From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You can't build a bridge or an aircraft using postmodernist feminist epistemology.
In the future people will spend the majority of their time online, with their online identity and digital assets. The majority of their interactions with friends, family, relatives and colleagues will be online.
Politicians, by and large, don't understand technology at all, and technologists don't understand politicians—and both tend to denigrate each other. The technologists in Silicon Valley see politicians as venal, short-term, and ignorant, while politicians view technologists as rapacious capitalists who will stop at nothing to beat their rivals and lack any ethical compass.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. There are many ways of living in the future or catapulting yourself into it, but the first order of business is to get out of the present.
As humans, we've evolved in a world where the pace of change was slow. Our minds are not structured for the pace of rapid change that we're seeing and, increasingly, will experience. 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.
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.
Technology is no longer a separate segment- it is pervasive. It is technology IN agriculture, IN governance, IN education, IN health. It is also about health technologies, education technologies and agricultural technologies- there are two sides to it.
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.
In discussing the responsible deployment of AI in healthcare, I believe there are three key areas where it can create significant impact. First, AI should enhance healthcare equity. Second, it should increase efficiency. And third, it should improve effectiveness.
The problem of our information society isn’t anymore that we don’t have access to information. It’s that we have actually too much information.
In my view, all the big existential risks are anthropogenic, arising out of human activity. More specifically, the biggest existential risks in this century arise out of anticipated future technological advances.
There's a considerable correlation between symbols and meaning—especially given how we train modern computer networks these days with unbelievable amounts of data and trillions of parameters. Each parameter is a number representing a probability, but with so many parameters, the answer you get—if you can't follow the vast number of steps—seems unpredictable, much like flipping a coin and not knowing heads or tails. But if you could view all the information, you could determine with certainty which side lands up—that's classical physics. Only in quantum physics does probability acquire a different meaning.