From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The ultimate goal is to be in a state of flow with machines. Think about people working with horses, or herding cattle with a dog, they are examples of interactions with other intelligent creatures in a way which is fluid and allows us to achieve something we couldn't do ourselves.
We're extraordinarily vulnerable to the functions of our heart, no other organ can cause sudden death.
There's a moment when you look at good art when time changes… It's as if time no longer exists, becomes longer, or is suspended. There's a moment of reverie when you're fully immersed in something apart from yourself. One experiences this sometimes in meditation. These inexplicable, wonderful and mysterious experiences we have never leave us.
Indeed, these concepts transcend our natural intuition, but I firmly believe they aren't beyond our grasp. As Einstein marveled, the universe seems to be comprehensible.
People do confuse pleasure for happiness, but as Mortimer J. Adler put it, there is a big difference between a having a good time and having a good life. Pleasure is best understood not as the very good itself, but as a by-product of pursuing the things that really are good.
We take ethics very seriously – and it's important to never fool the user. It must be clear that you are dealing with a digital person, not a real person, and at the same time you cannot create any dependency.
One way that we deal with the accelerating rate of change is by sort of riding on top of that tsunami of change rather than being crushed by it.
I cannot help but admire the insight of our Jewish sages of old who taught that every child is born with equal affinities toward goodness and evil, in Hebrew yetzer hatov and yetzer hara. This means that we are not born as a tabula rasa.
Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this. People say that we cannot trust science because once-upon-a-time scientists held it true that the earth was flat; that's not correct. It was never true that the earth was flat, even if people believed it.
From the guys who started Adobe to Steve Jobs, and everyone in between…. for the people I documented, money was secondary… They knew absolutely they would make money, but changing the world and doing cool stuff was the primary goal; that was their mission.
There's no sensible definition of people without technology. Our relationship with technology is complex and helical. As technology changes over time, so do we, and we have a situation therefore where we develop technologies, adapt, and then need new technologies to solve the side-effects of the first.
Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered... Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes. Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement.