From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I see it as my moral obligation in this world to help these people unlock their potential so they can start working on humanity's grand challenges.
The reality is we live in a very dynamic world that's full of risks and all we should really care about are risk drivers – both financial and non-financial. Alternatives may provide us with ways of hedging out or managing future risks better.
Globalisation is here to stay. You cannot, however, look at it as a natural phenomenon on which you have no influence- it's not like a typhoon or a cyclone. It's a process- and a process on which you can have influence.
The 'Doomers' often anthropomorphize computers by attributing human characteristics to them. While this is an understandable tendency, it's essential to recognize that humans have evolved their competitive nature and occasional violent impulses from survival in a world marked by resource scarcity and competition.
Every acorn is already programmed to become an oak tree, every embryo is programmed to become a baby, and every bud is programmed to become a blossom. Human beings are programmed as well, but we have something an acorn does not; free will.
The power of regret is that it clarifies what we value and instructs on how to do better. The fact that we have so many of these boldness regrets suggests that when people tell you what they regret they most, they are telling you what they value the most, and what most people value is growth and learning.
You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.
Quantum computing can be seen as a monumental effort to fully confront this exponential scaling that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. By building and testing quantum computers, we are conducting an experiment that should either indisputably confirm this exponential nature, or overturn a century of established quantum theory.
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?'
I need failure like I need air. Unless people understand what failure is, they can't grow. I find growth in suffering, in pain and in failure.
Four days before she died, she challenged my daughter and I to try and find a pocketful of happiness in each day, which has become the mantra by which we navigate the abyss of grief, following her death. I don't think you ever get over grief, you just have to find a way to accommodate and travel around it.
charity and philanthropy are the same. Charity giving is more aligned with money and not so much individual time. Philanthropy is more of a practice and way of being