From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Instead of militaries fighting militaries, we now have militaries or military motivated agents that are able to activate civilians in each other's countries. Social media is global national security threat, and one that we're not even spending billions of dollars to protect against.
You cannot say you support a values based human rights agenda and have your defense industry dictate the terms of your relationships between states to the extent that you won't criticize states who you sell weapons to. People see this for what it is, they recognise the internal and external inconsistencies and are tired of it.
In today's United States, asking a republican parent if it was OK for their daughter to marry a democrat would elicit a response similar to asking parents years ago if their daughter could marry a black person – the polarization is astounding.
Many entrepreneurs are deluded about their odds of success, that evidence is very clear. This creates problems… Should a government subsidise entrepreneurs who greatly over-estimate their chances of success?
The people of the world are gambling for colossal stakes. Two centuries of scientific enquiry, founded in basic physics and powerful evidence, indicate that the risks from a changing climate over the next hundred years and beyond are immense.
There's a tension amongst the countries who belong to, and who have led, international organisations. Are they there to solve problems which no country can alone solve? Or – are they there to impose one particular view of the world on the rest of the world?
Society feels broken because society is broken. When the most powerful nations in the world are spending billions of dollars on ways to kill each-other, and a fraction of those resources on ways to heal each other, we're broken.
Comedy chips at people in power, particularly those who use tyrannical power. It strips their fake respect, and destroys the fake fear they create; and these are people who rely on being respected, and being feared.
While a quantum computer could certainly cause significant economic and social disruption if used to break encryption, it does not pose the same kind of direct, physical threat to humanity as nuclear weapons. The situation is somewhat mitigated by the existence of quantum-resistant or post-quantum cryptographic schemes.
All conflicts are different with their particular history and reasons. I think that inequality within societies and between regions has become a key cause for conflict, exacerbated by rapid information dissemination, as people are now more aware of inequalities.
We don't need to have CNN, NBC and their counterparts. Anybody can report on the most important news of the day. The best example recently was the video circulated of that young girl who got killed in Iran; that had an unbelievable impact on our knowledge of what was going on in that country.
It is very common in politics that each party assume the other party cheated in every election if they lose. It's not that republicans are more suspicious than democrats or vice versa, but their constructive paranoia leads them to believe that the other party is doing something sinister.