From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You have some smart people gaslighting us into telling us this isn't true... and that's now how history works. Those same people, when a Donald Trump figure comes onto the scene- or some other toxic force- are like who's going to save us? But they discouraged you from believing people had the power to do that.
We have lost the personal touch – today, everything is fast – impersonal, digital… yet, we are not robots. We need personal contact, we need to understand each other's feelings… and this can't be done via email; and especially for the older generations in or society, this change is really hard.
The twentieth century has been called the century of the homeless man. The number of persons permanently displaced for political reasons as a result of wars, treaties or sometimes obscure reason is startling.
We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.
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.
We recently set ourselves the goal of educating 10 million children in the next decade; it's ambitious, but we're attracting incredible people and partners to help us on this journey, and I genuinely believe we'll achieve it.
We've never met anybody that has changed the world without moving people. We've never met anyone that changed their own world without moving people. Moving people is not a 'yucky' thing. Martin Luther King Jr. moved people.
The future is baked into the population of today, and that makes it very convenient for looking at the next couple of decades as our future soldiers are today in nursery school, and our future retirees are entering college.
I often tell my students to recognize the implicit messages our clothing conveys about our mood, social status, and more. Soon, our entrance into a room will announce our presence not just visually or audibly, but also electromagnetically. Our interactions with others will encompass sight, sound, and this electromagnetic identity.
I can't advertise chewing gum to my children because it's unethical, but I can feed them all sorts of narratives that will have a profound impact on their personal trajectories. It's quite an extraordinarily hypocritical position.
For me, one of the big gaps is youth entrepreneurship. There are a high number of young people who want to set-up businesses, but there is a huge gap between their aspirations/intentions and the actual delivery of setting up a business.
British identity is profoundly tied-up with Europe and vice-versa.