Society

There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.

Dean of Cornell University's Blavatnik School of Engineering

We have engineered a world where going into leadership or public office creates huge worry. That's a problem as it means that the people who go forward for these roles are those for whom power is the reward, not doing the work.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons. Social media has broken the stranglehold that hierarchy often has in organisations for better and for worse.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

It took Jesus 2000 years to reach a billion people. It took Larry Page, I think, around 12 or 10. It took Facebook around 7. And it's not unthinkable that something will happen today that will reach a billion users by the end of the year.

Former Google Executive & Author of "Solve for Happy

We got to the point where, we are not on our grandparents' planet anymore. Meat has become less healthy for us – it's too available. There are too many calories, too much saturated fat. Animals are no longer 'free-rangy', they are growing in very tight confined conditions.

My greatest fear is that we have learnt nothing. Individually, we have learnt that the longer your population lives healthy, the better off your economy will be.

Democracies are not very good at long term planning in general and population ageing is the utmost long term planning.

We are all headed towards aging populations because we are living longer and measuring GDP growth is not the way to decide whether a society or an economy are flourishing. Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right.

It is essential to think about it systematically and to include demographics as it's the study of people – who we are, where we are- people are the foundation of every society. There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's, destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.

The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.

Think about your water kettle. When you heat the water and you see the transition from water to gas, not all water molecules are converted at once. The same happened in the world economy. Since this transition was associated with such a fantastic increase in income per capita, those societies that took off first increased their gap from the rest of the world tremendously.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

There is a certain conventional wisdom about the way that humanity evolved over time. The puzzling element is that much of the gain that we made in the technological realm were converted into more people, rather than into richer people up until very, very recently. World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

Consider for a moment residents of the city of Jerusalem in the Roman period and whisk these individuals in a time machine nearly 2000 years forward to Ottoman Jerusalem. Those individuals from the Roman period will be able to adapt nearly instantaneously. But if you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft.

Economist known for unified growth theory explaining long-term economic development

The politics of identity has gone very wrong in many cases. Politicians often forget that people are much more complex, and are a mix of many identities – and each of these identities can be of differing importance to the individual. A Muslim man from Somalia, who is a chess player, may have his chess-playing as his main source of identity, for example.

If those assets are not being productively converted into goods and services that make the world a better place, it's a missed opportunity. Over the past half-century, we've standardised on a 'way' to do things – and that's clearly flawed but continues. We need managers and leaders to up their game if we're going to hope to tackle the environmental, inequality and other crises we face.

Management theorist & former Dean of Rotman School of Business

It's fair to say that life felt more secure 40 years ago. You felt safer in your home, on the streets, in school, you just felt safer. If people suggest that humanity is becoming less 'human' – it's because we've allowed civilized conduct to deteriorate and that's what I've fought against for my entire professional career.

Creator and star of TV show "Judge Judy" for 25 years