From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In the future people will spend the majority of their time online, with their online identity and digital assets. The majority of their interactions with friends, family, relatives and colleagues will be online.
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.
When I was a journalist, you had to always have three sources, or they would not run the story. Now, according to 'sources', not even on-the-record, is good enough. Everyone wants to be first and often that leads to mistakes.
The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.
I acknowledge the monumental impact of the convergence of games with computers, leading to the creation of video games. This fusion marked a significant cultural explosion, underscoring the importance of games in the context of modern technology.
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.
Technology isn't a 'thing,' it's a social structure that people act upon the universe through. The social structure has incentives, roles and governance which determine the meaning and effect of the technology, not the engineering itself.
Each of us needs a space to think deeply. The best space to think combines the comfort of paper and the advantages of digital technology—in a focused, distraction-free environment.
If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?
Among future technologies that may pose significant existential risks I would rank machine super intelligence at or near the top.
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.
The perspective of seeing the Earth from space has rewired our brain. We used to have a 2-dimensional view for hundreds of thousands of years. Now with space telescopes we have a 4-dimensional view of our universe.