From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There are a lot of people who misuse social media and then they pay the price for it. These individuals and groups are hunting for people to make mistakes, take embarrassing videos and show the world.
The most important form of power is human capital, people.. and their education. In today's world it is easier for people to amass education and communicate their ideas than it has ever been before.
If Leonardo Da Vinci could somehow be transported to the present, he would be blown away by the level of knowledge that's available to all of us by a simple press of a key. It follows that we all have the opportunity to be on the level of Da Vinci or Franklin because we all have access to so many different forms of knowledge.
We are in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change of the novelty we face is so fast that it has outstripped our evolutionary capacity to keep up.
What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap... cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?
It's the convergence of these technologies that creates waves on top of waves of capability, which will change our world – every industry, our economy, our government, our health, our families… everything is beginning to change.
By 1970, with a budding awareness of computers, I envisioned a future where the cumbersome administrative tasks of gaming could be offloaded to computers, transforming gameplay into something as visually captivating as television but with the added allure of interactivity. My vision was clear: to merge the engagement of gaming with the visual appeal of TV, thereby revolutionising how we play.
[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control.
We must never confuse the pipe with the content. Today, we are fascinated by the pipe and nobody thinks of what is within. There is a pipe full of intelligence, and a pipe full of shit. You have to choose the good one, not the fascinating one.
In my view, all the big existential risks are anthropogenic, arising out of human activity. More specifically, the biggest existential risks in this century arise out of anticipated future technological advances.
Our informational environment has flipped from scarcity to abundance in a similar way that our food environment has. The heuristics we had living on the plains of Africa in an environment of food scarcity served us well there. But in the environment of Netflix, Ben & Jerrys Ice Cream and La-Z-Boy recliners, these same heuristics give us less than ideal outcomes.
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.