Innovation

There is an honest trade-off between labour market protection and learning. If you have an extremely static labour market—like the high protection laws in France or Spain—you get stability, but you sacrifice learning. You pay a 'learning cost' for that 'stability dividend.'

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation. When you build in a remote location, costs skyrocket, attractiveness is hard to engineer, and the complementarities that help knowledge stick to a place simply aren't there.

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.

How many times have we all heard someone say, 'I had a really good business idea, but then I found somebody else had already done it—so I gave up'? I'd say the opposite: fantastic! If someone's done it, is still in business, and it's working, that's proof you're onto a solid idea.

The third and deepest reason this matters—why it's not just commercially meaningful but potentially world-changing—is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction.

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.

I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. We just have to start innovating at a faster scale, and doing it in a way where we can then communicate those innovation wins to the next generation in a way that gets them excited and gives them hope.

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.