From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I think intelligence is best understood as an entity that has the ability to improve a metric through repeated exposure over time. By that definition, machine learning algorithms are learning systems — they get better with more data and more exposures.
My dad always said you can't win until you don't care. That's how I approached it. My goal was to ski the best I could, as fast as I could, and I didn't care. I would rather crash than come to the finish line knowing I could have done better.
The real strength of our culture lies in what happens once our basic needs are met. As social capital develops, humans become increasingly able to perform feats way beyond the biological and cognitive limitations of the individual.
Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky. Or maybe it normally only takes a few hundred million years to go from life to intelligence, and we were just slow. We have a sample size of one.
I think most limits are self imposed. The limits we place on ourselves are between our ears – it's our minds telling us we could never do X, or achieve Y. It's our minds deciding what is possible, or impossible. Guess what… when you go out and do something you thought was impossible, it expands your perspective on everything.
Seeing the Earth from space gives you an unfiltered understanding of it. Until you see the Earth from this vantage point, everything you knew about the planet was based on something that someone else had told you – based on their own filtered understanding and bias.
Most of the pain you feel, you create. Most of the pain stems from the conversations we are having with ourselves. It is not the actual event outside of us that affects us. That's the case 99% of the time.
If a product is really good, time will give it the justice of beauty -that's real beauty, intelligence beauty, honest beauty.
Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered... Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes. Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement.
I don't know why I didn't just walk-away from Los Alamos...
The most corrupting idea about power is that it gives you a set of techniques to enable you to get more of what you want, no questions asked. If we think about power in that way, our soul will get eroded.
We are made up not of atoms, but of stories.