From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It is essential that the public knows how deeply science and technology affect their lives. A lot of the decisions that will impact our future are underpinned by science, and whilst sometimes these decisions are made by governments – who are elected and hopefully transparent – many are made by corporations who are not generally accountable to the public.
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.
The gap between the situation of people caught in conflict and the rest of us is growing, not narrowing. The gap is not going to be narrowed by trying to change the words on paper, we have to live up to them.
There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch.
Today, policies are sold to us largely on the basis of fear, or fear mitigation: from immigration to climate change, from health services to defence. It's less about promoting a progressive vision of the future and more about playing to our fears of what might happen if we don't toe a particular line.
We don't need to have CNN, NBC and their counterparts. Anybody can report on the most important news of the day. The best example recently was the video circulated of that young girl who got killed in Iran; that had an unbelievable impact on our knowledge of what was going on in that country.
There are two basic underlying reasons. Firstly dysfunctional politics and secondly economic mistakes.
If you offer no vision for the future, someone else will. Our geopolitics cannot tolerate a vacuum, and if you retreat- whether physically or ideologically- someone else will come up with a plan which may not be complementary for democracy.
We must always remember, in the West as democracies, that we have to do this within the character of a free society. That will hopefully always be what separates us from them: that we defend ourselves, but we do so within the character of a free society.
Telecommunications has connected India- and has brought about openness, accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratisation, decentralisation and as a result- social transformation.
Those children who are enslaved, and victims of violence, belong to those sections of society that don't have a strong political voice or who are taken for granted by politicians and elites. Most of those children therefore belong to marginalised and excluded sections of our society.
There are two key advantages of thinking of guns as a public health issue. First of all, it removes some of the emotion from the issue because it's no longer about banning guns, it's no longer about guns being awful things. Secondly it moves the debate to be about evidence; where we can empirically show what works, at what cost.