From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
About 80 billion of the dead ones died of infection over humanity's lifetime, and the average lifespan of those people was 30. Think of all the self-actualization, the dreams, the aspiration, the success, fulfillment, the family, the grandchildren—all those things that you never ever saw.
Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
We have no idea about the world that we inhabit and that what the brain is doing is really creating an entire shortcut that enables us to understand the world without being able to physically really understand the reality in which we inhabit, which is a mind-blowing concept.
Don't make the mistake of confusing net worth and self-worth.
We must start by eliminating a culture that falsely implies the existence of agency where there is none and condones differential treatment of individuals based on a misguided notion of self-control.
Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.
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.
Most astronomers are surprised, but biologists look at the history of life on Earth. Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky.
Those cycles don't exist – that's not what history is like. Disasters keep coming along at random intervals, they are not normally distributed... That's hard for our brains to deal with… we don't like the idea that history is just a lot of random shocks without any predictable features.
Postmodernists are intellectual terrorists who fly their planes of bullshit into the edifices of reason.
Success should simply mean enjoying what you do and feeling purposeful. If you have all the money in the world but spend every day miserably staring at a computer screen, feeling bored, uninspired, not learning or contributing meaningfully, then no amount of money makes you successful.
When you first go to war as a young guy, it's almost like you want to get into combat. Quickly though, you realise that these are real people! You have to bring the human element to the fore. At first it was let's go to war… then it was let's do the right thing… and then it was why are we even doing this?