From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you are someone who has generated wealth, you have the responsibility to make sure this money is used to benefit the community. This is something that exists in all philosophies, cultures, and all religions. You have an obligation to the people around you, and your society.
From the guys who started Adobe to Steve Jobs, and everyone in between…. for the people I documented, money was secondary… They knew absolutely they would make money, but changing the world and doing cool stuff was the primary goal; that was their mission.
There's just enough in your control where you think you should be able to perform or deliver on any given day – but when you really sit and think about it, you're basically trying to be predictive text for the ocean.
Morality represents the way we would like the world to work, and economics represents how it actually does work.
The court is primarily interested in the effort made, in the attempt. That is what truly counts.
No one has to be a genius, but everyone has to participate.
Anti-goals are all about what you refuse to give up while chasing those goals. The trap a lot of people fall into is getting so laser-focused on the target that everything else just fades away. You put on blinders.
The research community rallied behind the Turing Test as a benchmark. The idea was simple: demonstrate that machines can emulate human intelligence, which was seen as the pinnacle of cognitive achievement. This historical and cultural trajectory, while understandable, seemingly dismisses the idea that computers can serve as invaluable complements to human cognition.
The real tragedy is that we have become so accustomed to injustice that we no longer recognize it when we see it. We've normalized inequality, normalized discrimination, normalized the idea that some people matter less than others.
I use the word repugnance to describe transactions that some people would like to engage in, that other people would not like them to; it's often hard to pin-down what harm the transaction does to anyone else.
The truth is, any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'
Digital technologies are now an unavoidable part of the infrastructure of life and society, and we have the capacity to design them in ways that promote, understand and respect people's goals and values in ways we simply couldn't in the pre-digital era. With many of these technologies, though, our deeper human goals get treated as secondary, or are ignored altogether, in favour of lower 'engagement' goals such as views or clicks.