From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We come from mammals, we are mammals… we're just mammals that wear clothes. We're destimulated – we don't feel the cold, the heat, everything in our environment – even though our physiology is built for it. Our vascular system responds naturally to temperature changes by dilating and contracting our muscles; but we've allowed them to lose this fitness, to lose their conditioning – and so our hearts compensate.
Consciousness is at the root of human identity. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is at the root of everything that really matters in life from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, these are the things that make life worth living.
In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.
The 'Silicon Valley' mindset is one where you race ahead and build technology, and if people adopt it and use it, you scale. Success in this mindset is measured in terms of numbers of users, revenue and valuation. How do these measures illustrate social good though?
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. For me intelligence is a property of life. Even the most humble unicellular living organism must be intelligent to solve the problems of everyday life.
We can take a hell of a lot more stress than we believe we can. We should learn how to fight not flight. And fight doesn't have to be a physical thing – it can be that you feel something's going to be uncomfortable 'okay well let's avoid it'. No, go through with it but go through with it in a progressive manner.
In the long-term there is no way to reconcile the conflict of interest between serving the user and the advertiser.
The 'Doomers' often anthropomorphize computers by attributing human characteristics to them. Humans have evolved their competitive nature and occasional violent impulses from survival in a world marked by resource scarcity and competition. Computers, on the other hand, have emerged from a vastly different evolutionary path. Thus, to say a computer 'wants to eat your lunch' leans heavily into projecting human traits onto machines.
The smartest being on planet Earth is life itself. And if we mimic the intelligence of life, life creates with abundance, not with scarcity. Life does not want to kill the tigers for the deer to survive. Life basically says more deer, more tigers, more poop. Everyone's happy.
The act of humans making choices will become a mere memory. We'll be spectators in a novel arena. But is this the zenith of liberty or just a cage?
Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.
Our mission is to help people create a life, not just a living. By freeing them from thinking about the tasks related to space, they can dedicate more of their time and energy on their work and passions.