Wisdom in fragments

As a psychotherapist, you have diagnostic categories for problems. There are specific techniques and therapies to apply. So the book really comes out of that frustration. If you think about science, it progresses from description, to categorisation, then to explanation, prediction, and control — and I wanted to feel like there was some science behind what I was doing.

That confidence and perseverance can sometimes lead you to keep charging ahead headfirst, when what's really needed is a pause and a course adjustment. I think that's the challenge — and I talk about that in the book — when strengths get overused.

I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together. You're filtering every experience you have with others through your own perceptions, your own biases, your own reactions and instincts. So you have to know yourself first before you can truly know anyone else.

In markets like books, art, music, and Hollywood, it's extremely hard to predict which products will become runaway hits. In the early days, if a high-status person embraces a product, it can have an enormous impact on its trajectory. Influential people adopt and endorse a product, which gives it an initial push.

Take any product and change the identity of the person or entity associated with it, and you fundamentally change how the world interprets and values that product. The product itself is 100% identical—it hasn't changed at all. What has changed is the identity, and in particular, the status of the person attached to it.

Status often has what's called an accumulative advantage property. If you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead. So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.

Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena. That shift takes audiences that were once local and turns them global. It also puts the anointment dynamic on steroids, because now your potential reach is basically unlimited.

Status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't. Anointment refers to these ritualistic events that can be major: in a biblical sense, you're anointed by a king and all sorts of good things follow. In modern life, you're anointed if you're admitted to and graduate from a prestigious university. But anointment also happens on a much smaller scale, many times a day.

As you think this through, a lot of structure dissolves. And then the question becomes: what remains once all of that is gone? You could still choose to do these activities, of course, but there would no longer be any point—no instrumental need. You would only do them simply because you wanted to…

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

If our future is to count as a utopia, we cannot allow a massive oppressed class of hyper-sentient, uncomfortable digital beings. We want it to be good for all kinds of minds.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Many of these, I think, would have moral status, meaning it would matter how they are treated for their own sake—not just because an owner might be upset if you destroyed a data center, but because they would be moral patients in the same sense that humans, pigs, dogs, or other sentient creatures are.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

With superintelligence, that whole panoply of physically possible technologies could be realized in short order, since the inventing would happen on compressed timescales. We could experience a telescoping of the future—where developments that once seemed millennia away arrive soon after the transition to the era of machine intelligence.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Arguably, though, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

It's the ultimate invention—the last one we'll ever need to make—because once we have AI that is generally intelligent and then superintelligent, it will do the inventing far better than we can. In that sense, it's a handing over of the baton.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Mind, body, and spirit have to come together, and I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad's an alcoholic—there's only so much a child can take.

Developmental psychologist and attachment expert; author of "Hold On to Your Kids

I used to keep a pair of lizards in an aquarium and fed them live crickets. At the time, I didn't think twice about it—I didn't believe crickets had any inner life at all. But now I wonder if I was actually creating the worst moments of their existence by feeding them to my lizards.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet