From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere except for where our food and energy come from, and where our waste goes. We are the most powerful species in the world, but we remain blind to the fundamentals that allow us to survive. How are we blind to our life support system?
Social media has completely and seismically changed our industry in a way that is hard to express. Historically we would have largely been reliant on a few gatekeepers, but that has been completely flipped on its head with social media, in that anybody with a unique voice that is able to connect with an audience can be talent.
If you step back and zoom out, and ask yourself: why are video games so powerful in the first place? The answer is that they're a digital manifestation of play. Video games are simply a digital form of that. They're one of the most effective and, from an evolutionary perspective, one of the most fundamentally human ways of engaging the brain — of connecting with who we are as a species.
We were approaching the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.
Screens are weapons of mass distraction, and as audiences we have to listen and give speakers a chance.
That's the future of medicine… being able to see a doctor before something happens, not after… seeing a doctor when you need to, not on some random annual check-up day once a year. Data can create a real story for how the body is evolving and what's happening right at this very moment.
There are a lot of people who misuse social media and then they pay the price for it. These individuals and groups are hunting for people to make mistakes, take embarrassing videos and show the world.
The things that get rewarded in those systems are things that provoke, divide and drive outrage – so we end up with a broken media economy that drives us all crazy and doesn't represent the best version of ourselves – that doesn't help us come to a common understanding of truth.
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.
Unlike real money, they are decentralised and transactions are free; no bank in the middle taking their slice and nothing central to fail.
The cardinal rule in academic research is to base your assertions on citable evidence rather than conjecture. This principle sets Perplexity apart from ChatGPT, which has the freedom to generate content without such constraints. Perplexity, by design, is restricted to sourcing information directly from the web, eschewing any reliance on pre-existing knowledge within the model.
Influencers wield enormous influence, and sometimes, this can manifest negatively. The spread of anti-vaccination rhetoric, the reluctance to use sunscreen, and the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon can be profoundly damaging.