From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
When you're young, you're basically a time billionaire, sitting on billions of seconds stretching out ahead of you. But here's the thing—most young people, even folks in the middle of life, don't see it that way.
We have an emotion categorization for a reason. Anger is about injustice, disappointment is about unmet expectations, and when you feel pride, it's because you've achieved some kind of goal you've been working hard for.
One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?
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 there are no other complex biological systems in a galaxy like the Milky Way, then there's no meaning in that galaxy at all—so the galaxy is meaningless if there are no complex biological systems in it. We bring meaning to it.
My whole life I'd thought of Earth as this place where we're in control of our lives. I'd wake up, go to the grocery store, take my kid to a baseball game. It was this safe, stable cocoon. Now it wasn't that anymore. In space I could see the Earth in relation to the stars and the sun and the moon. The Earth is a planet. It's a spaceship. We're zipping around the universe, hurtling through the chaos of space with asteroids and black holes and everything else, and we think we're safe but, boy, we are right out there in the middle of it.
Endurance stays with you across everything, if you do it one place, you can do it anywhere. You're able to sustain because you've already trained your brain to do that.
A particular individual trait that has piqued my interest through research is intellectual humility. Embracing the possibility of being wrong enhances the likelihood of being right—a somewhat magical paradox. This notion dovetails with the scientific ethos, where the quest isn't about proving oneself right.
If a company doesn't have a purpose, I think they are wasting their life. Making money should be the result of helping people to build businesses.
One of the most precious aspects of Glastonbury is specifically that we can't put our finger on it. It's evolved slowly over 50 years to become what it is today – we've tried things that have worked, some have not, and allowed it to evolve.
What novels do is to turn the tide and restore our individuality. The writer is alone when s/he is writing, the reader is alone when s/he is reading. This bond is precious.