From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Within each of us is a deep, complex network of capillaries, veins and arteries which extend a distance equivalent to more than 3 times the circumference of the Earth, and because our body has lost its conditioning to nature, our hearts have to pump 20-30 times a minute more than if we regularly exposed our body to cold water.
Many people think the role of bioethics is to go and see what the scientists or doctors are doing and tell them to stop because they are acting, by hypothesis, unethically. However I often find when I go and see what the scientists are doing, they are doing wonderful things and I'm very inclined to say 'great guys, keep going!'
The human mind, once the pinnacle of intelligence, is now overshadowed by computational intelligence in many domains. Algorithms understand and can guide me better than I can guide myself. The real game-changer is data. I'm willing to yield control to an algorithm that proves to be superior.
If only one-quarter melted, it would lead to a 2-metre rise in sea-levels all over the world and would threaten thousands of cities and towns on every continent.
Seeing the Earth from space gives you an unfiltered understanding of it. Until you see the Earth from this vantage point, everything you knew about the planet was based on something that someone else had told you – based on their own filtered understanding and bias.
Our senses allow us to perceive, but they're incredibly limited. Science sees far beyond our human blind spots, and the reaches of this 'bubble' our senses create for us. When you're in a bubble, you inhabit a form of fictional reality, and we've seen the dangerous consequences of this in financial bubbles, stock market bubbles, real estate bubbles… If you're not paying attention reality comes crashing in.
Right now, biological evolution is not the main engine of change in the human condition. Instead, social and technological development, which occur on shorter timescales, are the predominant change-makers. In particular, it seems that we are gaining capabilities to directly modify human nature—through genetic selection, gene therapy, cognitive enhancement drugs, life extension treatments.
Because these systems don't see the world the way we do, they can extrapolate things in novel and unexpected ways that we haven't identified. Systems like Deep Mind's AlphaGo are not beating humans at games through speed and brute force, they're discovering new ways to play which we never conceived.
It's absolutely true that a lot of the time the market is indistinguishable from a coin toss- and we all know that… However, when the system is under some stress, when the market is undergoing changes, the coin toss model just doesn't work.
A model that's really strong at mathematical reasoning is likely to be strong at coding. And a model that's excellent at both math and code is often very good at analysing the nuts and bolts of legal reasoning as well.
I feel altogether confident that the historian of the future will estimate the past thirty years as the most extraordinary in the history of the world up to the present... there has been no period at all comparable with it unless it be the period about 300 years ago, which saw the development of Galilean and Newtonian mechanics. This was indeed of incalculable importance for the destinies of the race; the conceptions then introduced are not only the basis of modern material civilization, but they were the cause of a very complete change in man's whole intellectual and spiritual outlook- in his philosophy, his religion, and his morals.
The quest for happiness is a universal, scientific, fact. We can measure happiness, we can assess it, and we can devise strategies to make ourselves happy and fulfilled human beings.