From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Imagine if Coca Cola said, 'well, we *could* take the sugar out of our drink, but how else would we give the world diabetes?' – we have information diabetes.
With Foursquare, our original app was a good idea but it wasn't a hundred million users good idea. The data behind the app, and what we do with the data? That's our good idea. That's our hundred million dollars in revenue idea.
Ageing is malleable, we can control it. 20% of our health in old-age is due to genetic factors, and the rest is due to our lifestyle. We can measure this clock. It's literally measuring chemicals in our own DNA.
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.
We have become robots, instead of humans with feelings… with conversations… with letter writing, you know.
When we create digital faces, they have to look and behave organically- they have to trigger that part of your brain that starts to think about what that 'person' would be like.
In my view, all the big existential risks are anthropogenic, arising out of human activity. More specifically, the biggest existential risks in this century arise out of anticipated future technological advances.
It's shocking how quickly this innovation [the internet] has become woven into the foundation of everything that we do. In just 30 years, the internet and the world wide web have gone from being generally unknown to consumers to being involved in every aspect of life, and necessary for almost everything. There is no healthy society without a healthy internet.
There's no question that Facebook could have done much, much more in the last few years to address the problem. I don't think we can inoculate people against crazy ideas, they will always have takers- but we can certainly improve the way that platforms like Facebook operate because they don't have any incentive at the moment to restrict the spread of harmful content.
The group found that, on average, people living in Manhattan travel 2.5 miles most days, compared to five miles in Los Angeles. But we also found that when you look at the longest trips people make, people that live in New York go significantly further, 69 miles on a weekday compared to 29 in Los Angeles.
With participatory culture, economics dictates that we pour more resources into building an infrastructure platform that anyone can use, so most resources go into empowering 'the long tail'. Small groups of people can come together and make use of a powerful infrastructure to enable them to pursue their own passions and interests, without regard for popularity.
In some ways, emulating birds would have held us back – yes it would have given us the drive and motivation, but we had to forget about flapping to develop the combustion engine driven plane!