Technology

If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Knowledge isn't just stored in people or the sum of individuals; knowledge exists in the network. The labour market is always searching for those matches, constantly learning because technology changes and people retire, keeping the system out of equilibrium.

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.

The Trump phenomenon isn't just a blip—there's a genuine rupture across the Atlantic. So, what does that mean in practice? It means we need to protect some of our own sovereign infrastructure—our own sovereign cloud—especially for utilities, security, and intelligence.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

We're not just over-reliant—we're wholly reliant—on American technology across the entire stack. Our data sits in American cloud infrastructure; our hardware is American designed; our software and operating systems are overwhelmingly American; most of the AI systems people interact with are American, and so on.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

We often talk about misinformation and disinformation, but the deeper issue is the speed and flow of trust, because we're responding to feeling rather than expertise and credibility.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Older generations give their trust to experts and influencers based on who and what: credibility, qualifications, and institutional affiliations. Younger generations, by contrast, trust based on how someone makes them feel.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

You can have the best AI in the world and the best robots in the world, but if they aren't integrated well with the humans, then you will lose.