From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I first heard about Twitter through a journalist friend of mine called India Knight. She said, 'it's fantastic, like a cocktail party where all of your best friends have turned up!'- she was right, it was like that, for about 15 seconds.... It did feel like a lot of people I knew were being really nice and just chatting on this thing... as if Silicon Valley had come up with a digitised, virtual version of a pleasant conversation!
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.
In the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere except for where our food and energy come from, and where our waste goes. We are the most powerful species in the world, but we remain blind to the fundamentals that allow us to survive. How are we blind to our life support system?
I believe a key issue is this newfound ability to hide behind our screens, which gives a false sense of impunity, allowing people to express themselves without restraint. The more time we spend glued to our screens, the less we engage in meaningful, real-world exchanges.
AI doesn't just amplify our physical capabilities; it augments our intellect, allowing us to comprehend and engage with the world on a level previously unimagined. This, I believe, is the pinnacle of our evolutionary journey.
Social media was kind-of created to destroy humanity, in a literal sense. The first notion of the implications of such networks was provided by B. F. Skinner who spoke of the dangers of people who- on networks- were too free, too creative and too uncontrolled.
Creating digital people is really hard. The quality really matters, especially when it comes to the face. We're so attuned to seeing faces that we pick up anything that doesn't look right. Faces communicate so much- when we see someone else, our imaginations go into overdrive.
In the last 20 years I believe I have become a hybrid entrepreneur – believing in the power of technology and process, but also in the very deep humanistic point of view. I guess it's a weird mix of Italian with Silicon Valley.
Technology claims to be showing us a mirror of what was already present in society but in reality, technology is a funhouse mirror with a feedback loop that's engineered to show us the most egregious parts of society that are better at keeping our attention.
If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more research effort and resources.
Once you're able to reduce the human element, and automate the reporting of these statistics- you will be greatly reducing the potential for misbehaviour. This is where regulators can leverage technology, reduce their burden, and create a much more reliable system for all.
We have lost the personal touch – today, everything is fast – impersonal, digital… yet, we are not robots. We need personal contact, we need to understand each other's feelings… and this can't be done via email; and especially for the older generations in or society, this change is really hard.