From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
However, the landscape is shifting with the advent of digital transactions. The digitisation of money movement, transitioning from cash to digital, allows for traceability. This traceability generates data, which can be analysed to inform decisions.
I do agree though, that in recent years receiving abuse online has been normalised to the extent that I expect it and know there's very little I can do to stop people from saying these things.
We're not just over-reliant—we're wholly reliant—on American technology across the entire stack. Our data sits in American cloud infrastructure; our hardware is American designed; our software and operating systems are overwhelmingly American; most of the AI systems people interact with are American, and so on.
In the last 20 years I believe I have become a hybrid entrepreneur – believing in the power of technology and process, but also in the very deep humanistic point of view. I guess it's a weird mix of Italian with Silicon Valley.
The most important form of power is human capital, people.. and their education. In today's world it is easier for people to amass education and communicate their ideas than it has ever been before.
We use these tools to do things quicker – but that never help us get on top of everything because they systematically increase the size of the 'everything' – It's a rigged game!
From around 2007 onwards, a new era dawned, marked by the widespread adoption of smartphones, essentially equipping every person with a sensor device. In tandem, social media platforms proliferated, facilitating incessant information sharing. Concurrently, Google services like Earth and Street View began to provide unprecedented access to geospatial data, granting us both the means and the method to verify a plethora of information.
Our brain is local and linear, and we live in a global and exponential world. If you want to keep pace, you have to perform and think at speed and scale – and we're not built for it. Flow is literally our leverage for keeping pace in a global, exponential world.
In my opinion, the progression of human evolution is both dramatic and romantic. A pivotal moment in our journey was the invention of language. Now, as we stand on the precipice of the AI era, we are witnessing perhaps the most profound invention in human history. AI doesn't just amplify our physical capabilities; it augments our intellect, allowing us to comprehend and engage with the world on a level previously unimagined. This, I believe, is the pinnacle of our evolutionary journey.
Social media was kind-of created to destroy humanity, in a literal sense. The first notion of the implications of such networks was provided by B. F. Skinner who spoke of the dangers of people who- on networks- were too free, too creative and too uncontrolled.
Over this 99.9% of human existence, when technology advances, population advances and counterbalances any potential increase in human prosperity. Suddenly once technological progress reaches a tipping point, families start to invest in education, they economise on the number of children, and technological progress is converted into richer people rather than into more people.
My fear has never been the machines waking up and deciding to do away with us, but rather that we- in our own bone headed way- deploy systems inappropriately, or without thinking through the unintended consequences that may occur.