Wisdom in fragments

I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. And that's one of the things I'm very, very excited about—leveraging synthetic biology. Because if we can create excitement, wonder, and solutions to problems like loss of biodiversity, then I think that not only can we inspire the next generation, but we can give them hope.

What the 1% of SMEs in a region that can really grow desperately need is local risk finance. We can think of this as venture capital. But we need venture capital that will work for SMEs, and that means it's got to be locally based. We've got a lot of venture capital, but it's nearly all in London and the Southeast.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

So Manchester and Sheffield had to apply to Transport for London for money to allocate to their bus routes. This is so comically bizarre that if you put it in a novel it would seem too silly. But that's how it is. The power is amazingly concentrated in Whitehall with a few very clever technocrats who go into it as their first job.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

What happened was that people saw their place going down while London was booming. It's not countrywide; it's not that everyone in the country is poorer. London's doing fine. So people ask: why are they not doing fine when London's doing fine? They start to blame each other.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

When the Sheffield steel industry collapsed, incomes collapsed, and so demand in the region collapsed—businesses of all sorts, not just steel but shops and businesses that sold things to consumers. The consumers were poorer, and so businesses started to fail. Investment didn't flow into this region saying 'oh good, a depressed region.' It flowed out to the places which were booming.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

Milton Friedman had a postulate about this. He got a Nobel Prize and all the rest of it, very fancy. But as soon as you interrogate this postulate, it's manifestly rubbish. The postulate was that capital would move into a region hit by an adverse shock. So, Sheffield's steel industry collapses. 'Oh well,' says Milton Friedman, 'that means wages are cheaper, property is cheaper, and so capital will move in.' Which sounds fine until you think about it for more than two minutes.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

My entry into this space came in 2019 when I read a paper by Demis Hassabis of DeepMind advocating for machine learning and AI researchers to go back to their roots in neuroscience. I took that literally — I went back to the neuroscience department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne, and asked what was exciting them.

You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.

Think about a rabbit sitting in a field. If that rabbit saw a hawk circling above and decided to wait for the back-propagation step before responding, it would be dead. It has been eliminated from the gene pool. The better you model the world, and the faster you can act on that model, the more likely your genes are to survive.

The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. When people ask me how our system compares to an NVIDIA GPU in terms of FLOPS, I tell them they're asking the wrong question. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?

I think intelligence is best understood as an entity that has the ability to improve a metric through repeated exposure over time. By that definition, machine learning algorithms are learning systems — they get better with more data and more exposures. A dog is a learning system. A cat is a learning system — you teach it a trick, reward it a few times, and it just does it from there on. And humans, of course, are the ultimate example of a learning system.

If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff — including building your brand to be about the very best customer service — will happen naturally on its own. But if you don't get the culture right, then you're not going to accomplish any of the other stuff.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

Our philosophy has been about trying to control the entire customer experience. A lot of people, when they think about branding, they think about advertising and marketing. But we actually don't do any advertising or marketing. Instead, we invest all of that money into the customer experience, and then our customers do our marketing for us through word of mouth.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

The vision for Zappos was for it to be about the very best customer service and for the Zappos brand to be synonymous with the very best customer service. In order to do that, we had to build a culture where employees genuinely wanted to provide great customer service — where it wasn't a department, but a way of being.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

We've actually gotten rid of all people managers. We don't have a single person whose job it is to manage or tell someone else what to do. Instead we've organized the entire company around work that needs to get done, and then people can have multiple roles across multiple circles, and there's a bunch of other rules and processes.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

We formalized making sure that the company culture and the employee happiness was priority number one, and everything else — including profits, revenue growth, and so on — was a byproduct of getting the culture right. Because our whole belief was that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, including building our brand to be about the very best customer service, will happen naturally on its own.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness