From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
It's important that every person you work with, all your colleagues, all your co-workers, leave a company with more skills and economic mobility than when they arrived. Further, it's important the time they spent with you wasn't miserable, that it was great, good, enjoyable.
The will to live together is the fundamental pillar that keeps society going- and that pillar is now under threat. What will we do when we lose the will to live together? That's one of the fundamental questions of our time.
Backlash is sadly an intrinsic part of social progress. When oppressed people make their claim for justice, they trigger a response – a fightback by those who want to maintain the status-quo.
We must start by eliminating a culture that falsely implies the existence of agency where there is none and condones differential treatment of individuals based on a misguided notion of self-control.
When we mask, conform, and hide aspects of who we are, it actually hurts and damages us in the end. But no one can be authentic 100% of the time because we are tribal, very social.
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.
The smallest male can be dominant based on his social skills. Think about it; nobody walks into a big store in London and assumes the biggest person is the boss! It might be the old man; it might be the young woman!
We didn't just make technology, it made us. In the modern context, this phenomenon terrifies some people and excites others- but it's going to happen. We have to understand how humans and their tools and technologies blend at scale – it's going to be an absolutely fascinating journey.
Inside all of us though, is that inner deviant – who wants to unleash chaos, collect power and acquire status. The internet provides a perfect medium for this deviant (our inner 'troll') to flourish – giving anonymity and 'identity loss' – breaking that social contract and freeing us to test the boundaries of the acceptable.
I made a principled decision that none of my wealth will be passed on as inheritance, that my capital will work for philanthropic causes. In other words, philanthropy is the reason I make money.
Consider for a moment residents of the city of Jerusalem in the Roman period and whisk these individuals in a time machine nearly 2000 years forward to Ottoman Jerusalem. Those individuals from the Roman period will be able to adapt nearly instantaneously. But if you whisk these individuals an additional 200 hundred years forward to present day Jerusalem, these individuals would be entirely shocked. Past knowledge will be largely obsolete. New technologies would appear as witchcraft.