From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The price of technology comes down every year, year after year, and I see no immediate end in sight to that process. What this means is that the poorest people in the world will soon have the possibility to access the Internet in some form, and eventually will have 'ordinary' access to it.
For the iPad it's game over in terms of market-share… Apple has won! It's a preposterously cheap stock… The applications for the iPhone and the iPad are just growing every day. I think these things are going to be ubiquitous…
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles, sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year. At the same time, we have pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails and 9/11 truthers.
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.
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.
Without a doubt, even when an influencer is reaching out to a million followers about fashion, they are still communicating with a million people. That's a staggering degree of influence.
Remote work has turned the lights on in the room, it's allowing us to see the cracks and cobwebs, and we can never switch that light off again.
Existing platforms don't necessarily have the best business models for creators, nor do they enable creators to interact directly with their fans in a way that value can pass directly to the people who are producing the creative work.
Water is the essence of life. On Earth it's used to grow plants and within industrial processes but in space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. One cubic metre of water gives the same protection as Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.
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.
I completely appreciate that people think social media is a waste of my time, but spending all day being obsessed with our customer, interacting with them in every way that I can, answering every question, trying to understand everything that I can about them, matches everything that we do and everything that we produce.
Most people would have a nervous breakdown if they didn't have their phone for a day; I would have a total breakdown if there was no culture, no art. I couldn't live without art, it would be impossible.