From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It's hard to predict risks, but easy to understand resilience, and frighteningly, we're living in a world that is less resilient than I've ever experienced in my lifetime.
Architecture has the power to democratize space - to create environments where all people, regardless of their background, can participate in civic life.
Every single individual in the world, including you and I, have a grievance or a problem at any given moment in time. When you and I go to sleep tonight in our own beds, you'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting you and I'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting me.
I think music is a way for God to speak to humans. We have a connection through music that we can't find anywhere else. I believe that's why music is so important for society- its connection- its healing.
The idea of time as something distinct from us, which we are then having to fight and struggle with all the time would simply not have existed to the mediaeval English peasant, who would have existed much more in what anthropologists call 'task orientation'.
We all inhabit distinctive inner universes. We all see and experience the world in a slightly different way. Understanding perception has a lot of consequences for understanding who we are.
My impression however is that the rate of change in society is accelerating as a result of rapid developments in science and technology. Science today is a huge, industrial scale activity and has a far greater impact on society than it did a few hundred years ago.
Change proceeds at the speed of trust. Building this trust, particularly in the context of AI and synthetic biology, starts with open information exchange, discussion, and dialogue. It's about creating a shared understanding of our capabilities, responsible deployment of technology, and acknowledging the associated risks.
Data is showing that the amount of information we're sending them without hope, and the ratio of hope versus negativity, is shutting down the next generation, which is terrifying. And so it's not like, 'Oh my gosh, there's a fire—they're going to go put the fire out.' They're like, 'Oh my gosh, what's the point? The fire is too big.'
Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.
We live in a society where our pursuit of authenticity is more important to us than ever, but we've created a society which is also extraordinarily fake. I want to understand this and understand how we can fight back.
We're a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire. The reason you and I are here talking is because some English people went to India and invaded it in the 17th century.