“We now have religion based not on theology but on sociology. In principle, that's not a bad thing, but when your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it (which was Marx's dictem), you've got a problem.”
— James Lindsay

The quote archive

Technology

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

You can have the best AI in the world and the best robots in the world, but if they aren't integrated well with the humans, then you will lose.

— Dr. Nicholas Wright

We see math as code and code as math. The real magic, and the key transition, comes from combining AI, programming languages, and mathematics—bringing all three pillars together. What we envision is humans using informal reasoning and intuition as a powerful guide, with formal systems then verifying those ideas. That interplay across layers is, I think, the real magic of combining multiple levels of abstraction.

— Carina Hong

You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.

— Hon Weng Chong

The brain is definitely not doing computation in the purest sense. We are not crunching numbers in binary ones and zeros in our heads. When people ask me how our system compares to an NVIDIA GPU in terms of FLOPS, I tell them they're asking the wrong question. A more important question is: what are your inputs, what output do you want, and how intelligently can the system get from one to the other?

— Hon Weng Chong

There's also of course this huge army of paid trolls (like Putin's) who can be hard to spot, but definitely there, whipping up hate and confusion just because it's part of the Russian state process to do that.

— David Baddiel

British comedian, writer, and television personality; co-founder of Fantasy Football League

I first heard about Twitter through a journalist friend of mine called India Knight. She said, 'it's fantastic, like a cocktail party where all of your best friends have turned up!'- she was right, it was like that, for about 15 seconds.... It did feel like a lot of people I knew were being really nice and just chatting on this thing... as if Silicon Valley had come up with a digitised, virtual version of a pleasant conversation!

— David Baddiel

British comedian, writer, and television personality; co-founder of Fantasy Football League

These are the kinds of digital services that have been technologically available for 25 years but just haven't been implemented anywhere. Basically, for scalability all you need is more servers.

— Toomas Hendrik Ilves

Former President of Estonia & Cybersecurity Pioneer

In the advanced countries, it is a very challenging time for people in the middle-income and middle-education range. They are being subjected to greater competition from labour saving technology.

— Michael Spence

Nobel Prize-winning economist; Stanford provost and NYU president

The current Trump–Silicon Valley consensus—that all forms of regulation somehow constrain the muscular freedom of companies to innovate—is ludicrous.

— Nick Clegg

Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader

At the end of the day, the platforms will complain, but they exist to serve society—society doesn't exist to serve them.

— Nick Clegg

Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader

One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.

— Nick Clegg

Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader

We're not just over-reliant—we're wholly reliant—on American technology across the entire stack. Our data sits in American cloud infrastructure; our hardware is American designed; our software and operating systems are overwhelmingly American; most of the AI systems people interact with are American, and so on.

— Nick Clegg

Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader

Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.

— Nick Clegg

Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader

If you make it easy to steal from you, someone will. Every breach I've been involved with comes down to the fact that someone in the company did something they weren't supposed to or failed to do something they should have done.

— Frank Abagnale

Notorious con artist and impostor who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can

Dehumanizing the victim through the internet has enabled people to commit crimes and not worry about their conscience.

— Frank Abagnale

Notorious con artist and impostor who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can

Criminals are not looking for challenges, but opportunities. Hackers don't cause breaches, they wait for doors to open; and we're making it so easy for people to steal from us that we're creating unlimited doors.

— Frank Abagnale

Notorious con artist and impostor who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can