Technology

The physical world isn't going away. We are a physical species. While digitisation is enabling incredible things – the best companies seem to be combining the physical and digital; they seem to understand what it means when products and services are connected.

NPR Host and Senior News Correspondent for Over Three Decades

We are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We live downstream of a very high-quality tool for manipulating each other in a collaborative way, which has been augmented by the perverse incentives surrounding manipulating each other in a hostile way. The explosion in the number of people who are interacting with each other has- today- made the problem effectively unsolvable.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Fear just finds a new thing to be scared of. People are worried about having mean things said about them on twitter… they're worried about losing their jobs… and yes, all those things suck, and could happen, but it's not the same as being tied-up and roasted at the stake!

Author & Stoicism Expert; Marketer & Media Strategist

With technology, we're creating a lot more hammers – and with more hammers, we're able to find more nails. The question is whether those hammers are being made for the right purposes, and whether they will serve the right purpose.

We all have the opportunity to be on the level of Da Vinci or Franklin because we all have access to so many different forms of knowledge. Those who study philosophy, the arts and sciences together can make connections at that very high level.

Author of "The 48 Laws of Power" & Strategist

While people have been worried about AI being embedded in humanoid robots from the science fiction world, our lives have been shaped and influenced by AI which makes tens of billions of decisions each day about what we see, and how we communicate.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

There's a delicate balance between making sure our values are encoded in these technologies as they come out- and not constraining them so much that we lose the technological race to other nations who don't hold our values.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

If you're sourcing trainers from sweatshops, those sweatshops can be filmed on a mobile phone and that can go viral in hours, destroying shareholder value. There are no dark-corners in which supply chains can hide anymore.

Digital media has allowed a complete bypass of those structures – there's less control around power – and people can amass huge followings for totally irrational reasons.

Political scientist & author specializing in authoritarianism and democracy

These are technologies that are autonomous in many, many ways. They are independent in many, many ways – they have free will. They can replicate. And that makes a difference because then we teach them how to learn, but we have no idea what they will do with that ability to learn.

Former Google Executive & Author of "Solve for Happy

Cultured meat can be very helpful. You can design them in such a way that they will have wonderful health benefits for the entire population. This is where exactly where we're going, but it doesn't have to, other producers might do something else.

When you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!