From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When you're in the present, looking forward, your brain sees change as scary. But from the far side, looking back, the fear fades.
The question as to whether we are alone has been asked by humans almost since they first crawled out of the cave! For millennia we used to ask the priests, philosophers or shaman- whoever we thought was wise- how to answer that question. They always came back with a belief system. What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb 'to believe' we're trying to use the verb 'to explore'. We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.
If you are someone who has generated wealth, you have the responsibility to make sure this money is used to benefit the community. This is something that exists in all philosophies, cultures, and all religions. You have an obligation to the people around you, and your society.
We scrutinise a photograph with a sense that we are scrutinising the actual objects themselves, although they are distanced from us in time and space.
Globalisation is here to stay. You cannot, however, look at it as a natural phenomenon on which you have no influence- it's not like a typhoon or a cyclone. It's a process- and a process on which you can have influence.
I have anxiety and depression, I don't 'suffer with them' as the description would normally go. I have them in the way I have arms, legs, eyes and a mouth, they are a part of me.
If you want to do something well you do it 1,000 times, if you want to do something great you do it 10,000 times.
An object must be useful before being beautiful.
We are fields endowed with consciousness and free will, existing in a reality deeper than the familiar realm of space, time, and interacting objects—precisely the view scientism asserts: that we are merely bodies, properties of physical matter. But scientism is mistaken. Consciousness exists independently of any physical form; it resides in the underlying field that instantiates the matter and energy we measure in space and time.
Subversive, ethical, ecological, political, humorous… this is how I see my duty as a designer.
Technology isn't a 'thing,' it's a social structure that people act upon the universe through. The social structure has incentives, roles and governance which determine the meaning and effect of the technology, not the engineering itself.
To me, the very definition of success is living up to your potential – and the very definition of failure is not living up to your potential, simple.