From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The BitCoin general ledger is called the block chain. It is remarkably secure. To break into the chain, you would have to amass 25,000 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That seems completely infeasible.
To scale? you have the stars aligned- timing is everything. When we created the first personal digital assistant, the Newton... we were probably 15 years too early. Even some of the best computer scientists in the world didn't realise that at the time, we needed Moore's Law to continue doubling processing power every couple of years for at least a decade before it was practical to build products like iPhones.
Today, information is omnidirectional – you have to respond to it immediately- and you have to empower people, in the field, to make decisions, or you will fail. Leaders today are far less involved with telling people what to do, and much more involved with setting goals and providing guardrails.
With participatory culture, economics dictates that we pour more resources into building an infrastructure platform that anyone can use, so most resources go into empowering 'the long tail'. Small groups of people can come together and make use of a powerful infrastructure to enable them to pursue their own passions and interests, without regard for popularity.
Influencers wield enormous influence, and sometimes, this can manifest negatively. The spread of anti-vaccination rhetoric, the reluctance to use sunscreen, and the rise of conspiracy theories like QAnon can be profoundly damaging.
At Dyson our philosophy has always been to invest in the long term. To power our 25 year pipeline of technology we have just announced a further £1.5 billion investment into new research and development on top of our current spending of £3 million a week. You cannot create disruptive technology without investing heavily in the long term.
Ageing is malleable, we can control it. 20% of our health in old-age is due to genetic factors, and the rest is due to our lifestyle. We can measure this clock. It's literally measuring chemicals in our own DNA.
There's no question that Facebook could have done much, much more in the last few years to address the problem. I don't think we can inoculate people against crazy ideas, they will always have takers- but we can certainly improve the way that platforms like Facebook operate because they don't have any incentive at the moment to restrict the spread of harmful content.
The concentration of power in technology corporations is a moral and political problem that we simply don't have a precedent for. More people use Facebook than speak English for example, so the implications of Facebook, as just one platform, are at the scale of language itself.
The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.
It can be understood as the undermining of the human will. It starts with distraction in the moment where our ability to focus is fragmented – but then it runs deeper into how it distracts us into living according to certain habits, values and norms.
In rich countries, 'innovation' often means finding a better way of doing things. But in developing countries, it can mean finding a way to do things at all.