Society

Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

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.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We live downstream of a very high-quality tool for manipulating each other in a collaborative way, which has been augmented by the perverse incentives surrounding manipulating each other in a hostile way. The explosion in the number of people who are interacting with each other has- today- made the problem effectively unsolvable.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

Our world today is not only superficial, but also very cynical, almost to the point of nihilism. There's a cynicism that masquerades as intelligence, but which- in reality- is a form of despair, a kind of excuse for not having to do anything.

Author & Stoicism Expert; Marketer & Media Strategist

Fear just finds a new thing to be scared of. People are worried about having mean things said about them on twitter… they're worried about losing their jobs… and yes, all those things suck, and could happen, but it's not the same as being tied-up and roasted at the stake!

Author & Stoicism Expert; Marketer & Media Strategist

My advice is to grab hold of people that are close to you and lean on them heavily. That's how we're designed to work!

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

The most common misunderstanding is that the Arctic is just a frozen wilderness with a lot of ice and glaciers and a few polar bears roaming. On the contrary the Arctic is a very diverse part of our planet with multiple resources and economic opportunities, the home for over four million people of different nationalities and diverse ethnic origin.

Former President of Iceland (1996-2016)

My father taught me an important lesson; when you get something, when you receive something, it's important to give back. This lesson is something that has really stuck with me through my whole life, and I've always tried to do social good as much as I can.

Founder and Chairman of Diesel fashion brand and Only The Brave Group

You are all so smart… and this was so bad… how could your discipline have not seen it coming? Implicit in the Queen's question was the assertion that economists don't get out enough and talk to people in the wider economy.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

There is a problem with business leaders and the economics profession where we have celebrated the gains from neoliberal policies whilst only paying lip-service to compensating those left-behind.

Dean of Columbia Business School & Economic Policy Advisor

There's some psychological evidence which shows that people who have experienced very little suffering in their lives often have very low tolerance for difficulty and strangely enough, lower kindness.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

We're starting to realise that business is a major force in deciding the sort of society we live in- and so the role of business must be more in tune with political, social and moral norms of the day.

While people have been worried about AI being embedded in humanoid robots from the science fiction world, our lives have been shaped and influenced by AI which makes tens of billions of decisions each day about what we see, and how we communicate.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader

We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.

Dean of Cornell Tech & Computer Science Leader