From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It's essentially a democratic revolution, wresting control from the conventional gatekeepers like intelligence agencies and the media.
I'm genuinely convinced that the upcoming decade will be the era of India as a product nation. This presents a tremendous opportunity for India, and you might wonder why now? Broadly, it's a confluence of a few factors. First, the global demand driven by digital transformation isn't limited to Fortune 500 companies. We're discussing the Fortune 5 million here – from a small-scale apparel retailer, a neighbourhood restaurant to a colossal multinational, they all need to adopt technology.
It's the convergence of technologies at any given time that allow individuals to achieve the things which simply were not possible before. Your smartphone can be used to diagnose diseases for example – every disease has a pattern.
Compare the 1600s to the present day, and what we do now would seem like magic to people from that era. That just shows you how dramatic the transformation of society has been as a result of science and technological advances.
Most people would have a nervous breakdown if they didn't have their phone for a day; I would have a total breakdown if there was no culture, no art. I couldn't live without art, it would be impossible.
Right now, biological evolution is not the main engine of change in the human condition. Instead, social and technological development, which occur on shorter timescales, are the predominant change-makers. In particular, it seems that we are gaining capabilities to directly modify human nature—through genetic selection, gene therapy, cognitive enhancement drugs, life extension treatments.
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.
What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap... cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?
To break into the chain, you would have to amass 25,000 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That seems completely infeasible. This is one of the big advantages of BitCoin – the ledger is practically unhackable.
Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business… for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.
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.
It turns out that for every ipod sold by Apple, it makes the US trade deficit go up by USD 150. Is the US poorer because the world loves ipods? No, we accrue the high-value elements like intellectual property, profit, and so forth, and outsource the lower-value parts of the chain.