From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
And the overall picture that's emerging is that the controls which still work operate more along corporate boundaries than along national boundaries. In order to censor YouTube, for example, countries like Turkey and Pakistan had to block access to the whole site; it's not practical just to block selected content.
We need a new Manhattan Project to rebuild trust in a world that's been deliberately attacked at its cultural foundation. This is not about state actors nuking each other's electricity grids but attacking each other's trust and cultural infrastructure which is just as critical.
The economy is in the doldrums and likely to worsen. The UK economy has performed worse than most Euro Zone countries, and the calls for a change, of course, are becoming pretty loud. The economists who backed Osborne in 2010 have basically withdrawn their support, the IMF lowered its growth forecast and so on. The government's economic strategy is clearly in disarray.
Power requires oppression. In order to be powerful, you have to stand upon something. Strength comes from within. We are seeing the emergence of new political organisms with strength not power at the core. From Moscow to Hong Kong and India to the United States, powerless organisations are creating strong governance without power.
Though I'm not a politician or involved in politics, I found myself deeply entrenched in the political world because decisions about our bodies aren't made in clinics or doctor's offices. They're made in Westminster. When you step into those corridors of power, it's astonishing to witness the detachment many decision-makers have from real-life issues.
The cost of inaction far exceeds the cost of action. Every day we delay comprehensive HIV programs, we're not just counting dollars - we're counting lives.
There is nothing, however, in standard theories of money that requires transactions to be anonymous from tax- or law-enforcement authorities. And yet there is a significant body of evidence that a large percentage of currency in most countries, generally well over 50%, is used precisely to hide transactions.
We have the technological means to deal with climate change. We have the technological means to deal with pandemics. This is not a technical problem. It is mostly a political problem. If we get our politics under control, the rest is fun and games.
Instead of worrying about powerful artificial intelligences in the future, we should be concerned about the lack of intelligence in the Oval Office today!
Central banks all around the world have essentially abused the power of printing money, and they have abused it by using quantitative easing, meaning creating new federal money to kit over fundamental problems, structural problems in the economy. So much of that acceleration in the wealth inequality has come from this quantitative easing.
What the verdict says, to the astonishment of tens of millions of us, is that you can go looking for trouble in Florida, with a gun and a great deal of racial bias, and you can find that trouble, and you can act upon that trouble in a way that leaves a young man dead, and none of it guarantees that you will be convicted of a crime.
At its core lies a universal crisis of legitimacy of the state, and that crisis means many countries will evolve Fourth Generation war on their soil. America, with a closed political system and a poisonous ideology of multiculturalism, is a prime candidate for the home-grown variety of Fourth Generation war.