Our apps and platforms are addictive by design. We know this both because the tech titans behind them have admitted it publicly, and because the dominant apps and social media platforms use the same suite of techniques that are well-proven to ensnare us.

The twentieth century has been called the century of the homeless man. The number of persons permanently displaced for political reasons as a result of wars, treaties or sometimes obscure reason is startling.

Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go into general anesthesia, and what comes back when you wake-up or come around.

We are all creative beings, but we're brought up being told not to colour outside the lines – but why? It's OK to be different…. It's more than OK to be different, and we need to encourage that.

Online trolling and abuse is a real problem now. A lot of people who want to express an opinion now are fearful that they'll get piled-on. And there's no real immunity from it: Zadie Smith's brilliant New Yorker story 'Now More Than Ever' is really an expression of her terror of the arbitrary possibility of being judged by a moralistic internet pile-on, of being as they say cancelled.

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.

Without what Becker called 'cultural world views' we would be overwhelmed by existential terror. Beliefs about reality that we share foster psychological equanimity by giving us a sense of meaning and value.

I never had an ethical dilemma with what was going on as a child, it was about pure survival. The kids that survived were the ones who were clever enough to continually get a meal.

You can't stop risks completely, that's the whole point of a free market.

99.9% of the time, you are not in a burning building- and that is precisely the time to think about what you would do in that 0.1% of time when it is on fire. A lack of information and preparedness in an emergency or crisis can be the difference between carrying yourself through, and sometimes, catastrophic outcomes.

The virus doesn't discriminate, but our response to it has. We've seen how stigma and discrimination have fueled this epidemic more than the virus itself ever could.

In No One Killed Jessica (2011), a true crime tale of a woman searching for her sister's killer, Balan (known to her many fans as simply Vidya) proved that a film without a male lead could be a commercial success.