From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In 2008 there was one company which applied for more patents than all the others put together, this company was IBM.
You feel like a product when you're on these things. You feel like you're selling yourself. But what's amazing is that when you get people in person, actually interacting, much of the time they don't do that same optimisation, especially if you give them just a few nudges.
In a world where everything is connected, there's bits and bytes moving, and leaders need to understand what happens when functions inside a company interact. What happens when your company is interacting with others inside of its ecosystem? There's a flow to business and leaders need to be able to see that flow.
A nervous system is just a group of cells specialised in transmitting impulses from one to another. Ordinary plant cells can do this, albeit in a less efficient way. It is indisputable that there is no need of this "Holy Grail" of a nervous system to have the miracle of the transmission of electrical signals and communication.
Without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have the modern world… we wouldn't have electronics… we wouldn't have understood the semi-conductor, the computer chip…. All of our modern technology relies on this mathematical description of the world of the very small.
I think Groupon was preposterously overpriced, and Zynga was moderately overpriced. The principal problem with Groupon, in my opinion, is that they have a bad business model. It basically eats by selling their customers crack cocaine- telling them to cut their prices 50% for a selected number of people. If you do that enough? You wont have a business.
We cannot think about technology in confrontational terms. There is no race against the machines, there is no fight, no war. We have to end this long, historical confrontational narrative.
One way to think about reserve currencies is to liken them to an operating system for a computer. Today, everybody is on Microsoft... but nobody changes... why? because everybody else is on Microsoft and if you want to exchange files and work together, you have to be on the same platform.
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.
The only way social media can work is if you are incredibly authentic. If you try and cultivate and curate too much it can be very obvious and transparent.
Deep fakes, are probably the most chilling example to me of it, as if you take a politician's face and you use deep fake technology to slightly change it in ways that are imperceptible to the politician and to you, the observer, but that make the face just change enough to make your brain trust and like that image of that person.
Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.