unable to stand idle in an elevator for ten seconds without pulling out our phones. There's also an epidemic of social avoidance, particularly among younger people, as the skills required for face-to-face interaction are more demanding.
Search started as a free product meaning it cannot get any less expensive for the user. You pay nothing, but the benefits of reaching larger and larger portions of humanity accrue to the provider, not to you.
I felt strongly that search- as a product- was just going to continue to face more and more revenue pressure, forcing us to show more and more ads, and inevitably making the product worse over time.
Previously, there were a lot of gatekeepers that controlled how you were supposed to listen to music… you'd walk into a record shop, and there was a special room for classical, and different genres in different places… that's all gone now, and you can follow your enthusiasm and affection for music however you want to. There's something beautiful and liberating about that.