From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I think it's down to what Jeremy Bentham said which is, '…the question is not can they reason? Or can they talk? …But can they suffer?'
In a peculiar way, failure can sometimes be simpler to grapple with. You can simply resist it, dismiss it with a defiant 'to hell with this, to hell with them', and return to square one. Conversely, success can be considerably more subtle and insidious. While initially thrilling, relieving, and intoxicating, it can harbor a profound hollowness, which makes it more challenging and bewildering to confront.
There's no way electrical signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.
Play is a mock version of these activities, allowing us to experiment and understand how they work and interconnect. Questions like 'What if I did it this way?' arise in play, exploring different possibilities.
As a prosecutor, I recognize that our involvement typically begins when it's already too late: when prevention, humanity, and common sense have failed. Violence, whether in families, communities, or at an international level, signifies a failure of humanity.
That thing of me being anonymous and just the music that's moving the person.
We're not really creating a specific artefact—we're setting a direction for a process. There's no upper limit to that process; we're simply saying we'll create something capable of becoming smarter and smarter.
What was impossible 20 years ago, is possible today. What is impossible today, will be possible x-years from now. We are always in change.
There is a line between the observable and greater universe. For discussion it's very useful to recognise that when we speak about anything outside the observable universe, we're switching from the empirical to the speculative and theoretical
We have a lot of phobias around algorithms. Sometimes this is justified, but in the main, it's like being afraid of cockroaches or spiders. Algorithms aren't spiders or cockroaches, they're an instrument and sometimes will outperform human judgement terrifically well – and sometimes won't. If lives are on the line and it turns out an algorithm reduces the noise of the human decision maker and the bias, then the moral case for using the algorithm starts to look really strong.
I wanted to impart this fundamental philosophy that a person should endeavour to better the world, an aspiration divorced from monetary considerations. While some might contend that financial power is a prerequisite for effecting change, I don't subscribe to this belief.
True courage isn't present without fear. How can one be brave without confronting what scares them? When you witness someone tackling extreme or perilous tasks without any sign of fear, it doesn't reflect courage. You need fear to get stronger. You need discomfort to build.