From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.
Fiscal austerity is the primary focus of policy in terms of response. That is both a misdiagnosis and compounds the problem.
Whether we look at the rioters who converged on the capital, the Gamestop Redditors, Incels or Qanon followers, what they have in common is that they're groups of people who are lonely and craving community. Right wing populists have very effectively spoken to this feeling. Trump and Le Pen talk about the 'forgotten people' they say 'we hear you' – That fundamental need for human connection is missing for significant swathes of our population, and that's dangerous.
There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch.
I grew up in Canada and have a lot of friends in Argentina. In the early part of the 20th Century, Argentina was wealthier and had a higher per-capita income than Canada. The country had severe governance issues which impacted economic and social development.
The concept of 'crimes against humanity,' as initially defined for the Nuremberg trial, emerged to address atrocities committed in Germany, particularly against Jewish and other minority groups, including political factions and the disabled. These acts demanded accountability, which the existing legal frameworks, recognizing state sovereignty, couldn't provide.
The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.
With leadership and privilege comes immense responsibility. And in this case, it basically took 20 years for the US to replace the Taliban, with the Taliban. This is a backward step of epic proportions for women's rights.
Society at large only sporadically pays attention to the extraordinarily despair-producing conditions in which young black poor youth attempt to survive.
We have enough water on this planet for everyone's needs, but not for everyone's greed. The crisis is fundamentally about distribution, access, and governance - not absolute scarcity.
Fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
Putin badly miscalculated his chances of quick success in launching his 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But I think he will make a much sounder calculation of the costs to him of taking the action of using WMD.