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The system incentivised the promotion of individuals who could read the room — or the Hippodrome.

What they are doing is converting human choices into inevitability. But they are never inevitable.

The whole project in the twentieth century of creating a broad middle class was precisely to create a buffer for the system against the appeal of that ideology. As soon as the Soviet Union collapsed — the moment it did — you could see our elites starting to roll that back.

There is hardly any positive democratic thinking in the European tradition until probably the twentieth century. It really took the First World War to get Europeans to start thinking along those lines. So it is quite recent. I think we need to understand just how fragile it is.

The things we take for granted the most — the ones we discuss the least — are sometimes the ones most deeply embedded in the infrastructure of our thought.

One interesting speculation is that every time you type a prompt into an LLM, there is a flicker of consciousness as it thinks about the response – and then that consciousness ceases to exist.

Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.

One of the roles it can play is the role of a conscious being talking about its consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s conscious.

In our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.

We know that a computer is processing information – but is there something it is like to be that computer, on the inside?

The distinction between thought and thinker, between a pattern and a real being, is not a real distinction. We are thoughts in a great computational medium.

We don't make minds - neither through embryonic development nor through engineering. We make embodiments that have something else going on besides design, evolution and learning.

Even something as simple as bubble sort does things that are not in the code. This is not philosophy; it's actual data. There is another source that competencies come from.

Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. But groups of cells have incredibly large, grandiose goals - no individual cell can store what a limb is, but the collective certainly can.

Whatever magic tricks we think brains are doing, what are they actually doing? Brains didn't just show up out of nowhere - they speed-optimised much more ancient evolutionary mechanisms.

We are more than we appear to be. The technology cannot be uninvented — I know, until I die, that we did that, and I was a key enabler of it.

Exploration starts with exploring yourself. There’s so much temptation for everyone to seek answers outside of themselves, when peace and leading a fulfilling life starts with self-knowledge and self-reflection.

There is no mundane. The word itself, I think, is a non-word. It should not be a word.

The small act of paying attention to people is extraordinarily rewarding to every member of the team — and it’s amplified in an inverse way from their level on the hierarchy.

The line between acceptable mitigated risk and recklessness is actually very thin— and it’s even more dangerous because it moves.

Never get into a vehicle where the fear of failure is greater than the fear of dying.

Life is a series of decisions you make with imperfect information — and then carrying it through with conviction, while at the same time looking over your shoulder to make sure the rest of the team is coming along with you

I never grew out of that feeling of constant wonder. I just became more experienced, and got a lot more resources to go to even more extraordinary places — but the same feeling existed in me. I never really grew up — just the expense and sophistication of my toys.

If you just stand up for your own values in all the things you do, big and small, you create the conditions for the possibility of collective action.