Wisdom in fragments

Social platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.

Status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't.

If our future is to count as a utopia, we cannot allow a massive oppressed class of hyper-sentient, uncomfortable digital beings. We want it to be good for all kinds of minds.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

Much of our future work may end up being about convincing them that we are conscious, and worth keeping around.

AI Safety Researcher & Director of Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville

We're not really creating a specific artefact—we're setting a direction for a process. There's no upper limit to that process; we're simply saying we'll create something capable of becoming smarter and smarter.

AI Safety Researcher & Director of Cybersecurity Lab at University of Louisville

Arguably, it could be more comparable to the rise of Homo sapiens itself, or even to the origin of life on Earth.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

It's the ultimate invention—the last one we'll ever need to make—because once we have AI that is generally intelligent and then superintelligent, it will do the inventing far better than we can. In that sense, it's a handing over of the baton.

Philosopher & Director of Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford

As soon as you get close to this thing we need to heal, the anxiety comes up to try to pull us away as it did when we were a child, and that's why anxiety is so hard to heal. Because as soon as you get close to it, you want to pull away.

Anxiety is a feeling problem, and basically, you need to speak to that feeling problem with a feeling solution. You can't fix a feeling problem with a thinking solution, which is, I think, why most traditional therapies fail. They try and talk you out of a feeling, which never works.

I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad's an alcoholic—there's only so much a child can take.

Anxiety isn't one thing, it's two. It's the anxieties of the mind, but it's also this alarm state, this state of constant protective hyper vigilant alarm, physiological activity in the body. And each of them energises the other.

People who come in through the games engage more with the news and other content — and ultimately become more valuable subscribers overall. Gaming becomes the entry point that leads them into the broader New York Times ecosystem. It's been so successful that they've actually flipped their old saying. Back in the 1940s, the Times used to say, 'People come for the news and stay for the games.' Now it's the other way around.

If you step back and zoom out, and ask yourself: why are video games so powerful in the first place? The answer is that they're a digital manifestation of play. Video games are simply a digital form of that. They're one of the most effective and, from an evolutionary perspective, one of the most fundamentally human ways of engaging the brain — of connecting with who we are as a species.

The mindset shift has to be from those one-off activations to seeing gaming as a holistic, integral part of your overall strategy — something that's always on, like social media. Because think about it: as a brand, there's never a day when you go, 'Well, today we're not doing anything on social.' That just doesn't happen, right? The same mindset needs to apply to gaming.

Companies and organisations need to understand and embrace gaming in its totality. Gamification is just one small element — a subset — of what a true gaming strategy entails. To me, it's something that should be an integral part of how companies think about their consumer or customer engagement strategy.

The truth is, any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet