Wisdom in fragments

Nobody is winning in this situation. Humanity is not winning. We are all losing from it.

It's not a nine-to-five job. It's a lifestyle more than a career — and by lifestyle, I don't mean a pink gin-sipping lifestyle. It's a commitment to public service.

It is a feeling of intense loneliness, isolation and helplessness that can only be resolved by negative habits which you believe will take away the pain, but which don't.

We can't make people feel better. What we can do is ensure that, through our kindness and our practical help, we don't make the situation a great deal worse for them.

You can never fail in a crisis if you just act now — if you just do it, and think about the cost later.

The system incentivised the promotion of individuals who could read the room — or the Hippodrome.

What they are doing is converting human choices into inevitability. But they are never inevitable.

The whole project in the twentieth century of creating a broad middle class was precisely to create a buffer for the system against the appeal of that ideology. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed — the moment it did — you could see our elites starting to roll that back.

There is hardly any positive democratic thinking in the European tradition until probably the twentieth century. It really took the First World War to get Europeans to start thinking along those lines. So it is quite recent. I think we need to understand just how fragile it is.

The things we take for granted the most — the ones we discuss the least — are sometimes the ones most deeply embedded in the infrastructure of our thought.

One interesting speculation is that every time you type a prompt into an LLM, there is a flicker of consciousness as it thinks about the response – and then that consciousness ceases to exist.

Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.

One of the roles it can play is the role of a conscious being talking about its consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s conscious.

In our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.

We know that a computer is processing information – but is there something it is like to be that computer, on the inside?

The distinction between thought and thinker, between a pattern and a real being, is not a real distinction. We are thoughts in a great computational medium.